[HN Gopher] Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
___________________________________________________________________
Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
Author : CawCawCaw
Score : 717 points
Date : 2022-07-20 11:03 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chess24.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chess24.com)
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Wow, this site's GDPR cookie nag exhibits the worst dark pattern
| I've seen in the genre, and that's saying something.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| It might be worth mentioning a famous abdication which caused a
| lot of consternation, albeit in another game. I love this story
| but may have gotten some details wrong.
|
| Marion Tinsley was world checkers champion from 1955-1958, then
| took a break, then again from 1975-1991, when he resigned in
| protest (at age _64_ ). He was utterly dominant; indeed it is
| hard to think of a competitor in all of history more dominant
| over his sport or game than Tinsley.
|
| In 1990 Tinsley decided to play Chinook, the best checkers
| computer program in the world. Chinook had placed second at the
| US Nationals so it had the right to enter the world
| championships, but the US and British checkers federations
| refused to allow it.
|
| So Tinsley resigned his title. Tinsley then played Chinook in an
| unofficial match (which he won).
|
| This power play really stuck it to the federations: nobody wanted
| to be named the new world champion knowing Tinsley was fully
| capable of crushing them. Eventually everyone came to an
| agreement to let Tinsley be the "champion emeritus".
|
| Tinsley played Chinook four years later, at age 68, still
| probably the best player in the world. But in the middle of the
| match he complained of stomach pains and withdrew after only six
| games (of 20), all drawn. Tinsley's pains were real: he later
| died of pancreatic cancer.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Chinook was obviously playing the long con. Knowing Tinsley's
| weakness was his humanity, so it continued to draw until his
| frail human body succumbed to the forces of nature, thus
| winning once and for all.
| tmjwid wrote:
| It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is
| not a weakness, that is life.
| TylerE wrote:
| Not in checkers. The Chinook team later proved it is a draw
| if both players play perfectly.
| RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote:
| In the context of the GP quote, Data did ~~achieve
| victory~~ busted him up, in a sense, by playing for a
| draw, so...
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIRT6xRQkf8
| cortesoft wrote:
| Are you saying he busted him up?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Not at all true in general; consider tic-tac-toe.
| hangonhn wrote:
| One of my favorite quotes of all time.
| solardev wrote:
| Whoosh
| moffkalast wrote:
| Nah, he's quoting a TNG episode where Data does the exact
| same thing.
| solardev wrote:
| Ah,oops, my whoosh!
| allenrb wrote:
| Data may have said it in TNG, but pretty sure this
| originated with the 1983 film "WarGames"
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames).
| fknorangesite wrote:
| It was Picard _to_ Data:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4A-Ml8YHyM
|
| The WarGames "the only winning move is not to play" quote
| is about mutually assured destruction; a rather different
| lesson than the one Data learns in 'Peak Performance'.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| The only winning move is not to play.
| danuker wrote:
| If you have a few hours to kill, here is a game the situation
| reminds me of:
|
| https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| "If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your
| enemies will float by."
| gralx wrote:
| > ... it is hard to think of a competitor in all of history
| more dominant over his sport or game than Tinsley.
|
| I've got another one: famous hold 'em poker player Stu Ungar
| never lost a game of gin rummy. Utterly dominant.
| treis wrote:
| Sounds like an urban legend. Gin rummy has too much luck for
| someone to have a perfect record.
| bohadi wrote:
| It turns out Checkers was solved, for perfect play, in 2007 if
| anyone was wondering.
|
| https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/publications/solving...
| Arocalexi wrote:
| All the links are broken on that webpage.
| OskarS wrote:
| By Chinook, actually. The computer science Jonathan Schaeffer
| became obsessed with solving checkers, because it was the
| only way to prove that Chinook could've beaten Tinsley in a
| fair game (as Tinsley passed away before Chinook could defeat
| him on the board).
| aaronmcs wrote:
| There is a great book that the main author of Chinook wrote
| about this. It's called One Jump Ahead[0] and it is a great
| combination of technical info about the development of Chinook
| as well as a kind of mini-history of competitive checkers.
| Strongly recommend!
|
| [0] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-76576-1
| fffrrrr wrote:
| This is really a riveting book. You don't need any interest
| in checks or computer science to enjoy it.
| RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote:
| Yes I read the book decades ago and it was indeed excellent.
| IIRC, the technical details are probably too light for the HN
| crowd, but it was the biographical stories that had
| interested me.
|
| For an even shorter, and lighter, read on checkers engine, I
| recommend Blondie24[0].
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1558607838
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ihateolives wrote:
| Where do I sign up for your daily checker facts newsletter? :)
| ProAm wrote:
| Please dont turn this into Reddit.
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's a drake meme if I ever saw one.
|
| No -> Fact checkers
|
| Yes -> Checker facts
| mattnewton wrote:
| Surely you want fact checked checker facts?
| kif wrote:
| Only checkers fact-checker checked checkers facts.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| I'm not the fact checker I'm the fact checker's son. I'll
| be checking facts till the fact checker's done.
| fdeage wrote:
| > He was utterly dominant; indeed it is hard to think of a
| competitor in all of history more dominant over his sport or
| game than Tinsley.
|
| Very interesting comment. This sentence about dominance in a
| field made me think of Stu Ungar, who dominated Gin Rummy so
| completely that he had to switch to Poker (where he became a
| 3-time world champion) to meet interesting adversaries.
|
| I couldn't find an exact reference for the following quote, but
| still: "Some day, I suppose it's possible for someone to be a
| better No Limit Hold'em player than me. I doubt it, but it
| could happen. But, I swear to you, I don't see how anyone could
| ever play gin better than me."
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| Along the same lines of utterly dominant and lesser known,
| Jahangir Khan in the sport of squash. Most famously for 555
| consecutive victories.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > "Some day, I suppose it's possible for someone to be a
| better No Limit Hold'em player than me. I doubt it, but it
| could happen. But, I swear to you, I don't see how anyone
| could ever play gin better than me."
|
| An approximately optimal strategy for Limit Heads Up was
| determined: http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/ is a Limit
| solution.
|
| Machines don't play No Limit perfectly, but they're good
| enough to have beaten the best humans available when they
| last tried, so I expect if Stu had lived long enough they'd
| beat Stu too.
|
| Interestingly Gin Rummy is not seen as a major AI research
| target. I found some undergraduates playing with relatively
| simple AI approaches for Gin Rummy as basically a getting
| your feet wet exercise, but this is apparently not in the
| context of "Here's what the grown-ups did" but rather "Nobody
| is exploring this, so whatever you do is actually novel". So
| there's a real opportunity if somebody is interested.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| Fascinating character. I ended up reading the whole Wikipedia
| article [1] because of your comment.
|
| Sounds like he was very skilled _and_ continuously getting
| better -- which is of course impressive. At the same time,
| his overall life story turns out to be tragic. Two choice
| quotes from the article really jumped out for me:
|
| > Ungar told ESPN TV... that the 1980 WSOP was the first time
| he had ever played a Texas hold'em tournament. Poker legend
| Doyle Brunson remarked that it was the first time he had seen
| a player improve as the tournament went on.
|
| > Ungar is regarded by many poker analysts and insiders as
| one of the greatest pure-talent players ever to play the
| game. But on the topic of his life, Stu's long term friend
| Mike Sexton said "In the game of life, Stu Ungar was a
| loser."
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stu_Ungar
| xhevahir wrote:
| After reading that Wikipedia article I'm reminded of a
| episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent that was almost
| certainly inspired by Ungar's life:
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0799186/ . The character appears
| in two episodes, although the second one isn't that great.
| RockyMcNuts wrote:
| there's a (so-so) movie -
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338467/
|
| when the show Billions did a poker game they used a famous
| Stu Ungar hand https://somuchpoker.com/calling-with-ten-
| high-stu-ungar-vs-m...
|
| (but OMG that game was so cringey for so many reasons, you
| don't get to call time and go talk to your therapist in the
| middle of a hand)
| toolslive wrote:
| About being dominant. What about Raymond Ceulemans ? From the
| wikipedia page: Billiards player, having won
| - 35 World Championship titles (23 in three-cushion + 12 in
| other carom disciplines) - 48 European titles (23 in
| three-cushion) and - 61 national titles.
| agumonkey wrote:
| He died in Humble.
| OskarS wrote:
| I love this story so much. This The Atlantic article telling
| the full tale is a favorite of mine [1]
|
| It's hard to overstate how incredibly dominant Tinsley was. In
| his entire career, he never lost a match, and only ever lost 7
| games (two to Chinook). That is out of maybe tens of thousands
| of games. He was a mathematician by training and taught at a
| historically black university. He was also deeply religious and
| a lay minister at a black church. He famously described the
| difference between chess and checkers like this: "Chess is like
| looking out over a vast open ocean; checkers is like looking
| into a bottomless well."
|
| I could just quote the entire article, but I'll just leave it
| at this passage:
|
| > _The two men sat in his office and began the matches,
| Schaeffer moving for Chinook and entering changes in the game
| into the system. The first nine games were all draws. In the
| tenth game, Chinook was cruising along, searching 16 to 17
| moves deep into the future. And it made a move where it thought
| it had a small advantage. "Tinsley immediately said, 'You're
| gonna regret that.'" Schaeffer said. "And at the time, I was
| thinking, what the heck does he know, what could possibly go
| wrong?" But, in fact, from that point forward, Tinsley began to
| pull ahead..._
|
| > _The computer scientist became fixated on that moment. After
| the match, he ran simulations to examine what had gone wrong.
| And he discovered that, in fact, from that move to the end of
| the game, if both sides played perfectly, he would lose every
| time. But what he discovered next blew his mind. To see that, a
| computer or a human would have to look 64 moves ahead._
|
| Tinsley was simply one of the most remarkable human minds of
| the 20th century. I'm happy he finally got a challenger that
| was worthy of him (as no other humans could even come close),
| but it also seems fitting that he was never officially defeated
| in a real checkers match. Rest in peace.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/mario...
| Scarblac wrote:
| Did he ever talk about international draughts? It is
| essentially checkers on a 10 x 10 board, rather than the 8 x
| 8 that checkers is played on.
|
| I wonder how much more resistance he would have had in
| draughts.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| I just read this story in Jordan Ellenberg's book, "Shape: The
| Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy,
| and Everything Else" as part of the section on decision trees,
| evaluating state, etc. Tinsley is the GOAT.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Oh, intriguing title. How is the book?
| stolenmerch wrote:
| It's probably too basic for anyone who's taken even
| college-level math courses, but I thought it was an
| engaging summer read that got my imagination going. Easy to
| read but also required some work. It was fun to imagine
| examples of everyday life as geometric objects -- but you
| probably have to be in the mood for that to enjoy it.
| panda-giddiness wrote:
| You skipped the best part of the story!
|
| > We [Chinook and the lead programmer] played an exhibition
| match against Marion Tinsley in 1991. And the computer told me
| to make this one particular move. When I made it, Tinsley
| immediately said, "You're going to regret that."
|
| > Not being a checkers player, I thought, "what does he know,
| my computer is looking 20 moves ahead." But a few moves later,
| the computer said that Tinsley had the advantage and a few
| moves after that I resigned.
|
| More details on this epic match from Wikipedia:
|
| > The lead programmer Jonathan Schaeffer looked back into the
| database and discovered that Tinsley picked the only strategy
| that could have defeated Chinook from that point and Tinsley
| was able to see the win 64 moves into the future.
|
| ---
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/science/short-history-ai-sc...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Tinsley
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > and Tinsley was able to see the win 64 moves into the
| future.
|
| It's more likely that Tinsley was able to see a winning
| position much closer to the present than that, without
| bothering about the details of how exactly the winning
| position 6 turns in the future converted into an actual win
| 64 moves in the future.
| cupofpython wrote:
| the point is that his winning position was a 64 move
| convert and he was correct. Lots of players believe they
| will end up in a winning position, but overlook something
| while "not bothering with the details".
|
| it's less about how much he calculated in that moment and
| more about the accuracy of his confidence and the work he
| had to have put in alongside his talent prior to that
| moment to achieve that confidence and back it up.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > it's less about how much he calculated in that moment
| and more about the accuracy of his confidence and the
| work he had to have put in
|
| That is a matter of opinion. Looking a certain number of
| "moves ahead" is an important metric in game engines and
| also something that human players will tell you that (1)
| they are consciously doing and that (2) is important to
| them. So it's worth discussing on its own terms.
| Closi wrote:
| Eh, sometimes you aren't 'looking ahead' that many moves,
| just that you can calculate the number of moves from a
| known-winning position.
|
| This is why chess programs usually say "mate in 24" but
| humans would more likely just be looking a few moves
| ahead to get in a 'winning position' which they know is
| an eventual checkmate.
|
| I'm not good at chess, and don't calculate more than 5
| moves ahead, but have 'spotted' a mate 20 moves ahead
| just because you recognise that a certain position is
| winning even if you don't know every single possible move
| and response.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| How does your comment differ from my comment?
