Engine Analysis of Games 10-12 from the World Championship

As always, I highly recommend checking out the annotations provided by Lichess to get GM commentary for the moves.

Game 10

The tenth game was again a London system and initially it looked good for Ding.

Ding got a slightly better position out of the opening, but as he played 13.Nxf6+ he gave away some of his winning chances. White was maybe slightly better in the resulting endgame but not much happened and the game ended in a draw.
The piece activity also shows that there wasn’t happening much in the game.

Ding had slightly more active pieces but it was never really significant. After the piece exchanges, the activity for both sides was roughly equal in the endgame.
The sharpness of the game was also very low and quickly got close to zero.

Even the clock times reflect that the game wasn’t too exciting.

Both players didn’t use much time which shows that they didn’t have to think for too long during the game.

Game 11

In contrast to game 10, the eleventh game was very interesting and double edged. This becomes immediately clear from the WDL graph.

The game was very complicated right out of the opening and both sides had good winning chances. Both sides had chances at different points during the game but the draw probability was never very high. This means that even though one side was better, it was still difficult to realise the advantage.
While Ding was better out of the opening, he started to go wrong with 15...g6 and Gukesh’s position kept getting better. In the end, Ding blundered a knight and had to resign.
The piece activity highlights the point where Ding’s position got really difficult.

Gukesh was already slightly better but after 22...Qxb6 his pieces became much more active. This made the game even more difficult for Ding and led to the blunder in the end.
The sharpness for the entire game remained very high.

The sharpness for the entire game remained very high. While the overall sharpness of game 10 never got above 0.2, the sharpness for this game never really dropped below 0.2!
The drama of the game can also be seen in the clock times.

Ding spent in total one hour on moves 4 and 5, which looked very bad for him. But then Gukesh thought for an hour about the move 11.g3 which left both players with very little time until the time control. Gukesh managed to deal better with little time and remained up on the clock from move 17 onwards.

Game 12

After Gukesh took the lead, it was clear that Ding would have to play more ambitiously in order to win a game and tie the score line. Game 12 couldn’t have been better for him.

As the WDL graph shows, Ding was just dominating in this game. He calmly prepared to break in the centre with d4 and then his central pawns were restricting black’s pieces.
The piece activity for this game doesn’t show too many details.

The activity for both sides was roughly equal until Ding was already much better. I guess this might be an artefact from the way I calculate the piece activity by only looking at the squares the pieces attack.
The sharpness of this game is quite typical.

There was a lot of play after the opening and as soon as Ding was ready to push his d4-pawn after 17.Qd2, the sharpness jumped up until Ding was already much better.
The clock times look a bit different than for the other games.

Ding was down on time early on but he didn’t spend 20+ minutes on one individual move in the opening as he did in almost all games before. Instead he spent a couple of minutes on moves 5-10 and then sped up and caught Gukesh on the clock. While Ding still spent a lot of time in the opening, his time management seemed to be more reasonable in this game.

Conclusion

The tension has been building before this series of games and now we also got to see some decisive results. It’ll be interesting to see how this affects both players. I only hope that they won’t be afraid of another loss and play cautiously in the final two classical games. Even in this case, an intense tiebreak would be the result.
Let me know what you think about these past three games and how you think the match will end.

If you enjoyed this post, check out my other posts about the world championship match.