D Gukesh vs Ding Liren Highlights: Ding Liren beats D Gukesh in Round 1 of World Chess Championship 2024

Ding: “I feel very good. I haven’t won a single classical game for a long time and today I managed to do that. But this game, I think to be fair, it’s very lucky for me because I missed two tactics.”

On spending 24 minutes on 7…a5: “I analyzed it, but I couldn’t remember what’s a continuation. I have to decide between playing the line I knew, but maybe I didn’t know as carefully as I should have, or [whether] I needed to come up with a new idea in the game myself. And I chose the second one.”

From our last update about the moves on the board, the only progress was Gukesh moving his knight from h3 to e6 followed by Liren moving his king from g8 to h8, and that brings us an end to the match. Attached is the view of the final positions on the board.

Liren capture white rook on f1. Gukesh uses a knight from g2 to capture the black rook on f1. Next, Liren moves the king pawn from e6 to e5 but Gukesh captures it from the white knight that was on d4. Liren’s queen goes from c4 to capture the white pawn on gr4 as Gukesh moves the knight from f1 to g2 to protect his king who is on g1.

Liren moves his knight from d7 to f5. Gukesh is trying to bring back his pieces as he moves the white knight from e5 to g3. Liren moves the knight from f5 to e4.

Looking at the threat, Gukesh moves the king from g1 to h2 as Liren moves the rook pawn from h7 to h6.

Gukesh moves knight from g2 to h3 while Liren takes his queen from g4 to dc.

Gukesh is now trying to attack as he takes the white knight from g3 to d6 as Liren’s king is on g8. Liren also takes the queen from d1 to c2.

Gukesh has moved the king from h2 to g3 as Liren takes the queen from c2 to a2.

Gukesh is running out of time, so he plays his white queen from d2 to e3. Liren has over 5 mins on the clock so he is taking his time to decide the next move but Gukesh has less than a minute left.

This is becoming more of a cat-and-mouse game now with Liren currently in control of the match. The Chinese GM moved his queen from f4 to c4 to put it directly into the vision of Gukesh’s queen on c2 but because Liren had a pawn on d5, Gukesh moved his queen to d2.

Liren then opts for casting, moving his rook to f8 and king to g8. Liren responds by taking his white bishop from f2 to d4 followed by Liren taking a knight from b2 to d3. Gukesh can opt to capture the knight as his queen is on d2 but Liren’s queen is also on c4.

Gukesh now moves his white queen from b1 to c2. Apart from the threat of a checkmate, the problem here is time. Gukesh has played 32 moves so far and has less than four minutes left on the clock. Liren is currently engaged in thinking and he has over 14 minutes.

Liren makes another decisive move and captures the white pawn on e6. Gukesh then decides to move back his knight from d4 to e2. Liren then takes a commanding position by moving his queen to e5 from c3.

We know you don’t have the advantage of watching the board in front of you and if you are facing problems wondering how things are shaping up, here’s a look at the live board.

Rook pawn played from h2 to h4 by Gukesh on his next move followed by Liren bringing his black bishop from g5 to f4. Gukesh is back thinking about his next move and unlike at the start, Liren is making his moves within seconds.

Gukes takes 3-4 minutes and removes the white queen from e1 to b1.

Gukesh responds by moving his queen from e3 to e1 and decides against capturing Liren’s black queen on d3. Liren also moved his from e7 to g5. This last move is not shown in the attached picture.

Gukesh responds by mimicking Liren as he also moves his white rook to c1 from a1. A quick response comes from Liren who forwards his queen c7 to c4. Time for Gukesh to make another move.

Gukesh on his 17th move takes the queen to e2 while Liren moves black knight from c6 to d4. Gukesh is currently not in his seat as he had moved away after moving his queen and Liren was quick to respond. The clock is running down for Gukesh.

It was surprising that Liren started with a French defense. Not only because he lost to Nepo last year playing that style but also because playing French defense with black pieces has been a poor move in World Chess Championship history.

After Liren moved his black knight to b6, Gukesh exchanged positions between the rook and king. King took g1 while the rook went to f1. Liren responded by moving the knight to c4 from b6 as Gukesh dropped the white bishop from r3 to f2. Liren then took the black bishop from c8 to d7.

Gukesh’s time to make a move now. Liren has taken his black knight from d7 to b6.

Liren has less than 50 minutes left on the clock with only 3 moves. Gukesh has over 1.5 hours. By the way, Gukesh used his white knight to capture Liren’s pawn d4 which the Chinese had used to capture his opponent’s queen pawn.

Gukesh has challenged Liren by moving a pawn to b4 which forced Liren to take his queeb back to c7 followed by Gukesh moving his knight from e2 to d4. The picture added here is from before the Liren’s queen was moved to c7.

After Gukesh was made to work hard for his last move which was moving Knight to g2, the Indian Grandmaster has decided to move around a bit to get some ideas. Liren meanwhile is losing a lot of time. Liren has lost close to 40 minutes and is now set to play his 11th move.

So Gukesh finally makes a move and he moves Knight to g2. He has left his Queen pawn in the danger of getting captured on d4 but doing that will also leave Liren’s pawn in danger. Things are heating up here.

Liren has set up a French Defense and while Gukesh started quickly, making the first 10 moves in a jiffy, he’s currently in a fix with his queen pawn in danger of getting captured on d4. He barely took any time to make the 10 moves but now has taken over 10 minutes to think over what to do next.