Gukesh — Ding, World Championship 2024, Game 14

The fourteenth and final classical game of the Singapore world championship match — and the game that delivered the title to Dommaraju Gukesh without recourse to a rapid tiebreak. The match score stood at 6½–6½ going into the round; a draw would have sent the players to faster time controls the following day, where Ding was, on paper and on recent form, the heavier favourite. Gukesh, with the white pieces, chose to play for a win.

He opened with 1.d4, and after Ding’s invitation to a Semi-Slav Defense (ECO D45) the game took the shape it would hold for nearly four hours: a slow positional manoeuvring battle out of a balanced middlegame, transitioning into a long technical endgame. By move 40, after a phase of careful manoeuvring in which neither side appeared to commit to a decisive plan, the players reached an objectively level rook endgame with symmetrical pawn structure on both wings.

The endgame

Endgames at this technical level rarely fall to a single decisive move — they fall to the slow accumulation of small concessions. Over the next fifteen moves, Gukesh probed without committing, edging his king toward the centre and using small tempo gains to push Ding Liren’s rook into progressively passive squares. The position retained drawing chances for Black throughout this phase. The classical defensive technique called for the rook to stay active behind White’s passed pawn and the king to shoulder the opposing king away from key squares.

The decisive moment came on move 55. Ding played Rf2 — a routine-looking rook retreat that mistakenly stepped out of the active defensive formation that had held the position. The blunder allowed Gukesh to consolidate his king’s advance and convert the resulting won rook endgame in three more moves. Ding resigned on move 58.

What the win meant

At eighteen years and ten months, Gukesh became the youngest undisputed classical world champion in the history of the title, breaking Garry Kasparov’s 1985 record of twenty-two years and seven months — a mark that had stood for nearly forty years. The result confirmed a generational handover that had been building since Gukesh’s 2024 Candidates tournament victory in Toronto eight months earlier, where he had finished a full point clear of Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura.

For Ding — defending the title he had won from Ian Nepomniachtchi eighteen months prior — the loss closed a difficult two-year stretch marked by documented bouts of poor form and personal difficulty. The fourteenth game remained, until that point, the longest game of the match.