SINGAPORE: If Tuesday and Wednesday were all-action from the get-go, Thursday was more of a slow burn without the final pay-off. When both players play precise chess for over a couple of hours, it can lead to a dull draw and that's exactly what transpired. It was so precise the evaluation bar stuck to 0.0 like it had been nailed to a mast (chess.com put the accuracy of both players at over 99 per cent). The draw was so visible from a mile away that Hikaru Nakamura, one of the world's leading players, published his Game 9 recap even before the players had agreed to shake hands.
It means the champion, Ding Liren, and the challenger, D Gukesh, remain tied on 4.5 points with five games to go before potential rapid tie-breaks. The game itself was free of jeopardy and it transmitted into the viewing area fairly early on. If the atmosphere was over the edge the last few days, it was like watching paint dry on Thursday. What Liren did during the game's concluding stages was a homage to the game state; he stretched his hands behind his chair to relax and, pardon the reference to the popular meme, chill.
At some level, both players needed this game to steady their nerves after a couple of mentally draining contests. For Liren, he was back to his best. He was utterly solid, maintained positional integrity from start to finish and sailed through time control with minimal fuss. When the game officially ended, with just two kings within kissing distance of each other, it felt like he was in control for a very long time.
For Gukesh also, this felt like an important game. He overreached with White in the first game and paid dearly for it. He wanted to do the same thing on Thursday but without any of the recklessness.
Both players had blitzed out the opening batch of moves before the 32-year-old from China was forced into a deep think, one of the recurring themes of the Championship. Unlike in some of the previous games, he kept finding the book move and this forced Gukesh's hands.
He wanted to push so he started to lose the time advantage he had built up in the initial phase of the game. He had one clear option in front of him -- play the best move, take pieces off the board, call truce and head back to the room inside a few hours -- but he wanted to find a different line. So he was forced into a long think on at least two different occasions. The first time he did that came in move 22 when he took over 30 minutes, one of his longest of the final before committing a move to the board (he made Qb1).
Liren, though, had by now known the position of the board like the back of his hand. There were no dangers and started to play moves with relative comfort. In reply, Gukesh, who was up by 40 minutes on the clock at one point, again retreated to try and complicate matters for Black. He came up with 24...Qb5 in the hope of at least challenging his opponent. The world champion's response? 24...Bxc5 which came with a double exclamation mark (great move per engine).
By now it was pretty clear that one of the players had to commit a blunder for the game to catch fire. In the end, though, pieces were liquidated one after the other before the Kings, White and Black, were the only ones left on the board.
"The game was very precise," Gukesh said. "I might have had a small edge after 16.Ba5, but I think that 20.Qb5 was premature: maybe I should have played 20.Ne5 with a small edge, although it shouldn’t be anything defensive."