| Closi wrote:
| I mean you don't actually have to 'look ahead' 65 moves
| to know that there is a winning move, even if that move
| is 65 moves ahead.
|
| You can just go 'this move is winning, and I can infer
| that because of these logical points'. This isn't really
| 'looking ahead x moves into the future', you can just
| know a position is winning and will cause a cascade of
| moves of a predictable-length that will end in an
| eventual checkmate.
|
| If you call this 'looking ahead x moves' or not depends
| on the definition I guess, but I just mean they might not
| be actually evaluating / imagining all those positions
| (because you can either use logic or pattern-match to
| previous situations).
| cupofpython wrote:
| there needs to be work done and intuition developed in
| order for a human to look any amount of moves ahead. we
| do not look ahead in the same way a computer algorithm
| does
|
| we look ahead in ways like "doing this leaves this area
| weak, and the opponent has resources that can take
| advantage of that, and i cannot intervene on those
| resources in time" or "if i create a strong threat then
| the opponent will be forced to react to it, here are the
| ways they can react that make any sort of sense, here is
| what i can do in each of those situations"
|
| they are not doing things like "let me simulate moving
| every one of my pieces right now, and then every one of
| my opponents pieces in response to each of those moves,
| and then my options again, and review 10,000 possible
| scenarios in my mind individually for the best min/max
| situation" like a classical computer engine does.
|
| so i always find the "X moves ahead" phrase misleading at
| best. but as i originally stated, it is useful to know
| how many moves of perfect play are necessary for someone
| to convert a winning position when reviewing the players
| confidence going into that position. and even then you
| dont know if they got lucky or earned that confidence by
| looking at just the one game alone. Over the course of
| their career the amount of time that their confidence
| pays off or not tells the story there
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > there needs to be work done and intuition developed in
| order for a human to look any amount of moves ahead. we
| do not look ahead in the same way a computer algorithm
| does
|
| I mean, that's just plain wrong on both counts. You need
| to do work to do a good job at looking ahead. You don't
| need to do work just to be able to imagine what the board
| might look like after a particular move is made.
|
| > they are not doing things like "let me simulate moving
| every one of my pieces right now, and then every one of
| my opponents pieces in response to each of those moves,
| and then my options again, and review 10,000 possible
| scenarios in my mind individually for the best min/max
| situation" like a classical computer engine does.
|
| You don't understand what the computer is doing. Pruning
| its options is just as important for the computer as it
| is for the humans.
| cupofpython wrote:
| you're missing the point of my post. yes the computer
| prunes, but fundamentally it is attempting to review all
| possible scenarios indiscriminately as opposed to a human
| who is trying to make some sort of sense of the position.
| without work, as in developing an intuition for making
| sense of the game, a human looking ahead doesnt provide
| value.
|
| so im not sure why you think i was trying to say humans
| cant move pieces around in their mind.
|
| you also completely ignored that i was mainly addressing
| the scope difference of positions analyzed by a human
| player vs a computer, and that the talking point was
| someone looking "64 moves ahead" and trying to explain
| that no this guy did not literally see all variations 64
| moves out - but that through (arguably more impressive)
| reasonable human ability he was able to to be accurate
| and confident in a decision that he had won while there
| was still 64 moves of depth left in the game
| tetha wrote:
| It also strongly depends on the branching factor.
|
| Like, if you're in a chess midgame, there might still 6
| major pieces and 4 or 6 minor pieces and tons of pawns on
| the board. It's tricky to calculate far into the future.
| At each node, there's easily dozens of possible moves,
| and 4-8 viable or not-horrible ones. That's becoming a
| lot of possibilities to consider very quickly.
|
| In an endgame, there's like, 2 kings, 2 pieces and 4
| pawns or a similar constellation. There's 6 possible
| moves, 3 of them immediately lose and 3 are worth
| thinking about. 2 of them probably only have one possible
| answer. Suddenly even an utter beginner like me can
| calculate 4-8 moves. A master-level player probably knows
| the endgame entirely, or can see 10 - 20 moves into it
| easily, because the branching factor is a lot lower now.
| hosh wrote:
| That sounds a lot like Go Seigan in the Go world. Dude
| was ahead of his time and developed a style of play that
| was remarkably similar to AlphaGo. His intuitions on the
| importance and usefulness of a position fueled his
| fighting ability.
| astrange wrote:
| Maybe his opponents were too confused by his name being
| Go.
| whatshisface wrote:
| People aren't like minimax, they can see 64 moves into the
| future if there's something about them that fits into a
| simple pattern.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Potentially. A ladder in go would match this description
| if the board was large enough. I stand by my comment.
|
| Note that the first quote agrees with me:
|
| > Not being a checkers player, I thought, "what does he
| know, my computer is looking 20 moves ahead." But a few
| moves later, the computer said that Tinsley had the
| advantage and a few moves after that I resigned.
|
| We know as a matter of literal truth that the computer is
| looking 20 moves ahead, but it doesn't need 44 moves to
| realize that it's losing, even though the other guy says
| that recognizing the win would require looking 64 moves
| ahead. That guy was wrong; recognizing the win didn't
| require looking 64 moves ahead. He just had trouble
| imagining other methods of recognizing a win.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Clicky without AMP:
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/short-history-ai-
| school...
|
| You are welcome.
| lpolovets wrote:
| Jonathan Schaeffer, who led programming on Chinook, wrote a
| book about the history of Chinook, the matches with Marion
| Tinsley, and checkers in general. I read it a while back and
| thought it was excellent, although it seems like cheap book
| editions are hard to find now. https://www.amazon.com/One-Jump-
| Ahead-Computer-Perfection-eb...
| arbitrage wrote:
| Fantastic write-up. Thank you so much.
| jari_mustonen wrote:
| Some ideas for rule changes that would make a draw less probable:
|
| 1. Make it so that repeating a position is not a legal move 2.
| Remove castling as a legal move
|
| Or, if the rules of the game stay the same, change the tournament
| format radically:
|
| 3. Force specific openings like they do in the computer chess
| tournaments. Both players play as white and black. Select
| positions that are far from equal.
| parkingrift wrote:
| I don't blame Magnus. It's a ton of preparatory work year after
| year and I'm sure the idea of a rematch with Ian is not exciting
| for Magnus after Magnus absolutely trounced Ian.
|
| In the end this might be the beginning of the end for the "world
| chess champion." The game is moving online, and moving to rapid
| or blitz.
| veidelis wrote:
| I wonder what Magnus' suggestions for the WC format are. It's
| very well known that current classical format has the issue of a
| lot of memorization/theory. To me the issue does not lie in the
| time format as a lot of people here suggest, but the format of
| the game. I would appreciate if a couple of chess 960 (Fischer
| variation) games were added to current format to determine world
| champion of classical chess.
| haunter wrote:
| He already talked about that 5 years ago
| https://www.chess.com/news/view/magnus-carlsen-proposes-diff...
|
| Single elimination knock out format like some big sport events
| (football/soccer World Cup, major league sport playoffs etc.)
|
| It can still be BO7/BO9 etc for example but it comes with more
| randomness (initial matchups)
|
| He just hates the current everyone plays everyone league format
| then the best score takes on the reigning champion (who didn't
| even take part in the first round aka the Candidate's)
| matsemann wrote:
| Time to change the format. It's understandable you don't want to
| spend your whole career preparing for these long matches all the
| time. For the challenger it's 6 months of preparing, but for
| Carlsen it would've been his 6th time of preparing for this in a
| few years.
|
| They have also become less entertaining. 12 matches is long
| (edit, 14 now), but no one dares to take any risks. Caruana was
| just defensive and all games ended in a draw. Karjakin they both
| at least won each their game, but still had to go to rapid tie-
| breaks. And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably
| meeting him again isn't that exciting.
|
| It's also almost impossible for a new person to get a chance.
| Even Carlsen didn't like the format and didn't participate in the
| Candidates for a few years, and when he first did he almost
| didn't win it to be allowed to play the WC match. Even though he
| clearly was the best player at the time.
|
| I wonder how this will affect the status of the title, when it's
| in practice is now a title-fight between the second best players.
|
| Also what will happen to the hype in Norway? Each WC match has so
| far been live streamed on all big news pages, biggest TV channels
| etc. It will still be a Christmas tradition to watch the rapid WC
| tournament I guess, but I'm afraid this will lead to less
| coverage. But just to tell how big Carlsen is in Norway: This is
| the top news on all outlets at the moment.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Chess960 or other variants would be nice to mix things up over
| time
| V-2 wrote:
| 12 games - or even 14, since the last WC (games, not "matches",
| excuse the nitpick) isn't long, it's short. There's never been
| a shorter format for chess WC. And this is precisely WHY
| players don't take any risks - because dropping even a single
| point means there won't be many chances left for equalising the
| score again.
| huevosabio wrote:
| I would make the following changes: - Make the candidates be
| the main event, the winner is WC. - score games as in soccer, 3
| points for a win, 1 for draw, 0 for lose.
|
| These changes increase the stakes, incentivize offensive chess,
| allow the sitting WC to play all the best players rather than
| one, reduces the time commitment to a single event for the
| challengers, and allows the WC to partake in the most
| prestigious tournament.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting
| him again isn't that exciting.
|
| The first half of the match wasn't even close to a steamroll.
| It's just Ian broke mentally after that famous 6th game. The
| candidate tournament showed that he had more than recovered
| from that loss and I think he would be in a much better shape
| to challenge Carlsen again. Also, with Carlsen's current
| attitude, it is quite possible that he would be closer to
| breaking first. (One may assume he already broke since he gives
| up the title without a fight)
| toolz wrote:
| nepo at candidates was in my opinion favored to beat
| magnus...he dominated the candidates harder than anyone else
| has in the history of the candidate matches - and it was not
| an easy pool of candidates, either. Sure, there were a lot of
| sloppy games, but only a couple vs nepo - with one of them
| being after the 1st place spot had been guaranteed.
|
| If nepo plays like he did in the candidates, I would not be
| so quick to favor magnus.
| tzs wrote:
| > nepo at candidates was in my opinion favored to beat
| magnus...he dominated the candidates harder than anyone
| else has in the history of the candidate matches - and it
| was not an easy pool of candidates, either.
|
| What about Fischer? The format was a little different then,
| but here was his route to the Championship.
|
| 1. Won the Interzonal tournament 18.5/23 (+15-1=7). The top
| 8 from the Interzonal then played a knockout series of
| matches using a bracket system.
|
| 2. In his quarter-final match of that he beat Taimanov 6-0.
|
| 3. In his semi-final match against Larsen he also won 6-0.
|
| 4. In his final match against former world champion Tigran
| Petrosian, he won 6.5-2.5 (+5-1=3).
|
| In the 21 games total that his candidates matches lasted,
| he won 17 games, lost 1, and drew 3. If we include the
| Interzonal it is 32 wins, 2 loses, 10 draws. In the
| combined Interzonal and knockout matches he had a streak of
| 20 consecutive wins against the world's top players.
|
| And then in the Championship against Spassky he won
| 12.5-8.5 (+7-3=11) (and one of those loses was a forfeit
| when he skipped the game over some complaint about the
| playing conditions).
|
| Nepo's performance in this Candidates was pretty
| dominating, but doesn't come anywhere near Fischer's level
| of dominance.
| toolz wrote:
| You make a very strong argument, but if you take fischers
| score vs the top 8 in the interzonal and double it,
| fischer would've had 10/14 to nepos 9.5/14, which given
| it was just 1 game vs the top 8 and given the ELO spread
| was vastly more spread than current candidates
| games(easily fischer had 100+ more ELO than the other top
| 7 opponents) I think it's fair to say you could say nepo
| was more dominant when compared to the interzonal
|
| granted it becomes more clear that fischer dominated in
| the quarterfinals forward, but it still is worht pointing
| out that his opponents weren't nearly as strong as nepo's
| opponents, relatively speaking
|
| I imagine nepo's score would've been MUCH stronger if he
| was playing 100-200 ELO points weaker opponents all
| candidates. Instead nepo had 3 opponents with higher ELO
| and his weakest opponents ELO was only 19 points lower
| than his own...
|
| in summary, I think you're correct and I was wrong, but
| I'm not so sure it's quite so clear-cut when you factor
| in other variables
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > And then in the Championship against Spassky he won
| 12.5-8.5 (+7-3=11)
|
| TBH in that match Fischer started his shenanigans about
| demanding all sorts of things which most likely
| unbalanced Spassky - who was known to be somewhat lazy -
| so with all the political pressure and mind games he
| likely decided that he doesn't care enough.
|
| The match was actually not that top-level chess as it is
| presented in chess mythology. Reshevsky [1] said the
| following things about it:
|
| _" True, there were several excellent games, but the
| match as a whole was disappointing. It was marked by
| blunders by both players. The blunders committed by
| Spassky were incredible. In two games, for example,
| Spassky overlooked a one-move combination. In the first,
| he was compelled to resign immediately, and, in the
| other, he threw away all chances for a win. Fischer was
| also not in his best form. He made errors in a number of
| games."_
|
| ... and he is also very critical of how Spassky was
| prepareding for the match. So a well-prepared Karpov
| would likely have been able to dethrone Bobby, and I
| think Fischer knew it, and it played a big part in why he
| had forfeited the defence.
|
| [1]: http://billwall.phpwebhosting.com/collections/The%20
| Fischer-...
| mda wrote:
| Well Magnus destroyed Nepo in the previous match, I don't
| see a reason why Nepo would be favorite this time. I think
| his chess and mental fortitude in general is inferior to
| Magnus.
|
| Personally I am not interested in this championship match
| at all.
| taneq wrote:
| Does it count as 'breaking' if you're just tired of the game
| and don't want to play any more? Surely it's OK to stop and
| do other things eventually?
