World Chess Championship 2024

On 12 December 2024, in a Singapore conference hall, the eighteen-year-old Dommaraju Gukesh defeated Ding Liren in the 14th and final game of a fourteen-game classical match. He became, that evening, the eighteenth undisputed World Chess Champion — and the youngest. Magnus Carlsen, who had abdicated the title in 2022, watched on a stream.

The context

Ding Liren had defended the title for nineteen months but had played almost no classical chess in that period — a documented case of competitive depression following his 2023 victory over Nepomniachtchi. Gukesh, by contrast, had spent the year winning the Candidates Tournament in Toronto (the youngest ever) and earning rating points in nearly every tournament he entered.

The pre-match expectation, depending on which betting market one consulted, was either 60-40 for Gukesh or close to 50-50. The first six games were drawn.

The match

Game 3 was the first decisive game — Gukesh won with Black after Ding played a dubious novelty in a French Defence. Game 4 immediately equalised: Ding won as White after Gukesh allowed a tactical breakthrough in a Spanish Opening structure. From there, the match alternated. Ding led 4-3 after game 7. Gukesh equalised in game 11.

Game 11 — the blunder

In game 11, with the match level at 4.5-4.5, Ding played the white side of an Italian Game and reached a clearly better position by move 27. The engines had Ding at +1.5 — close to winning. Then came 28.Rf2??, a one-move blunder that lost an exchange and the game. Ding, in a press conference afterwards, called it “the worst move I have played in my life.” Gukesh took the lead.

Game 14 — the decision

Game 14 was a slow endgame in a Petroff Defence structure. The position was equal for forty moves. On move 55, with both players approaching time pressure, Ding made an inexplicable rook move — 55.Rf2 — that allowed Gukesh’s pawn to queen with check. Six moves later, Ding resigned. Gukesh had won 7.5-6.5.

What it meant

At eighteen years and seven months, Gukesh became the youngest World Chess Champion. The previous record (Garry Kasparov, twenty-two years and six months, 1985) had stood for thirty-nine years.

For India, the title returned to the country for the first time since Anand’s 2013 loss to Carlsen. For chess as a sport, it was the first World Championship match held in Asia outside of the former Soviet republics. For the elite tour, it announced that the next decade would be defined by a generation Carlsen had himself helped accelerate — and from which he had now, deliberately, stepped aside.