A lot of commentators bring up the question of what if Ding had not blundered under time pressure in the last game. This overlooks the fact that Ding systematically struggled with time management and was under immense time pressure practically every game. Similar to how you can only cry wolf so many times, if you're always out of time, something's gotta give at one point. What was surprising to me was that blunders like that didn't happen more often.
Ding's problem was not his time management but his mental game. It's no secret he's been struggling for the last ~12 months and he admitted as much that he didn't prep well for this match. Having said that, the guy got himself into favorable positions multiple times and then was happy to trade-off pieces/repeat moves to get the draw.
The last game was where he took it a step too far. Several times during the game he had the opportunity to pressure Gukesh to find the correct sequence of moves, only to take the easy way out and trade a piece to make the game more drawish.
His blunder at the end was him thinking he'd just trade off the Rooks and kill off the game, but missed the fact that he basically sac'd his Bishop in the process.
This is so important, and people who watch games with engine eval or with commentators who use it don't realise it at all. Often in a chess game you're looking at a position and going "am I even ahead here?"...and when I do an analysis of my own games I'll often find that my own sense of the position doesn't at all agree with an engine evaluation. Clearly the situation is going to be much harder at the elite level where the edges are smaller and doubly so in this particular world championship where the positions were generally extremely complex and double-edged.
But I think that just comes back to his mental game/lack of match prep. The Ding of 5 years ago that pushed even Magnus Carlsen wouldn't have been out of prep 5-8 moves into every game and could've afforded himself more time in the mid-game to find the advantage.
It's basically what allowed Gukesh to do exactly that throughout the match. His opening prep was impressive and because he allowed himself time to think outside of the opening he at least tried to push on most games.
It's still a good "what if", though. He'd made it through the first 13.9 of 14 games with only one tactical blunder. Even if he was overwhelmingly more likely to blunder than Gukesh in the final position (between time management, mental exhaustion, and the fact that the position isn't dangerous for Black at all while it's slightly dangerous for White), he was still an overwhelming favourite at that point to play 10 more reasonable moves and make it to the tie breaks, where several factors would have worked in his favour.
Something doesn't gotta give, when there's only a few moves left in a simplified position.
While Ding did put himself under pressure in many games by taking long thinks in situations where it didn't really seem to benefit him, the pressure he put himself under in the final game was different. He forced a very uncomfortable endgame because he clearly thought he could draw it on autopilot. When he blundered he had 10 minutes on his clock and 30 second increment, he wasn't really under enormous time pressure, but it was a nasty position of his choosing. Either way, hard to have sympathy on a strategic level, as devastated as he clearly was in the moment.
Did he "struggle with time", or did he just work harder to find the move a chess engine would choose?
Basically in every single stat, Ding plays more like the chess engines; and overall he was able to capitalize better on an advantage and recover better from a disadvantage than Gukesh. Just looking at the data, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that Gukesh won mostly by luck: that the more probable outcome was that Ding didn't blunder in the final game.
On the other hand, Ding isn't a chess engine; he takes longer and gets tired sooner than a chess engine. One aspect of human chess is management of both time and intellectual energy, so there's certainly an argument to be made that the extra effort Ding put in to play more like a chess engine wasn't the optimal strategy for a human.
I think this misses the forest for the trees. At the end of the day, if you're competing to be the world champion in chess, your goal isn't to play as close to the engine as possible, it's to win games. If you play with 100% accuracy, but lose on time, you don't get to be the champion.
You're discounting the fact that Gukesh could have also sacrificed good time management and spent more compute time on his moves for precision. The fact that he didn't do that doesn't mean he won on luck.