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Magnus isn't stopping. He's playing chess everywhere else,
| at tournaments all over the world. He's pursuing his goal
| of a 2900 rating (he currently has the world record for his
| peak rating, though he's dropped a bit from that).
|
| He's just not playing in the FIDE World Championship
| because he dislikes the process.
| piker wrote:
| Not sure there will be much distinction in the history
| books unless there's an accompanying rule change, etc. that
| comes out of it.
| dwighttk wrote:
| It is both okay to stop and do other things eventually and
| it also counts as 'breaking'
| pverghese wrote:
| So the only way for it not to be considered not
| 'breaking' is by losing. That makes no sense
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Well, there is another way: you can die undefeated, like
| Alekhin.
|
| Yes, _every_ championship title eventually goes to
| someone else.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Um no. Losing is also breaking. Breaking doesn't have a
| moral component, it is just losing. The world champion
| isn't morally better than everyone, he just wins against
| challengers.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| So no one can ever quit without it being considered
| 'breaking'? If not, what would distinguish between
| 'breaking' and not 'breaking'?
|
| Surely, if one _can_ quit without it being considered
| breaking, resigning while on top is how.
| Accacin wrote:
| For me it's the intent at the time a decision was made.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| What intent constitutes 'breaking'?
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| You can honorably lose while giving it all, like most
| other champions did, except Fischer, who forfeited, and
| Alekhin, who died while holding the title.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Yes, quitting is always breaking. It is just that
| breaking isn't always a bad thing for the player
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Yes, that's what people mean, almost by definition. In
| highly competitive events, even a slight break in focus and
| drive toward winning are often really problematic. Once
| that wolf-like focus and readiness to fight is broken, a
| competitor is usually done.
| Bootvis wrote:
| I think Magnus just changed focus to being the first
| 2900. I bet the way the last match went was a bit of a
| let down for him as well.
| cupofpython wrote:
| i have to imagine there are only so many 'tricks'/new
| lines left for him to use to win games at that level.
| revealing them on center stage for a single win is
| wasteful of the resources he has. the WCC games get
| studied by everyone, not only live with the worlds best
| engines, but after the fact too. much better to use those
| resources in tournaments where you can actually play a
| lot of games with it before people really get a chance to
| study it in depth.
|
| By resources i mean things like going into a position
| that gives your opponent an incredibly small advantage
| but is hard for them to play. It's one of the best ways
| to win games. it's hard work to find those lines, and
| he's been doing it for so long at WCC level it's not
| surprising that he's tapping out against someone he's
| already beaten. if you use a line in the WCC, it becomes
| very risky to use it again - because if your opponent
| studied it and plays it correctly then all you've done is
| make it even harder for you to win the game.
|
| to reach 2900 he has to win games, not tie
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > that he's tapping out against someone he's already
| beaten.
|
| Many observers overplay the importance of one match loss.
| More than one chess champion title was taken by a
| challenger who had lost in the previous attempt [1] - and
| considering there was just a handful of champions, it is
| a lot.
|
| [1]: Spassky and Kasparov have lost in their first
| attempts against Petrosyan and Karpov.
| cupofpython wrote:
| while true, it is still fair to say Carlsen views nepo as
| a waste of time. While it would be easy to dismiss this
| as hubris - i think the bigger point is that he doesnt
| gain anything from beating him again. It's not that Nepo
| has no chance of winning.
|
| Magnus specifically mentioned Firouzja as an opponent
| that he would consider playing the WCC against[1]. So
| while not the most important factor in his decision, the
| fact that Nepo won the candidates again and was the last
| challenger before Magnus made the Firouzja statement
| seems relevant. Also relevant is that the candidates
| tournament concluded on July 5th and Magnus released his
| withdrawal now in the same month.
|
| It seems to me like the challenger being Nepo was the
| last significant piece of information towards his
| decision. How specific it is to Nepo or a more general
| feeling of Nepo being one of many people he doesnt feel
| any personal benefit from playing against, who knows.
|
| [1] https://chess24.com/en/read/news/magnus-carlsen-
| unlikely-i-w...
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > Magnus specifically mentioned Firouzja as an opponent
| that he would consider playing the WCC against[1].
|
| That is not how it works, and not how it is supposed to
| work. This is hubris and disrespect to all chess players
| in the world. For more than 100 years champions changed
| each other in title matches (well, before Kasparov's
| limitless ego created a decade of turmoil in Chess), with
| just one exception by Fischer, and now Carlsen 'doesnt
| feel any personal benefit'. :ThumbDown:
| Scarblac wrote:
| > much better to use those resources in tournaments where
| you can actually play a lot of games with it before
| people really get a chance to study it in depth.
|
| That doesn't exist anymore, any game Carlsen plays is
| studied in depth by the world immediately, and especially
| by his opponents. Same for other top grandmasters.
| Retric wrote:
| Depends on the game, but people will often come back much
| stronger after a ~6 months break.
|
| It's a mix of having a new perspective, dealing with
| stress, and having time to heal etc. This is one of the
| reasons most sports have an off season. Even if
| basketball could easily be played year round, the game
| would suffer.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Even wolves are only focused during occasional hunts.
| They also play, raise their young, mate, sleep, and care
| for their sick and injured.
| noirbot wrote:
| I think the difference, and what Carlsen is doing well in
| this case, is just backing out now instead of trying to
| defend his title and then getting 5 games in and just going
| "I hate this and I want to leave. I forfeit".
|
| That would look even worse for him, and be unsatisfying for
| his opponent and the public. In this case, he realizes he
| doesn't have the passion for this event any more, so he's
| doing the best thing for the sport and just letting two
| people who are still passionate about it compete instead of
| doing the mental-sports version of playing injured.
| dmurray wrote:
| > It's also almost impossible for a new person to get a chance.
|
| > when [Carlsen] first did he almost didn't win it to be
| allowed to play the WC match.
|
| These complaints are in opposition to each other! You can have
| an open process which gives an outsider a chance to qualify, or
| you can teleport the incumbent best player straight to the
| final, but you can't have both.
|
| The current Candidates structure balances it pretty well, in my
| view. Most of the 10 players who have a realistic chance in a
| match reach the final 8, but it often features one great-but-
| not-elite grandmaster who had a good tournament, and it's
| theoretically open to even the worst amateur who shows up to
| his Continental Championship and performs well in that followed
| by the World Cup.
| matsemann wrote:
| The candidates _being_ the WC deciding event would solve both
| of them, though. So while the points are in opposition to
| each other, a new format could find a better way to solve it
| than now, in which both things happen.
| enugu wrote:
| How about a very short gap, say a week, after the Candidates
| tournament to the Championship match to avoid long opening
| preparations?
| NhanH wrote:
| That just forces 8 players in the candidates to do their
| preparation BEFORE the tournament.
|
| Economically speaking, that won't be enough time for
| advertising, setting the venue or getting sponsor up either.
| It matters who plays in the WCC match before you can do
| either of those things. We still don't know when or where the
| match for this cycle will happen even now.
| chongli wrote:
| Not only does it force the 8 players to prepare before the
| tournament, it forces the champion to prepare against all 8
| players, making their task even worse!
| _ph_ wrote:
| Worse or, and that would be the point of the change,
| entirely different. You would do some study of all
| possible opponents, but you obviously can no longer do so
| much focus on the single player. Which means, the better
| preparation would just to prepare your best chess against
| whomever you are going to play. Which could be much more
| fun and make the games more interesting, as there is much
| more space for tactical surprises.
| taude wrote:
| I know next to nothing about competitive chess, other than
| watching the Magnus documentary about a younger Magnus. What
| kinds of things are chess players doing to prepare for a match
| for 6 Months? Is there something they're memorizing, studying
| video (what would they be looking fro)? I'd have always just
| thought they were good to play at any time. This sounds super
| stressful.
| matsemann wrote:
| In a normal tournament, you meet so many different people
| (and you often don't know in advance exactly who you will
| meet of all the participants), so it's hard to specifically
| prepare. For a match of this kind, however, you know your
| opponent will prepare specifically against you. So you kinda
| have to do the same.
|
| That entails analyzing all of their games and finding
| defenses and weaknesses. But also trying to find new
| novelties in the openings etc. And since the opponent will do
| the same, you yourself have to prepare defenses for lots of
| potential new openings 16 moves deep or so. It's an insane
| amount of studying.
|
| Of course, that pays off for future games outside the match
| as well. But when you know your challenger will spend half a
| year on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to beat you, you
| probably have to do the same. So have to say no to everything
| else.
| kamaal wrote:
| Say a player just rote memorised moves from a chess engine
| and just played it. Would that be considered cheating?
| Scarblac wrote:
| No. But the opponent will do that too. The trick is to
| find a move that is just slightly worse according to the
| engine, but that gives a complicated position that's hard
| to figure out behind the board. That you will then learn
| all the in and outs of, and memorize. And then hope you
| get it on the board...
|
| They need hundreds such ideas for a match.
| matsemann wrote:
| No, that's part of the preparation. But remember that you
| have around ~16 moves to choose from each time it's your
| turn. And you have to prepare a response for all the
| possible choices your opponent can make.
|
| This of course gets unwieldy _very_ fast. 16^5 is already
| over a million different games.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Actually it's so much worse than that. Chess has a
| branching factor of ~30, not 16, IIRC. A lot of those
| moves will be nonsensical though.
| somenameforme wrote:
| That is correct. And of course you don't just need to
| prepare for your own moves, but also consider your
| opponent's moves. So "just" 6 moves = 30^12 = about 500
| quadrillion possibilities.
|
| Though, like you said, the vast majority of those moves
| will be somewhat nonsensical though.
| timerol wrote:
| That is the strategy of opening preparation. For the most
| common openings, GMs often have a 20 move sequence
| memorized. The time limit of chess matters a lot, so the
| strategy is to break your opponent out of their
| preparation with a move that is unintuitive or considered
| untenable, after you have determined the ways in which it
| is actually better than widely considered.
|
| The ideal at top level is to get to move 20 or so with a
| slightly better position, essentially all of your time
| (because you've been playing memorized moves), and your
| opponent already having used most of their time.
| babarock wrote:
| As long as it's all in memory, that's fair game.
| Everybody at the high level is using engines for
| training/preparation.
|
| This is balanced by the fact that the sheer number of
| possible lines is huge. Too big for any human to
| "remember" them all.
|
| It's also not enough to memorize "good" moves from an
| engine perspective. "Good" engine moves and "good" human
| moves are different things.
|
| An engine might see a move as "good", because it
| calculated 50 moves down the line and found an advantage.
| This means that you'd have to play the next 49 moves in a
| very precise manner to reach this advantage. One way to
| think about it, is that there are multiple positions that
| are analyzed as "draw" by en engine, but 9 grandmasters
| out of 10 will see one side winning. That's because one
| side would need to play perfectly, while the other side
| has much higher tolerance for mistakes (engine assume
| perfect play on both sides).
|
| TLDR: engine is fair game, during preparation. It's a big
| deal, it transformed high level chess, but it didn't
| break the game, and is unlikely to do so.
| moomin wrote:
| It isn't, partly because you needed to predict the
| scenario would come up and partly because your opponent
| can do the exact same thing.
| ChefboyOG wrote:
| No, using engines to find lines is a common way to
| practice (at least, that's my understanding. Obviously,
| I'm not personally a world class chess player.)
| [deleted]
| coremoff wrote:
| That would depend on the opponent doing the same, and
| picking the same engine and settings for their side too.
| gliptic wrote:
| No, that is exactly what they do in opening preparation.
| jackmott wrote:
| bluGill wrote:
| the top 100 players in the world is a small list, and at
| this level you don't need to worry about anyone below that
| (until they get higher) as you are enough better than them
| that you can beat them. Thus for tournaments you don't have
| worry as you have already studied everyone you need to
| worry about before the tournament. Odds are you know ahead
| of time who is in the tournament and so you have a couple
| weeks to study all possible opponents.
|
| Remember for the best players in the world chess is their
| full time job. They spend 12 hours a day on the game. They
| are earning enough from tournaments to support life.
| throw7 wrote:
| I remember Caruana mentioning how he wasn't prepared for how
| much Carlsen "understood" him (not exact words from the
| video, but something to that effect).
