After the longest game of the 2024 FIDE World Championship, a five hour 23 minute marathon, Ding Liren held on for an unexpected draw against Dommaraju Gukesh to keep the scores level at 3.5 - 3.5.
After starting with the Reti opening, then going on the King's Indian attack, Gukesh seemed to have found a dominant position on the board, ripping apart Ding's King's Indian defence as the two castled by move 7.
As the game wore on, Ding went on an exploratory mission with his Queen, but Gukesh trapped it on his Queen's side and at that point, it seemed that he had an overwhelming advantage. The eval engine gave him a 2.2 advantage and the AI algorithm nearly 70% chance to win for Gukesh. However, a blunder on move 30 saw Ding claw his way back, when Gukesh moved his Queen to f4.
This gave the defending champion an opening back into the game, but Gukesh once again leaned on him and with time control a major problem for Ding, he made his 40th move with just seven seconds left (of the 120 minutes he had to make 40 moves) and it turned out to be a blunder, King moving forward to e5.
Gukesh once again became overwhelming favourite, but he once again let that slip: King back to e1 was another blunder as per the eval engines and the bar drew dead even immediately. It felt, for those watching, that it was a winning game for Gukesh that he couldn't quite capitalize on. After the match, he admitted, "I don't know where the win was, but I should be winning."
Ding, meanwhile, will feel confident going into game 8 now as he held on from a very precarious position to keep the scores level. We will be right here for updates from that tomorrow, but until then you can relive the game as it happened below: