Ding Liren held on for a high-wire draw with Indian teenager Gukesh Dommaraju on Wednesday in the penultimate 13th game of their world championship showdown, leaving the match knotted at 6½-all with one scheduled contest remaining.

The 32-year-old defending champion appeared visibly shaken at the board after leaving himself less than five minutes to make the last 10 moves before the time control, where players are given an additional half hour. But he defended brilliantly under nerve-shredding clock pressure to stabilize the position before it fizzled out to a peaceful result by threefold repetition after more than five hours. Game 14 is Thursday.

“It’s fitting that the match goes to the last game, because we’ve both showed a lot of fighting spirit and played some very entertaining chess,” Gukesh said afterward.

The challenger betrayed no sign of nerve in his final opportunity with the favored white pieces, opening with 1 e4 for the third time with Ding once more responding with the French Defense. Gukesh blitzed out his moves confidently before offering up the first wrinkle with the near-novelty 8 Be3, prompting Ding to think for more than 37 minutes before responding with 8...Nb6.

Better out of the opening and with a yawning clock advantage, Gukesh turned up the pressure with the tricky 22 Bf4! before black’s passive 23...Rb7 left Ding in a dangerous squeeze. Gukesh’s choice for a material exchange shortly after (25 Bxe7 Rexe7) released the tension and appeared to let Ding off the hook, but the champion’s decision to retreat his queen (30...Qf7?!) rather than capture on e1 badly undercut his position.

“I thought that after 24 Bd6 I should have a quite nice advantage, which probably was the case, but I couldn’t see a knockout blow.” Gukesh said. “Maybe there wasn’t one.”

The critical moment came when Ding was able to find the tricky 31...Rf8 amid the time crunch when all other moves were losing. From there Gukesh was unable to convert his advantage before neither could make progress in a rook endgame. They agreed to split the point after 69 moves and 5hr 6min.

Ding entered the first defense of his world championship having gone 28 classical games without a win, a dreadful run of form that saw him drop to 23rd in the world rankings and prompted the oddsmakers to install him as roughly a 3-1 longshot in the match. But he sprang a major surprise in Game 1 by winning as black, ending the 10-month winless streak with flair.

Game 2 was a quiet draw, before Gukesh roared back with a win in Game 3. The fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th games were each draws. Gukesh won on Sunday in Game 11 before Ding struck back in Monday’s Game 12.

The $2.5m competition resumes on Thursday with Ding playing as white in the 14th and final classical game. Either player can clinch the title with a win. If it results in another draw and the match ends in a 7-7 deadlock, a series of tiebreak games with faster time controls will be played on Friday. Tiebreakers have been necessary to decide three of the past four world championship matches, and four of the past seven, including Ding’s win over Russia’s Ian Nepomniachtchi last year for the title abdicated by Magnus Carlsen.

While Ding has been regarded as the underdog in the match due to his unremarkable form, he would go off as a slight favorite if the match was decided in rapid or blitz games. Notably, the leading online prediction betting market Polymarket forecasted Ding as the winner for the first time during the match after Wednesday’s result.

The 18-year-old Gukesh, currently ranked fifth in the world, is bidding to shatter the record for youngest ever undisputed world champion held by Garry Kasparov, who was 22 when he dethroned Anatoly Karpov in their 1985 rematch in Moscow.