|
| It sounded sort of like a side mind game that Carlsen plays
| on his opponents. It made it clear that Carlsen really
| studies his opponents and not just their past games.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > Is there something they're memorizing
|
| Yes. Their upcoming opponent's past games (including
| analyzing them for strengths and weaknesses), and engine
| lines mostly.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Going through all of opening theory to invent enough new
| ideas that might give them a tiny edge, somewhere. And then
| eventually memorizing what they found.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > They have also become less entertaining.
|
| The classical World Championship matches have never been
| entertaining to watch live.
|
| In fact they used to take 2 days for one game.
|
| > No one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive
| and all games ended in a draw.
|
| Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw. It's
| not a game of "risk" in classical time format. You can take
| risks in blitz and rapid, but in classical you have (almost)
| all the time in the world to calculate the line you're playing.
| TomGullen wrote:
| In theory, wouldn't the player who takes the first move have
| a tiny tiny edge? Or is the second mover always able to
| guarantee a draw if they play perfectly?
| pred_ wrote:
| Unless I missed something recent, it is not known whether
| any player has a winning strategy (or a drawing strategy,
| for that matter). It would be quite the discovery as well.
| usrusr wrote:
| It would be wild if it turned out that some of the 20
| first moves led into a tree that included a perfect
| winning path for black while others were draw on
| perfection: "take it, if you can, I bet you can't"
| Scarblac wrote:
| With connect-4 it's like that: playing in the middle on
| the 1st move means the first player wins, playing
| adjacent to the middle means the game will be drawn, and
| starting further to the side means the second player wins
| (all assuming otherwise perfect play).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four#Mathematical_s
| olu...
| usrusr wrote:
| Plenty of forced moves in that game, where there is only
| one option to not lose immediately. I basically
| sacrificed the last years of school math to a 10x8
| variation of that game, it was almost as if there were
| two competitions in parallel, who would win and who could
| call a game decided first. Declaring the other guy winner
| before he even knew was almost better than winning (but
| certainly not as good as declaring victory and then
| explaining why)
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Having a winning strategy for black seems impossible
| though; the discussion is whether white have it or is it
| a forced draw.
| Someone wrote:
| Why would that seem impossible? One could argue that
| white has to open up his defenses first, allowing black
| to pick the best response to that.
|
| In general, there's no guarantee of first mover's
| advantage. For example, Hexapawn
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexapawn) is a win for
| black on some boards (https://web.archive.org/web/2005033
| 0222720/http://www.chessv...). Versions that are more
| complex than chess and are a win for black may exist.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| White could start with a knight move. Unlike Hexapawn, in
| chess, white moving first provides an increase in
| optionality for white, and the board positions are not
| forcing white on some losing track, because white is free
| to "burn" a move with many pieces by taking 2 moves to
| get to the same place they could with 1 move. White can
| use two bishop moves, or a pawn push to the 3rd rank
| followed by the 4th rank, to turn around the initiative
| early in the game.
| SamBam wrote:
| That would give black two moves in a row, which is a
| different scenario, and might still be optimal for black.
| fileeditview wrote:
| Many think that perfect play from both sides will result in
| a draw but there is no prove for that yet. So I'm reality
| we do not know.
| Tenoke wrote:
| It's not a solved problem but our best players and best
| computers perform better with white. The edge isn't tiny
| either.
| bluecalm wrote:
| They don't anymore, at least not the computers. When you
| let them start from normal starting position and provide
| decent hardware and some time it's always a draw and has
| been for a few years now.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > always
|
| Not always. Almost always.
| Scarblac wrote:
| When have you last seen a decisive game from the starting
| position by two modern engines on normal hardware? I
| haven't seen one for many years.
| bluecalm wrote:
| No one is going to waste the CPU time running Stockfish
| (or GPU with Leela) against each other at classical time
| controls long enough to see a decisive game which might
| never happen anyway so we will likely never know. I think
| current Stockfish on a modern ThreadRipper with classical
| time control will never be beaten. I am not 100% sure I
| am right but I don't expect (but would love to!) to be
| proven wrong.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| Stockfish won't solve it. We need a full game tree.
| Stockfish is not designed to build a full game tree.
|
| Generating a full game tree would be a truly daunting
| undertaking, and I can't even fathom how much memory
| would it take.
| bluecalm wrote:
| I am not saying Stockfish is going to solve it. I am
| saying it will not lose from the initial position. In
| other words my hypothesis is that we already have a soft
| solution to chess available. I can't prove it but I can
| proceed accordingly in practice (in opening preparation
| or correspondence games for example) and no one will
| prove me wrong or exploit it.
| tromp wrote:
| Due to alpha-beta cutoffs, you don't need a full game
| tree. But if you did build a tree with all legal chess
| positions, it would have approximately 4.8x10^44 of them
| [1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/tromp/ChessPositionRanking
| [deleted]
| Scarblac wrote:
| > In theory, wouldn't the player who takes the first move
| have a tiny tiny edge? Or is the second mover always able
| to guarantee a draw if they play perfectly?
|
| White cannot have a tiny tiny edge against perfect play.
|
| Either it is possible to force a win against perfect play,
| or it's not. So white is either winning or the game is a
| draw (or black is able to force a win against white's
| perfect play, but that's a whole different level of
| unlikely).
|
| When talking about perfect play, terms like "tiny edge"
| lose their meaning.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| It's possible, although it seems unlikely, that white is in
| zugzwang [1] on the starting position, in which case black
| would have a win with perfect play.
|
| Chess is only solved for positions with 7 pieces or less
| (and some configurations of 8 pieces [2]), so we're far
| from knowing best play from the 32-piece starting position.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang
|
| [2] https://www.chess.com/blog/Rocky64/eight-piece-
| tablebases-a-...
| rocqua wrote:
| It isn't known theoretically whether perfect play is enough
| for black to force a draw. It is also an infinitesimal
| probability that white starts off in zugzwang (i.e. all
| possible moves are bad).
|
| However the consensus guess is that perfect play yields a
| draw.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| Why is that the consensus guess? I could imagine that a
| perfect play completely contradicts common chess theory.
|
| Just like we can efficiently find approximate solutions
| for the traveling salesman problem (that are at most 50%
| longer than the optimal solution), these heuristics have
| not much to do with the optimal solution.
| bluGill wrote:
| Because when great players realize they have a position
| that they connect win are still able to figure out how to
| force a draw so they don't lose.
|
| > I could imagine that a perfect play completely
| contradicts common chess theory.
|
| So can anyone. Nobody knows what perfect chess play is.
| Our best guess though is that whatever your opponent
| plays you can always force a draw before they can win.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's an interesting point.
|
| Unfortunately it leaves us in the position of not having
| much to go by, if expert experience doesn't help analyze
| the game.
|
| I wonder how different a chess engine and optimal play
| look for the reduced sized boards.
| franknstein wrote:
| There is a small chance that deep into the tree the first
| to play gets into zugzwang first, meaning position with no
| good moves. Is there any other scenario where playing black
| would give you theoretical edge?
|
| So until proven otherwise it's still possible that its
| theoretical win for white, theoretical draw or theoretical
| win for black as i understand it.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| Zugzwang is the only way for white to lose. Without
| Zugzwang and a winning strategy for black for chess with
| Zugzwang, white could skip the first move and now has the
| winning strategy.
| franknstein wrote:
| What do you mean skip the first move? Like play a neutral
| move? Why would such a move exist?
| bluGill wrote:
| Skip your turn. Don't move anything at all.
|
| Zugzwang means that you would be better off not moving
| any piece on your turn letting your opponent make two
| moves in a row. There are a number of endgames that
| depend on getting your opponent into a position where he
| has only one legal move and by making it you can then
| play the winning move. If your opponent could instead
| skip his turn you have no ability to win the game.
| franknstein wrote:
| I know what zugzwang is. I was just asking what he meant
| by 'skipping turns' because skipping turns by simply
| refusing to make a move is illegal, so i was not sure
| what point was Gehinnn trying to make.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| The question was if there is any other scenario where
| black could force a win other than by forcing a zugzwang.
|
| I would say no by contradiction. Let's assume black could
| win without zugzwang. Then white would win (and in
| particular not lose) by skipping the very first move and
| then playing blacks strategy (because now black has to
| make the first move and by white skipping the first move,
| the colors swapped).
|
| If white would not skip the very first move and play an
| arbitrary move instead, white loses and black wins.
|
| But this is the very definition of zugzwang! Thus, black
| can only win because of white's initial zugzwang, which
| contradicts our assumption.
| asdf_snar wrote:
| I think I may share confusion with the other poster. I
| don't understand the following step:
|
| > Then white would win (and in particular not lose) by
| skipping the very first move and then playing blacks
| strategy
|
| I understand the other comment, that there do exist
| setups in which colors can be effectively switched by
| e.g. 1. e3 e5 2. e4, but that requires cooperation on
| black's part. How does white "skip" the first move?
| Thanks in advance.
|
| Edit: it may be that the statement "without Zugzwang"
| implicitly (or perhaps by definition) means you are
| allowed to skip moves? If so, that clarifies my
| confusion.
| Gehinnn wrote:
| Well, applying "zugzwang" means you only win because the
| opponent has to do a move and cannot skip their turn.
|
| When black has a winning strategy, black already applies
| "zugzwang" for white's very first move: Black only wins
| because white has to make a move. If white could skip,
| black would not win.
|
| > Edit: it may be that the statement "without Zugzwang"
| implicitly (or perhaps by definition) means you are
| allowed to skip moves?
|
| Yes. It's not well defined, but I'd say a non-zugzwang
| win is a win (or rather a winning position) where you
| would also win when your opponent can skip their turn. A
| zugzwang win is a win that is not a non-zugzwang win.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| You can play e.g.
|
| 1. e3 e5 2. e4 whatever
|
| And you effectively have a king's pawn opening with
| colours reversed
| franknstein wrote:
| Can black refuse this 'color switch'? It seems like he
| can, for a while, by mimicking moves. 1. e3 e6 for
| example.
|
| Does this strategy necessarily leads to provably losing
| position?
| Scarblac wrote:
| Having that happen in one place deep in the tree wouldn't
| mean much: black would need to be able to get such a
| zugzwang (or other win) against _anything white does_.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| AFAIK it's not a solved game so we cannot say with
| certainty.
| philipswood wrote:
| Still an open problem.
|
| Unlike tic-tac-toe we're not certain if it is a win or a
| draw for perfect players.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| To give an example from a game more complicated than tic-
| tac-toe, it is known that the player who goes first in
| Connect 4 can always win with perfect play if (and only
| if) they play in the middle column on their first turn.
|
| The chess analogue to this would be that there is a
| single opening move for white that a perfect player can
| guarantee a win from, or maybe a limited set of opening
| moves.
|
| In fact, there is a variant of chess where this the case,
| namely "pawns-only chess", where 1.b4, 1.c4, 1.f4, and
| 1.g4 are winning for white, whereas all other first moves
| are a win for black with perfect play.
|
| https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/8755/is-the-
| result...
| [deleted]
| tobiasvl wrote:
| > The classical World Championship matches have never been
| entertaining to watch live.
|
| > In fact they used to take 2 days for one game.
|
| Come now. The WCC matches were entertaining to watch for
| chess enthusiasts. Even when games took two days, people
| would sit and analyze each position, and that was without
| computers.
|
| They still do that, of course. Although chess computers have
| taken some of the fun out of the analysis, I've been to
| several live viewings of the recent WCCs at chess clubs and
| bars, where a local GM would sit and comment on the position
| and take questions and suggestions from the crowd.
|
| But the WCC matches have become less entertaining for chess
| enthusiasts, since there is so much defensive play. There
| isn't too much to analyze in yet another Berlin game.
|
| It's entertaining when someone makes a horrible blunder, but
| not in the same way - there's little to analyze in a position
| that's blundered.
|
| So I'd argue the classical WCC used to be entertaining to
| watch live for chess enthusiasts, but now they're less
| entertaining for chess enthusiasts. For "regular people",
| they've never been very entertaining, except when there's a
| spectacular blunder, which has never been very entertaining
| for chess enthusiasts.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| > Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw.
|
| While this is highly likely and essentially agreed upon by
| all experts on the matter, it's not proven yet.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| I don't see why anyone would agree to that. In fact, I can
| see it being far more likely that chess experts believe it
| ends in a win for white considering that today white is
| favored, to the point where if offered a quick draw, black
| will almost certainly take it (unless they need a win to
| move up a rank in a tournament, etc).
| sgjohnson wrote:
| This is flat out false. Virtually all of the experts
| agree on this, and in top engine and human play the
| percentage of games drawn is increasing, not decreasing.
| AlphaZero on autoplay @ 1 minute per move draws 98% of
| the games.
|
| > if offered a quick draw, black will almost certainly
| take it
|
| [citation needed], and 1200 elo games on lichess aren't a
| valid citation
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >AlphaZero on autoplay
|
| While Alpha Zero is good, this is not very good proof.
| Alpha Zero is not perfect, so if there are tiny ways to
| win that Alpha Zero misses, it will miss it on both sides
| (being the same engine), so would never explore that
| path.
|
| It's like claiming inbreeding will result in perfection
| :)
| nhumrich wrote:
| Chess is still no-hard, so "proving this" will be near
| impossible. The closest we have is statistics. I remember
| watching a "bot battle." A chess tournament for bots only,
| algorithms playing eachother. Nearly 70% of these games
| ended in draw.
