World Championship, Game 3

Gukesh wins to level the scores.

Any fears Gukesh Dommaraju’s fans may have had about his nerves interfering with his ability to fight at his best against Ding Liren in their World Championship match can now be put to bed. He played a fine game, showing excellent technique after outcalculating Ding in a tricky middlegame. He won on time on move 37, but the position was completely winning in any case.

Gukesh switched from 1.e4 to 1.d4 in this game, and after the move order feints had run their course they were in an Exchange Queen’s Gambit. Gukesh went for the rare 7.h3 (played a couple of times before Vladimir Kramnik got to it, but even in retirement he’s putting interesting new opening ideas on the map). Ding played against this in a very principled but dangerous way, with a bishop on c2 that was both effective and in constant danger of being trapped.

That tense state of affairs remained in play on move 18, when Ding rejected solid options that would extract the bishop in favor of a more complicated approach. Unfortunately for the World Champion, he had missed a key move - Gukesh’s 23.Ne2! - and the result was a lost position. When the smoke cleared several moves later White was up a bishop for two fairly meaningless pawns, and Black had little chance of swapping his way to something like a rook vs. rook and bishop ending. Gukesh’s technique was excellent, and although Ding lost on time making his 37th move his position was utterly hopeless by that point.

The scores are now knotted at 1.5-1.5 going into the first rest day. Ding can lick his wounds and prepare for the next block of three games, in which he’ll twice have White. No doubt he’ll push much harder than he did in game 2, but we’ll see. In the meantime, here’s game 3, with my comments. (The fuller analysis for those with a yearly subscription to this will be sent later today, along with my video recap.)