After 72 moves and more than five hours of play, Game 7 the 2024 FIDE World Championship match, on Tuesday, December 3, ended in a draw.

Heading into Game 7, defending world champion GM Ding Liren – who was so close to defeat in the game – and his 18-year-old Indian challenger GM Gukesh Dommaraju had three points each after having won one game apiece.

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In what turned out to be their longest game, so far, after their second rest day on Monday, the Chinese GM only made it past time control with just seven seconds left on his clock. Ding Liren scrambled to not lose on time for the second time after he lost Game 3 on time.

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Early on, at some point, Gukesh, playing with white, spent 31.7% of his total time with his eyes closed.

For the first time in this contest, Gukesh later fell behind on the clock compared to Ding Liren. The game slowly headed into a nail-biting end game with Gukesh spending over eight minutes on the 48th move.

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Game 6 on December 1 ended in a draw after 46 moves and more than four hours of play. Ding Liren revisited the London System, the same opening he used to defeat Ian Nepomniachtchi in Game 6 of their World Championship Match last year, on Sunday, but it didn’t produce similar results.

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If the 18-year-old from Chennai beats Ding Liren, after 14 classical games, he will become not just the 18th World Champion but also the youngest in history, breaking the record set by Garry Kasparov in 1985.

Ding Liren and his challenger Gukesh are facing each other in a 14-game classical chess match. The player who scores 7.5 points or more wins the match, picking up the better part of the $2.5 million total prize fund.

If the score is equal after 14 games, the winner is decided by a tiebreak.