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| https://tcec-chess.com/
|
| 70% draws is a very small number, really. Not conclusive
| at all.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| TCEC is forced to choose very imbalanced openings to make
| sure there are some non-drawn games. From starting
| position it'd be 100 draws out of 100 (also all very
| similar o each other)
| adrianN wrote:
| Chess on an infinite board is asymptotically difficult in
| the worst case. Chess on an 8x8 board can be solved in
| constant time.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| Not sure if this was sarcasm, but that's like saying NP-
| hardness is no big deal because we only care about finite
| problems.
| adrianN wrote:
| NP-hardness is indeed often not a big deal in practice
| because NP-hardness is a statement about asymptotic worst
| case complexity. In practice you have some finite size
| problems that are often of average difficulty, not of
| worst case difficulty. For example, we solve instances of
| SAT every day, some of them quite large. Even humans are
| able to solve many Sudoku puzzles, even though Sudoku is
| NP-hard.
|
| If you hang with the right crowds (for example people
| into software correctness), PSPACE completeness is easy
| and you even solve undecidable problems every day.
| sabageti wrote:
| How Sudoku is NP-Hard?
| CJefferson wrote:
| If you generalise sudoku to a board with sides length,
| with subsquares with sides length n, then sudoku is no
| complete.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| I solve the TSP every time I run errands.
| dskloet wrote:
| Chess on an 8x8 board is not NP-hard. That doesn't mean
| it's easy but invoking NP-hardness is kind of
| meaningless.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| Yes and saying a problem is finite is also kind of
| meaningless. That narrows it down to everything except
| infinity. I also did not say that chess is NP-hard, it
| was an analogy.
| [deleted]
| bawolff wrote:
| Like parent was saying - that is true of all problems in
| practise since the earth has finite resources. That
| doesn't make complexity classes a useless concept.
|
| In other news, no point in needing pi, because perfect
| circles dont actually exist in the real world.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't think people are trying to claim it's unimportant
| in general, to anyone, they're suggesting that it's
| completely unimportant in this conversation about how
| slow and boring championship chess matches are.
| jstanley wrote:
| The reason chess is hard to solve is not because it's NP-
| hard (which it is not, being a constant-sized problem),
| it's because chess is a big problem.
|
| It can simultaneously be true both that NP-hardness
| matters, and that constant-sized problems can be hard.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| I never said chess was NP hard, it was an analogy. The
| equivalent would be some kind of chess on an NxN or Nx8
| board I guess, I don't know how hard would be.
| piva00 wrote:
| Why hasn't it been done then?
| adrianN wrote:
| We haven't build enough Dyson spheres to power a computer
| of the right size yet.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are more states to calculate than atoms in the
| universe so it isn't possible to brute force the problem.
| Maybe it can be solved, but it will require math.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| To be fair, on this scale, "the total number of atoms in
| observable universe" is quite a small number.
|
| Even 52! comes pretty close to it, and that's just one
| deck of cards.
|
| Saying there are merely "more" states is almost insulting
| to the depth of a chess game :)
| scaredginger wrote:
| I invite you to sit down and solve it then
| simiones wrote:
| A hundred billion years is still constant time. That
| doesn't mean it's doable.
| Someone wrote:
| I think no expert will claim it's a win for either player,
| but I don't think all experts agree it's a draw. There will
| be some that don't claim to know either way.
|
| (If they had to bet, I think all experts would bet on "it's
| a draw", but some experts won't be wanting to bet, even if
| they think that's almost certain)
| aaron695 wrote:
| > While this is highly likely and essentially agreed upon
| by all experts on the matter
|
| Can you cite this?
|
| I can't see anything on this.
|
| It's not something a chess champion would know on their own
| for instance.
|
| Basically you have to get a good understanding that the
| advantage of being white can't be leveraged enough to win.
|
| Obviously it can't be proved, but to even get an idea will
| be very mathematical or computational.
| matsemann wrote:
| I've found them entertaining to watch. But Norwegians are
| master of slow-TV, so I guess that's why. They have good
| experts that manage to explain it to normal people.
| Interesting guests in the studio between moves. Interact with
| audience through questions from chat etc.
|
| > _Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a
| draw._
|
| I don't think that's solved, actually.
| qw wrote:
| > I've found them entertaining to watch. But Norwegians are
| master of slow-TV, so I guess that's why. They have good
| experts that manage to explain it to normal people.
| Interesting guests in the studio between moves. Interact
| with audience through questions from chat etc.
|
| I usually don't follow chess, but I still end up watching
| the WC matches on Norwegian TV. They manage to make it
| interesting and exciting.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| If find it suspicious calling a match interesting when
| people need to have "Interesting guests in the studio
| between moves. Interact with audience through questions
| from chat etc." - I always found that suspicious with the
| NFL too.
| dhosek wrote:
| I love the idea of being somewhere that (a) what the
| world chess champion does is big news and (2) there are
| resources dedicated like this to the broadcast of chess
| matches. American culture is just so ostentatiously
| _mauvais ton_ in comparison with so many other countries
| (my other point of comparison was being in England in '93
| and watching a game show where it was clearly a
| competition of intellectual skills and the winner's prize
| was a dictionary--I just cannot imagine that being on
| American television).
| sgjohnson wrote:
| I do watch the WC matches myself, but definitely not
| live.
| __s wrote:
| It isn't solved but it's pretty obvious. There's enough
| drawn endgames where material advantage is insufficient to
| win
|
| Antichess at least is a solved win for White
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| > Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw.
|
| True, but that doesn't mean that you can't treat chess like
| other sports and try to incentivize wins - for example giving
| win/loss/draw a 3:1:0 point ratio. The world championship is
| not a good format to decide "who's the best at chess", and
| anyway we already know who that is right now. Might as well
| treat it as a spectator sport and add some drama in my
| opinion.
| dwighttk wrote:
| How would point ratio help if every game is a draw? Maybe
| if it was a round robin tournament that would help top two
| players competing for wins against less highly rated people
| and then drawing against each other. Like Liverpool and Man
| City
| arbitrage wrote:
| My feel is that from a game theoretical approach, a 3:1:0
| scoring ratio would encourage enough players to at least
| _try_ for a win sometimes that it would restore some of
| the interest and competitiveness to the sport.
| franknstein wrote:
| Would you play tic-tac-toe for a win with that scoring
| ratio?
| somenameforme wrote:
| This is an inappropriate analogy. Chess at the highest
| levels is not drawish because the game is inherently
| drawish but because the meta of it is.
|
| The easiest way to illustrate this is with openings,
| though it applies throughout the game in different ways.
| Against e4 the Najdorf defense was once the opening of
| champions, being a major part of the repertoire of
| players like Kasparov and Fischer. In modern times it's
| an increasingly rare guest at the highest level. It's not
| because it's considered unsound or even slightly dubious
| - it's a rock solid opening that gives black real winning
| chances. But the problem is it also gives him real losing
| chances. It's complex, difficult to play, and if you get
| outprepared by your opponent you may lose without him
| even having to make a single move himself, which is
| really one of the worst feelings in the world.
|
| So instead the meta has largely shifted to openings that
| are more about minimizing risk where black, more or less,
| aims for a draw - and usually gets it. Changing the
| risk:reward ratios in a sufficiently extreme way is most
| certainly capable of changing the meta.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| This implies that top-level players aren't trying for a
| win.
| somenameforme wrote:
| An alternative is to have tie-breaks for every game,
| playing increasingly rapid time controls until the result
| is not a draw.
|
| 1. Classical game, win = 5 points.
|
| 2. Rapid game, win = 2 points
|
| 3. Blitz game, win = 1 point.
|
| 4. Armageddon game, win = 0.5 points.
|
| This point layout might backfire and make the classical
| games even less interesting because the huge edge for
| winning is probably going to motivate extreme do-not-lose
| style play, which trends towards draws. But, nonetheless,
| wins in classical should be weighted well above the tie-
| breaks.
| kzrdude wrote:
| One thing they could change with the format, without changing
| the format(!) is to schedule the game very close to the
| candidates, say with four week's distance.
|
| That way the match is the same but the half year of prep is
| gone.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| That only takes prep time away from the world champion, not
| the candidates winner.
| Scarblac wrote:
| They need to know who the players are so they can look for
| sponsors willing to put up the prize money and organising
| costs. The events are often sponsored by companies from the
| home country of one of the players. Doing it before the
| challenger is known makes the pool of potential sponsors too
| small.
| kamaal wrote:
| For those of us who don't follow this closely, why is the
| format such a problem?
|
| Is it because its stressful, and demands too much work and prep
| from participants.
|
| Just asking as competitive sport at the top level be it chess,
| football, or even swimming for that matter demands lots of work
| and a kind of work ethic not easy for most of us.
| chongli wrote:
| The distinction is the fundamental difference between mental
| and physical effort.
|
| An athlete can spend all day in the gym and then grab a
| shower and roll into bed. They may be sore as hell from head
| to toe but they will be so exhausted they can just pass out
| and get a great night's sleep. They also get the benefit of
| endorphins which make them feel good and rewarded for doing
| their exercise.
|
| On the other hand, a chess player spending all day going over
| variations and practicing is going to have a difficult time
| sleeping with all of those lines and positions flying around
| in their head. They will be mentally exhausted but still
| active and alert. It is an absolutely miserable experience.
| So to prevent it you need to cut back on the hours which
| means spreading out the preparation over many
| days/weeks/months. It can also get very boring because you
| don't get the same rewards you get from playing and winning
| games. The only reward comes when you finally get to the WC
| match and then you actually have to win or it's utterly
| heartbreaking.
| zarzavat wrote:
| It takes months of preparation to prepare for the world
| championships, basically rote memorisation with a team of
| people. If he doesn't do that, he will lose.
|
| This is time that could be spent playing tournaments.
|
| This would be okay if the world championships was every four
| years, but it's every two, so a large fraction of Carlsen's
| time is spent preparing for this one match that everybody
| knows he's going to win anyway.
|
| It's similar to the way that many professional teams are
| reluctant to allow their players to play in the Olympics (in
| e.g. Basketball, Ice Hockey, and Olympic Football is
| completely neutered). Carlsen clearly feels that the World
| Championship is not important enough to sacrifice a large
| chunk of his career for.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>Carlsen clearly feels that the World Championship is not
| important enough to sacrifice a large chunk of his career
| for.
|
| Which other tournaments are considered like the top levels
| of Chess competition, and what are the criteria for being
| the top chess player in the world(If not winning the _world
| championship_ )?
| matsemann wrote:
| The criteria is probably their rating. Since they use the
| ELO system, each game gives or loses points. So the
| ratings are a good measure in how good you are over time
| and meeting multiple opponents.
|
| And Carlsen absolutely dominates the others, and have
| been the top rated player continuously for a decade. So
| no questions about who is the best, WC title or not.
|
| Carlsen is right now 98 points above Nepo, the
| challenger, which is an insane difference.
| akyu wrote:
| The format to the world championship in chess has
| historically always been a point of contention, and the
| current format is no exception.
|
| The Candidates tournament has some seemingly arbitrary
| qualifications that players must meet, and you could argue
| that the format doesn't necessarily produce the strongest
| player to challenge the world champion.
|
| The World Championship match itself is problematic because it
| gives the defending champion a fairly huge advantage, in that
| they retain the title if they can draw out the match,
| although more recently it goes to rapid chess tie breaker
| rounds. So in practice the Championship is decided by these
| tie breaker rounds, which doesn't really seem appropriate.
|
| Given the prep time players have and the engines available,
| players go into these matches extremely well prepared and
| draws over the board are quite a typical outcome unless
| someone makes a mistake.
|
| I believe Magnus wants the Championship to become a knockout
| tournament to reduce the advantage that so much prep time can
| give. There is a big difference between prepping for a field
| of 12 players versus prepping for a single opponent.
| ycombinete wrote:
| > The World Championship match itself is problematic
| because it gives the defending champion a fairly huge
| advantage, in that they retain the title if they can draw
| out the match.
|
| This has not been the case for quite a while. All of
| Carlsen's matches (Anand, Anand, Karjakjn, Caruana,
| Nepomniatchchi) had tie breakers in the format, to
| determine a guaranteed clear winner. The Karjakin and
| Caruana matches were decided in this way.
| LeChuck wrote:
| The format is not a problem per se. It's grueling, sure but
| that's what a word-championship match should be. Magnus
| Carlsen just feels there's not much to gain anymore for him,
| by defending his title. That's all there is to it I think.
| bfuller wrote:
| No idea their reasoning, but if I were a top football,
| swimmer, or other athlete and knew that a computer could
| outperform me even at my highest level would be pretty
| disconcerting.
| chalst wrote:
| I guess swimmers have known that the performance of powered
| aquatic vehicles runs circles around them on many metrics
| for longer.
| Gare wrote:
| Not to mention some other mammals.
| Cass wrote:
| That's already true of most sports, though. There's plenty
| of mechanical constructs that can move faster than the
| fastest human. The challenge is to be the fastest human
| using nothing but a human body, not to outrun a car or a
| boat (or even a humanoid running robot, which I assume we
| could build at this point, if anyone was interested in
| putting enough money behind it.)
| bfuller wrote:
| Of course a human can't outrun a car. This isn't some
| unprecedented idea, people have retired for this reason
| before:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50573071
| SpacePortKnight wrote:
| Maybe a format with 60 minutes + 30 seconds increment from move
| 40, could be more entertaining to watch than the current 90
| minutes for the first 40 moves, followed by 30 minutes for the
| rest of the game, with an addition of 30 seconds per move
| starting from move one format.
|
| Most rounds would finish in around 2 hours, just like several
| e-sports games. Have 2 rounds a day and finish it in 8 rounds.
| With a more e-sport like approach, chess could bring in even
| more viewers and hence more sponsorships.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Chess' centre of gravity is increasingly online centred now.
| Carlson himself has a lot to do with it. So do other
| charismatic super GMs like Nakamura.
|
| A light hearted, unplanned and unadvertised naka-carlsen bullet
| match can attract a _lot_ of viewers. They both stream, and
| lots of other chess streamers will switch to watching and doing
| commentary when these matches happen.
|
| They'll play silly openings like the double bong cloud and have
| fun.
|
| Carlson's into this new egaming vibe. He's good at it, and it's
| good for chess. Meanwhile, high-level classical is brutal. The
| level is so high that the game is hard to follow. It takes
| forever and is draining. Most games end in a draw.
|
| I feel like Fide should focus more on rapid, and get more
| involved in the online scene. Maybe this is the opportunity.
|
| I suspect the most anticipated, spectator matches of the future
| will be rapid matches and alt formats like team tournies (go
| Norway gnomes). They're just more fun for everyone but your
| cranky old chess instructor, and even she loves it in secret.
| tux1968 wrote:
| > They'll play silly openings like the double bong cloud and
| have fun.
|
| It's kinda fun to see this referenced recently in a
| television quiz show:
|
| https://youtu.be/aD2mUHeBIRA
| dalbasal wrote:
| Guggling.. gas!
| cowmoo728 wrote:
| You aren't kidding about classical games being hard to
| follow. I'm a pretty strong amateur at about 2200 on lichess,
| but some of the recent Candidates games are so dense that I
| can't make sense of them without a computer analysis. With
| blitz even when the super GMs play I can usually tag along
| and figure out what's happening once I see an interesting
| move played.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Exactly.
| econnors wrote:
| > A light hearted, unplanned and unadvertised naka-carlsen
| bullet match can attract a lot of viewers.
|
| I'd bet a 20 game rapid series over 4 days between naka-
| carlsen would attract more viewers than the world
| championship.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Viewership is not all that matters. I doubt it will happen,
| but I certainly wouldn't cheerlead the death of very high-
| level chess.
| dalbasal wrote:
| That's a bit strong. The levels attained by the likes of
| Magnus is true art, and it's cool that the art has had
| such a following for so long.
|
| I agree on fast chess being more fun, but hey now :)
| MikePlacid wrote:
| Isn't very high-level chess kind of dead already? I mean
| - watching Karpov-Kasparov was watching two best players
| in the world. But nowadays a match between human players
| just clarifies which of the second-rate devices is better
| than another. Or is it just me?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Did the invention of artillery cause javelin throwing to
| be dead?
| MikePlacid wrote:
| I do not know the name of a single javelin throwing
| champion. But I know the names of chess champions... up
| to Kasparov.
| frisco wrote:
| I mean ... yes?
| ptudan wrote:
| I don't think it will ever go away if chess is still
| around. But perhaps it stops being the main viewership
| draw
| literallyWTF wrote:
| Oh fuck yes it would. I rather have a classical 960 tbh
| andrepd wrote:
| Yeah, classical 960 would be amazing since it de-
| emphasises preparation.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I've thought for a while that someone should go hard on an
| esports style lightning tournament. Basically, try to
| recreate the energy that happens when an aggressive game
| happens between chess hustlers and everyone crowds around,
| but done as a stadium audience spectacle like esports. Big
| stage lighting setup, music, live commentary, crowd roar
| encouraged, etc. Besides a main event focused on rated pros,
| have side tournaments and exhibition games with big
| personalities. I think there's definitely a sizable audience
| for something like this.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Did you watch PogChamps? It had some great moments like
| this: https://youtu.be/YyG6HtsaF0w
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. The concept would be to create that sort
| of energy in the video stream production setting familiar
| to lan esports where you've got the hype of a couple
| thousand people behind it in person. I'm absolutely
| convinced there's an audience for something like this,
| and if you were reasonably deft in how you messaged it
| people like Magnus would be falling all over themselves
| to participate just for the fun of it.
| deltree7 wrote:
| Cricket went through a similar revolution and now we have a
| single game that last 5 days (Tests) which is an intense high-
| skill perseverance play, a game that last a whole day (One Day
| Internationals) and a much shorter format (Twenty20) that last
| 3 hours.
|
| All three formats are thriving with some superstars playing all
| three formats and official World Championships being played in
| all three formats
| Someone wrote:
| I don't see the test format as thriving. It often seems the
| players don't have the patience anymore to play it, losing
| games that they could have drawn if they had the perseverance
| needed to try so.
|
| (For those who don't know cricket: if your opponent is
| outscoring you heavily, there's no way to win the game, but
| by playing defensively, there still is the possibility of
| "not losing" the game (called a draw. That's different from a
| tie, where both teams score the same number of runs. Ties are
| extremely rare (about 1:1000 matches. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tied_Test), draws fairly common
| (about 1/3 of all test matches)). Part of the charm of test
| cricket is that trying harder to win a game also increases
| the risk of losing it, so teams have to make educated guesses
| as to whether to pursue that)
| kamaal wrote:
| >>It often seems the players don't have the patience
| anymore to play it
|
| Not enough monetary incentive either, it doesn't pay as
| well as T20.
|
| Second problem is bowling doesn't pay as well as batting.
| And that brings only batsmen centric view to the game,
| which is boring to watch after a while, even in T20.
| kamaal wrote:
| Cricket had a different problem. The game moved to be very
| batsmen centric(pitch construction) for a good part of 90's
| and 2000's. This caused most games to end in draws. Batsmen
| would just play days to make records. Ricky Ponting even said
| no Australian captain would allow the match to be played
| purely for records and not for winning.
|
| This eventually happened in ODI's as well. It just all
| reduced to batsmen playing purely for records. Competition
| dried out.
|
| T20 suffers from the same problems, and is a big reason why
| people are so burned out. I have barely watched any cricket
| in years.
|
| In matches where is there is a good pitch, and something for
| the bowlers, the test matches are super interesting to watch.
| bluecalm wrote:
| My view on this is that the current World Championship cycle
| achieves the opposite of what it should achieve:
|
| 1)There are many tournaments where the best player is not allowed
| to participate making them tournaments of second bests for no
| reason other than determining who plays in the Candidates
|
| 2)Other tournaments, even those with long tradition, are poisoned
| by the Candidates because many top players treat them as training
| ground for the Candidates (hiding preparation or not playing very
| seriously) or skip them altogether because the Candidates is more
| important
|
| 3) Candidates tournament itself is hyped as the most important
| event but it by design excludes the strongest player. If you told
| someone outside of chess about it they would rightly think only a
| complete moron could have come up with such system
|
| 4)Some tournaments with a lot of potential to be fun and
| competitive (Grand Swiss, The World Cup) cause a lot of
| controversy because some dinosaurs in the chess world think the
| strongest player shouldn't be allowed to play. Fortunately saner
| minds prevailed for now.
|
| What you end up with is a calendar full of events for the second
| best players which influence all other tournaments in negative
| way.
|
| Additionally tournaments with a lot of potential (Rapid World
| Championship for example) are treated as an afterthought by FIDE.
| 3 day very random event even though rapid chess if widely more
| popular than classical among casual chess fans.
|
| FIDE does everything to prevent fans from having fun following
| the game. Imagine half the tennis calendar excluding current
| number 1 player from participating. It's so ridiculous and
| obvious watching from the sidelines. Unfortunately a lot of chess
| insiders literally don't care about the game popularity and think
| the money they earn grow on trees (or come from the ground as the
| only serious sponsors FIDE could attract are oligarchs and they
| oil/gas companies).
|
| I am so happy Magnus is not interested in participating in this
| shit show any further. His reasons might be personal but it's a
| great chance more fun formats and tournaments take place and we
| can all have way more interesting game to follow.
| ourmandave wrote:
| I feel like this puts a cloud over Ding vs Nepo.
|
| Like whoever wins, the title will have an an asterisk that says,
| "Only because Magnus bowed out."
| bionsystem wrote:
| Ding had a really tough year last year, grinding his seat for
| the candidates with his country in lockdown. If he wins it's
| going to be well deserved in my opinion.
|
| Nepo really crushed it in the candidates, and frankly had a
| couple of good games against Magnus last time before he
| collapsed. If he wins I feel that there is some good merit as
| well.
|
| Obviously a lot of it is subjective. Mainly, I think the
| champion would have to beat Magnus in some future games or
| matches in other tournaments before truly gaining everybody's
| respect.
| ginko wrote:
| From the outside the champion system in chess seems so weird. I
| know they do something similar in boxing, but there it sort of
| makes sense because attending too many boxing tournaments isn't
| exactly healthy.
| pmontra wrote:
| Many national go tournaments have a similar format in all of
| the 3 countries it's worth talking about (China, South Korea
| and Japan): the champion waits for the result of the challenger
| tournaments and plays only the final series of games (3, 5, 7.)
|
| International tournaments tend to be shootouts with everybody
| playing from the first round.
|
| You can get a picture of how they are set up by looking at the
| tournament tables at https://www.go4go.net/go/tournaments/news
| NhanH wrote:
| Japan is the only country still have major tournaments with
| champion vs challenger format. None of the big tournament in
| China or South Korea has that type of game.
| pmontra wrote:
| I see. For example the Korean Kuksu had the
| champion/challenger format until 2008. Then it was
| discontinued in 2016 but that's another story.
|
| But China's Tianyuan is still champion/challenger (from
| 2022): https://www.go4go.net/go/tournaments/news/16
|
| I didn't check the others.
| masklinn wrote:
| > I know they do something similar in boxing, but there it sort
| of makes sense because attending too many boxing tournaments
| isn't exactly healthy.
|
| Also a boxing match is a maximum of 12 rounds over 47 minutes
| (since 1982), not 12 games over 3 weeks.
| [deleted]
| ComputerCat wrote:
| Wow, what an impressive run though!
| modernerd wrote:
| Good for him, and a great lesson for chess fans:
|
| Play the kind of chess that makes you happy, be it globetrotting
| super-GM invite-only tournaments or 500 games of back-to-back
| bullet on Lichess.
| willhinsa wrote:
| ...or play 250 hyperbullet games until 5:45 am during the
| Candidates tournament when you have a game at 3 PM the next
| day.
|
| https://www.chessdom.com/firouzja-prepares-for-nepo-with-the...
| jpeter wrote:
| Did the preparation pay off?
| __s wrote:
| No
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Hikaru kicking himself about that last game, now.
| ourmandave wrote:
| I wonder if Magnus wasn't inspired by Hikaru's zero-f's given
| attitude, where he's just playing for fun or the challenge,
| instead of titles.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Abdicating the chess championship title by Carlsen without a
| match is actually a dick move towards his eventual (and
| inevitable!) successor, who would never be seen by a lot of chess
| fans as the 'true' chess champion of the Steinitz-Lasker-etc
| lineage - much like how to this day many people argue that Karpov
| would have never been able to defeat Fischer and thus isn't a
| true champion.
|
| (I personally think that Karpov would have beaten Fischer, and
| that's the biggest reason why Bobby ghosted on everyone.)
| Lapsa wrote:
| he's just fucking with Naka :D
| raptorraver wrote:
| I understand his decision but still I'm disappointed.
| ycombinete wrote:
| Perhaps Magnus is going to pull a Kasparov and start his own
| competing World Championship.
| soneca wrote:
| Can someone please explain to me (someone complete out of the
| world of chess) why he doesn't like to compete in the World
| Championship but likes to compete in other tournaments?
| kriops wrote:
| WC requires copious amounts of high-intensity prep, close to a
| year from what he has said before, so this is a ROI thing for
| Carlsen. He has spent half-ish (emphasis on the ish) of his
| adult life preparing specifically for WC matches.
| tgarv wrote:
| Why does the WC take so much more prep than other
| tournaments? Is it because of the format, or just the
| pressure to win?
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| Between candidates (the tournament) and the event (the
| championship between current champ and challenger) there is
| a large gap so the top two can have time to study each
| other. Other tourneys you aren't putting in so much prep
| about all your possible opponents because there are too
| many of them.
| fernandopj wrote:
| In terms of preparing against your opponent, at their level
| and with enough time to think over the board, one has to
| know so much theory about many lines, that as white you're
| forced to find "novelties", which are brand new or mostly
| never played lines that might never come up in the game, in
| the hopes of throwing your opponent of their preparation.
| With black, you have to prepare a few opening lines and
| know them so well as to avoid surprises and maximize
| chances of at least a draw. This takes a lot of time and
| energy and memorization becames a huge factor. When you
| face many opponents, the ROI of deep studying a few lines
| doesn't pay off against people who have a myriad of styles,
| so memorization plays a lesser role; and you play many
| tournaments so having a few bad ones isn't such a big deal,
| comparing to playing for WC.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| The format of world championships (almost all classical games
| with very long time) mean that preparation is key to going far.
| Additionally in modern chess with the way points are
| structured, draws are increasingly common and even aimed for by
| players when they sense they cannot eke out the win (and they
| can set them up VERY far in advance at times). This means to do
| well in the WC you have to prepare a LOT and with the format,
| the games are more draining and more difficult to get through
| (there are a number of stories of players who "break" mentally
| or make critical errors in game 8+ just due to sheer
| mental/physical fatigue).
|
| Just seems like the format is draining and the games aren't
| interesting/fun for Magnus.
| __s wrote:
| Most tournaments are swiss format, so if you draw all your
| games you won't win the tournament because the person who wins
| the tournament will be the person who gets a few wins on top of
| their draws
|
| In WC it's zero sum, so there's less pressure to find wins
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| The preparation. Studying your opponent's history for 6 months
| without spending time actually _playing_ is not fun.
| SheetPost wrote:
| Weird flex: drop out of WC to promote scam artists:
|
| > I feel, the FTX Crypto Cup, which is going to be awesome
| theduder99 wrote:
| FWIW Hikaru pointed out that some of Magnus's complaints are
| kinda moot because Fide created the world rapid/blitz
| championships. If you prefer shorter games, go win that one. If
| you enjoy classic, then do the classic tournament.
| jpgvm wrote:
| To be fair he does "go win that one".
| pdevr wrote:
| He has every right to decide so. It is his prerogative.
|
| Nonetheless, this will, for sure, be disappointing for many chess
| fans.
| skilled wrote:
| I'm pretty sure 99% of Carlsen's fans _expected_ him to do this
| since he has talked about it for a long time now. And as the
| article points out, he 's still going to remain _very_ active
| in the Chess community, tournaments in particular.
| pdevr wrote:
| Expected by many. Still, disappointing for many, including me
| :)
| smitty1e wrote:
| Props to MC for going out literally at the top of his game.
|
| As Kipling noted: "Once in a while / We can finish in style".
| jstx1 wrote:
| He's not going out though - he'll keep playing chess and he
| stated that he wants to remain the best chess player. He's just
| not playing the World Championship match.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Yes, finishing his World Championship affiliation.
| eimrine wrote:
| Magnus' streams in blitz chess are way more interesting than
| official plays IMO.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Oh, that's fancier than my ready-at-hand qute for these
| situations, which was 90s-girl-rocker Ani DiFranco: "so I'll
| walk the plank / and I'll jump with a smile / if I'm gonna go
| down / I'm gonna do it with style".
| t_mann wrote:
| In the short run at least, this might hurt FIDE more than Magnus.
| He's already the biggest brand in global chess by far, at this
| point becoming successful at the 'influencer game' (his podcasts,
| other content like the poker and fantasy football he got into as
| well, collaborating with other influencers like the - also
| Norwegian - highly successful former climber Magnus Midtbo,...)
| might do more for his brand than winning yet another title.
|
| That's assuming that's even his goal, he really just seems to be
| doing whatever he enjoys. And in the long run, FIDE will also be
| fine. There will be new talents, and as even Magnus admitted,
| it's hard to rival the 'official' world champion title in terms
| of global attention.
| retzkek wrote:
| What might save FIDE, or at least keep it relevant, is if Ding
| being in the championship now can do for chess in China what
| Fischer did for chess in the US, or Anand for India. There's a
| potential huge market and player base that so far hasn't been
| very interested in international Chess (xiangqi and go are more
| popular).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_in_China
|
| On the other hand, this may be an inflection point toward
| online chess and faster time formats taking over for deciding
| who the "real" chess champion is. It will be interesting to see
| how this plays out, especially with the battle between
| chess.com and lichess.org for online mindshare.
| [deleted]
| epups wrote:
| Hopefully now he can dedicate more time to reaching 2900, a much
| more interesting accomplishment than winning 1, 2 or even 5 more
| world championships in their current format.
| [deleted]
| Epa095 wrote:
| Given that you get more points the higher ranked opponents you
| beat, the best way to get to 2900 might be to coach other
| players so they get higher scores, before beating them.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It's his choice of course but I think some of the argumentation
| is in bad taste. Suggesting to only play against Firouzja is bad
| sportsmanship, a player should not attempt to handpick their
| opponent. It's also disrespectful to announce this after the
| candidates tournament finished, in particular towards
| Nepomniachtchi but also the other players who expected to face
| the world champion.
| gautamnarula wrote:
| As a Magnus fan this saddens me, but his reasons are
| understandable: you've got one life to live and he doesn't enjoy
| spending a quarter of it preparing for these grinding, stressful
| matches. After five consecutive wins, including a crushing win
| less than a year ago, and 10 years as world #1, by a considerable
| margin for most of those years (the gap between him and #2 right
| now is the same as between #2 and #9, and this is the smallest
| gap it's been in some time), I think he can make a credible case
| that he has nothing left to prove and trying to get a 2900 rating
| is more interesting.
|
| On a related note, my suggestion for an updated WCC format:
|
| We should move away from all classical chess. Yes, that's the
| tradition that's been going for 150 years, but today so many of
| the biggest events are rapid and blitz (online tour events, Grand
| Chess Tour Rapid & Blitz events, World Rapid & Blitz
| Championships, not to mention two of the last three world
| championship matches being decided in rapid tiebreaks and many of
| the biggest classical events decided in rapid or blitz
| tiebreaks). So I believe the "World Chess Champion" should be the
| person who demonstrates mastery in a blended format of all three,
| to represent the importance of all three.
|
| The rapid, blitz, and classical portions all have equal weights
| (18 points)by following in the footsteps of the Grand Chess Tour
| Rapid and Blitz events where rapid games are worth 2 times as
| much as blitz. I suggest 6 classical games, worth 3 points each
| (1.5 for a draw); 9 rapid games, worth 2 points each (1 for a
| draw); and 18 blitz games, worth the traditional 1 point each
| (0.5 for a draw), with the cumulative score determining the
| winner.
| mrintellectual wrote:
| Although a lot of folks are undoubtedly disappointed, props to
| Magnus for understanding that there are other great
| accomplishments to be had besides continuously winning the WCC. I
| think the format of the championship match was a deal breaker for
| him - months of preparation and a slew of classical games meant
| that he would have little time to devote to other shorter time
| format tournaments.
|
| With that being said, match between Ian and Ding would also be
| incredibly entertaining. I look forward to it.
| mikaeluman wrote:
| The candidates might as well be the world championship.
|
| But they need to make sure wins give you e.g. 3 points and draws
| only 0.5.
|
| Even in the candidates this year Ian - having obtained a nice
| lead - played drawing lines with white to perfection.
|
| I don't blame him, it was the right decision. The incentive
| structure needs to change.
|
| Even after a draw, the concept of Armageddon games to give
| another half point would be interesting and useful.
| __s wrote:
| How do you disincentivize win trading?
| mikaeluman wrote:
| How do you mean one can trade when someone has lose? Do you
| mean that all russians agree to lose to their number 1?
| jstx1 wrote:
| That's why as a spectator I wouldn't like a change in the
| format to a multi-player tournament. Changing it would be
| equivalent to making the candidates the World Championship and
| removing the WC match - basically getting rid of the most
| exciting part of following chess and keeping everything else
| the same.
| tzs wrote:
| > But they need to make sure wins give you e.g. 3 points and
| draws only 0.5.
|
| As black under such a system I might be more strongly
| incentivized to go for the draw than under the current system.
| I'm already starting at a disadvantage by having black, so
| pressing for the win is extra risky, and if I do go for it and
| lose my opponent gains 3 points on me.
|
| If you want to reduce draws by playing with points you probably
| should included something that takes into accounts white's
| advantage. You want to make sure white has a strong incentive
| to push for the win, which in turn also increases the chances
| white will go too far, giving black a good chance to also push
| for the win.
|
| For example, asymmetric scoring such as black gets 3 points for
| a win, 1 point for a draw, and white gets 2 points for a win, 0
| points for a draw. That system was tried in a couple or so
| tournaments around 2005 or so.
|
| As far as the format goes, I wonder if a small tournament
| coupled with something like the promotion/relegation system
| used in many soccer leagues would be good?
|
| Have a Champions Tournament that consists of 4 players that
| play a double round robin (or maybe a quadruple round robin?)
| for the World Championship. The participants are the current
| Champion, the runner-up from the prior Champions Tournament,
| and the top two from the Candidates Tournament.
|
| The Candidates Tournament would include the 3rd and 4th place
| players from the prior Champions Tournament, the 3rd and 4th
| place players from the prior Candidates Tournament, and some
| players who are invited based on rating, World Cup, and Grand
| Prix results.
|
| Maybe also make the Candidates bigger than it is now, say 10 or
| 12 players. That would be too long to hold as a single event,
| so split it. Play some of the games as part of the World Cup
| event and some as part of the Grand Prix events.
| mikaeluman wrote:
| To your point - White steers the game. People only go for
| wins with Black when forced to. So I don't see how that
| changes anything?
| kzrdude wrote:
| This year's candidates was pretty combative, I don't think they
| have a problem to solve more with that.
| peter_retief wrote:
| Chess at this level is hard work, by resigning now he "sort of"
| stays world champion
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Funny that they mention Arkady Dvorkovich, I would expect him to
| quietly retreat from managing current affairs in FIDE because of
| his high position in Russian civil service.
|
| How can one of the closest allies of Putin head an international
| organisation nowadays?
| dmurray wrote:
| In March he condemned the invasion of Ukraine and stepped down
| from his other positions (which have not included working for
| the Russian state since 2018).
|
| You can always say he should go further, that he's tainted by
| his past links to Putin, or point out that if he had really
| turned on Putin he would have found polonium in his tea by now,
| but it's misleading to describe him today as "one of the
| closest allies of Putin".
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Isn't he still the Chairman of the Board of Russian Railways,
| a state-owned company?
| dmurray wrote:
| According to their website, he left that board in 2020.
|
| https://ar2020.rzd.ru/en/corporate-governance/board-
| director...
| divan wrote:
| International sport federations are non-profits and follow own
| statutes. While many sports federations banned russian and
| belorussian athletes and officials, they had to do it within
| the legal boundaries and their statutes. For example, the
| reasoning ISU (International Skating Union, second oldest sport
| federation) gave on banning russians is "...we obliged to
| protect athletes during event, so because of war, russian and
| Ukrainian athletes can have a fight or situation that endangers
| them, thus we ban russians from participation or
| officiating...". During ISU Congress in June 2022 they voted if
| russians should be allowed to officiate on Congress, take
| official positions (including potentially heading positions) in
| ISU and in Congress, and they haven't reached two thirds
| needed.
|
| So it's simply not easy "just to replace a president". You need
| to follow organization regulations and rules. Large
| international organizations normally have a lot of
| institutional inertia and rarely even have unified vision and
| position on many aspects, unfortunately.
| gdy wrote:
| >the reasoning ISU (International Skating Union, second
| oldest sport federation) gave on banning russians is "...we
| obliged to protect athletes during event, so because of war,
| russian and Ukrainian athletes can have a fight or situation
| that endangers them, thus we ban russians from participation
| or officiating...".
|
| That's the most disingenuous justification that I've heard.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Obviously this raised the issue of Bobby Fischer. The article
| mentions this but doesn't really go into the details.
|
| Fischer beat Spassky in Rejkyavik in 1972 for the World
| Championship. This took almost 3 months (July to September) and
| there was controversy, disagreement and negotiation about where
| and how it would take place. This had the backdrop of being a
| Cold War proxy too of course.
|
| Interestingly, Fischer didn't play competitive Chess after this.
| He was set to defend the title against the eventual challenger,
| Anatoly Karpov, in 1975. Fischer too didn't like the tendency for
| draws and proposed a format of first to 10 wins (with Fischer
| retaining the title in case of a 9-9). This was rejected and
| Fischer ultimately abdicated and never played competitive Chess
| again. He also became a semi-nomadic recluse too.
|
| But it also wasn't Fischer's first hiatus from the game. There
| was the 1972-1975 gap but also anotehr in the 1960s. He clearly
| seemed like a troubled guy.
|
| I've always found it fascinating the level of commitment required
| to play Chess at this level. I certainly have never had any
| interest in that (nor the ability, to be clear). No one really
| seems to know how to solve this without going to a more blitz
| like format.
|
| Chess at the highest level seems to revolve around memorizing a
| whole book of openings and defenses while being able to take
| advantage of mistakes but also finding novel approaches in
| standard openings and defenses but now it seems you have to go
| fairly deep into a game before you go off-book.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| >Bobby Fischer
|
| For anyone that likes the weird, wacko and genius (all the same
| thing ?) there are few excellent short documentaries on YouTube
| about Bobby Fischer. Well worth a watch!
| jackmott wrote:
| pkulak wrote:
| Chess requires rote memorization (gotta know every book opening
| 20 moves in), short-term memory/visualization (calculation),
| and general problem solving (tactics); almost in equal measure.
| It's absolutely crazy to me how hard it is. I can't play it
| unless I don't have anything else to think hard about that day.
| It wipes me out. And sure, you can kinda wing it and not give
| it 100% of your capacity, but then you just lose. It's brutal.
| And I suck at it. I can't imagine what these high-level folks
| go through.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Speaking of Bobby Fisher I found the book End Game fascinating
| and engrossing.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The quote by Paul Morphy, one of the great old chess masters,
| seems relevant here - "The ability to play chess is the sign of
| a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a
| wasted life."
| amelius wrote:
| I hope it doesn't apply to coding too.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Perhaps you might say something like that for e.g.
| competitive coding or leetcode.
| ctxc wrote:
| Code golfing!
| kamaal wrote:
| >>competitive coding or leetcode
|
| Absolutely yes.
|
| There is a big difference between inventing solutions to
| novel problems, and being 75,386th person to solve a
| problem on a website. The latter just makes you a
| sophisticated newspaper daily puzzle solver.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| I think it's because both systems are bounded and cut out a
| lot of real world complexity, and since these simplified
| systems are easier to understand than the real world the
| certainty and confidence they provide become addictive.
| Similar to video games in that way.
|
| It's not necessarily a bad thing though because we're
| always working with a simplified system whatever we're
| doing in life, the question is just how much is it helping
| people. Chess provides entertainment and personal
| challenge, coding provides ridiculous productivity. All
| things in moderation though.
| moonchrome wrote:
| I don't think that ability to code is a sign of a gentleman
| jstx1 wrote:
| More like Kasparov because he remained active after the FIDE
| split. Still a bit different because Magnus isn't running a
| parallel WC of his own.
|
| It's also funny how the only 3 World Champions who have refused
| to defend a title because of disagreements with FIDE are
| probably the 3 best chess players ever.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Fischer is clearly the goat in my view. But it's not so
| obvious to me that Kasparov and Carlsen are better than say
| Vishy or Morphy or Botvinnik or Capablanca...
| prionassembly wrote:
| On one view, Morphy et al. picked low-hanging fruit, no
| longer available to Kasparov. On the other, Morphy and
| Capablanca etc. _laid the foundations_ on which Carlsen and
| Kasparov walk.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I find these conversations amusing because it really is the
| nerd (I mean that as a nerd myself; not perjoratively)
| version of arguing about whether LeBron is better than
| Jordan (in their respective primes) or whether the GOAT is
| Brady, Woods or LeBron.
|
| It's just funny that this same argument structure repeats
| in radically different fields with (often) very different
| people.
|
| Personally I've never gotten too invested in any of these
| arguments because they're ultimately unknowable but, more
| importantly, they're kind of pointless. You can't separate
| someone from the time they existed in. I was only ever at
| best average at Chess but even I could recognize that the
| grats of 100-200 years ago would get wiped out by the
| modern greats but obviously we know more now, we have
| better tools now and so on. And you can never really say
| how a historic great would do in the modern times with
| modern ideas, knowledge and tools because they're a product
| of their time.
| rofo1 wrote:
| I think most chess players are comparing them in the same
| circumstances, e.g on pure skill.
|
| So for example Fischer said Capablanca and Morphy, under
| the same circumstances, could beat anyone (if they were
| born in the same era, using the same tools, etc.)
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| I think you can get pretty close, though. We can now
| objectively evaluate middle and endgame strength (where
| you wouldn't gain as much from modern techniques) by
| using superhuman chess engines.
| jstx1 wrote:
| For Anand it's really obvious that both Carlsen and
| Kasparov are better given that they've beaten him in World
| Championship matches (Kasparov once, Magnus twice), have
| positive head-to-head scores against him and have better
| other achievements like peak rating or time spent at number
| 1. There's no metric on which Anand comes out on top in
| comparison to Carlsen and Kasparov.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| There's also not really any metric where any of them are
| better than Fischer. Neither Carlsen nor Kasparov
| challenged Vishy's title during the peak of his career.
| He's also such a phenomenal player, that if he'd been the
| one to abdicate the FIDE title instead of Kasparov, you'd
| easily be able to make the same kind of "top 3" comments
| about him.
| jstx1 wrote:
| > There's also not really any metric where any of them
| are better than Fischer.
|
| Off the top of my head - World Championships matches won,
| time spent as number 1, peak Elo.
|
| > Neither Carlsen nor Kasparov challenged Vishy's title
| during the peak of his career.
|
| When was the peak? He was WC between 2007 and 2013, he
| wasn't even the top ranked player for most of that time
| and then he lost the WC to Magnus (then lost the rematch
| too).
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| > Off the top of my head - World Championships matches
| won, time spent as number 1, peak Elo.
|
| I meant to say that the other way around sorry. A lot of
| Fischer's stats aren't very impressive at all. He's won
| less championships than say Kramnik or Petrosian, but not
| many people would argue that either of those two were
| greater players than Fischer.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Elo inflates over time, and so can't be easily compared
| like this. More interesting to me is how dominant a
| player was at their peak, and for that Fischer wins by a
| mile for modern times, with Kasparov behind him. And
| historically, Morphy, Lasker and Capablanca come to mind.
| And Tal could wipe the floor with anyone when his poor
| health didn't get in the way.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Honest question: Would somebody at this "level" be better than
| good at something like StarCraft ? Noted that SC takes more than
| "just strategy" i.e micro comes to mind.
|
| Like I would pay good money to see Serral Vs Magnus, maybe after
| some coaching sessions with Harstem ? :D ?
|
| EDIT: Just out of curiosity will there be anything else that
| someone at this level is "exceptional" good at besides chess ?
| epolanski wrote:
| Magnus would do well if he applied to anything involving math
| and calculations.
|
| SC has a sane dose of reflexes and micro management.
| __s wrote:
| Magnus has been doing alright in poker, tho the volatility
| makes it harder to accurately measure what his level is there
|
| Pitting him against a pro StarCraft player would be a joke tho.
| For reference, Nina is able to reach 4800 MMR worker rushing
| every game. The mechanics alone would take a couple years of
| dedicated practice
| matharmin wrote:
| There is not that much overlap between skills required for
| chess and StarCraft. Being good at one may perhaps correlate
| with having some natural talent in the other, but experience in
| the specific game would matter a lot more.
| rollcat wrote:
| "Good" as in, maybe reach GM? Quite likely, although being in
| GM already makes you a statistical outlier (200 slots per
| region in a player base of hundreds of thousands).
|
| Good enough to challenge a pro? You're seriously
| underestimating how much hard work the pros are putting in to
| play at their level - on top of the insane mechanical skill,
| game knowledge, and experience. Part of the skillset is
| obviously transferrable to other RTS games (big chunk of the
| AoE4 ladder was dominated by SC2 GMs early after launch), but
| playing (and staying) at pro level in SC2 requires much more -
| it requires consistency.
|
| Serral has 7.5K MMR not because he's been taking 20 MMR off a
| 7.4K player (because there are no 7.4K players), he has 7.5K
| MMR because he took 1 MMR from 6K players a couple thousand
| times. 6K is like what, top 50 GM?
|
| My bet in Serral v Magnus would be X:0 in a best of (X*2)+1,
| for any X the players would be willing to suffer through.
|
| (Sorry if my numbers are a bit inexact, the new season just
| started and GM is not open yet.)
| bena wrote:
| Yeah. The live element brings something else to the table.
| It's not only knowing what to do, but being able to execute.
|
| I've played Starcraft off and on, mostly through the Brood
| War days, and never super competitively. My friends and I had
| a standing Friday night game we'd play. We were ok.
|
| My brother-in-law came to stay with us for a while and he had
| never played Starcraft before but wanted to try it out. So I
| said, sure, we can 2v2 the computer so you can get a handle
| on things. We'll play Terran since it's the most like
| Warcraft. He told me he's played Age of Empires, he knows
| what RTSs are like. He'll be fine, he wanted to 1v1. I asked
| him if he was sure because Starcraft was a much faster game
| than AoE. He said he was sure, it would be fine.
|
| So we played. I played a pretty standard build order, sent
| out my 10th/11th worker as a scout, found his base, saw he
| was still on his initial set of workers and building a
| barracks with one of them. So I built my second base on his
| expansion spot, got it up to speed, built a couple of
| barracks, and a couple of machine shops, cranked out some
| marines, medics, and siege tanks, and to top it off, I build
| a starport and some drop ships. Loaded up the squad and
| dropped them behind his mineral line, obliterated his
| economy, then rolled through his base.
| rollcat wrote:
| That's also why in a tournament (or a showmatch) you'd play
| the same opponent in a series (like best of 3, best of
| 5...). I once had a couple friendly games with a dude in
| masters 3 (that's maybe 1K MMR above me) and... actually
| won one map. My mechanics are pretty bad, but I have a very
| decent understanding of the game. He tried something funny
| - I scouted, responded, and killed him. If it were a best
| of 1, that was our first map - I would have won the series.
|
| This would not happen with Serral. He does lose against
| other pros, but not against joes. When you face an opponent
| 1.5K MMR below you, you're putting something like -200MMR
| on the table if you lose. You can't stay 200-300 MMR above
| the #2 spot if you ever drop a game like that.
| bena wrote:
| Oh yeah. We played with someone who played competitively
| one time and it was no joke. We couldn't get anything off
| the ground. It was literally our rec league flag football
| team going against <INSERT YOUR FAVORITE NFL TEAM HERE>.
|
| There's a guy, Stanislav Cifka, who plays (or maybe
| played at this point, I haven't kept up) competitive
| Magic: the Gathering who was ranked fairly high in chess
| at some point (or maybe still is). He wasn't ever the
| best chess player or best Magic player, but he was pretty
| good in both.
|
| So Magnus could probably eventually do well, but there's
| a learning curve.
| Lapsa wrote:
| no, dude. it would take at least couple years of intense
| training for Serral v Magnus to be somewhat interesting
| inkblotuniverse wrote:
| I'd love to see that.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| i imagine that being good as chess is a huge predictor of being
| good at pretty much all other strategy games. However, there is
| too much of a focus on mechanical skill in starcraft for him to
| overcome with strategy.
|
| I think a better choice would be something like Magic the
| Gathering or other card games. I have no doubt he would end up
| dominating those if he became dedicated.
| hnfong wrote:
| Not sure chess players would be able to do 300+ apm though....
| 8note wrote:
| you should see fast over the board play.
|
| Within a bullet game though
| https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/most-
| move... looks like 100apm isn't far off, and that includes
| having the opponent make moves inbetween
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Nepo is an ex professional Dota player
| b0afc375b5 wrote:
| Now that's a fun fact! As a dota2 enthusiast on a previous
| life this is so exciting to learn.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Nepomniachtchi#Video_gam.
| ..
| haunter wrote:
| He held the number 1 spot in the Fantasy Premier League for a
| time so yes
| https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/dec/16/chess-champion...
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Oh interesting ! I didn't know that !
| kriro wrote:
| He'll still play chess and wants to go to 2900 but I'm curious if
| he'll take a serious step at poker eventually. He's playing for
| fun already (played in the 2022 WSOP if I recall correctly) and
| he'd probably be very good at GTO studying.
| upupandup wrote:
| I guess when a particular game has been figured out thanks to AI,
| we will hear more and more professionals and world champions
| throwing the towel. Yes there will be a market for watching human
| vs human games but can we still call them the best of the best
| when some AI program can play it not only better but teach us
| more axioms and undiscovered patterns or rules?
|
| Good on him to call it quits, shouldn't impact his standing in
| the world any less.
| fairity wrote:
| My read on the situation is that Magnus had two goals:
|
| 1) remain world champion
|
| 2) get to 2900 elo
|
| #1 got in the way of #2 because all the elite grandmasters
| constantly focus throughout the year on preparing for Magnus,
| which creates a headwind in the non-world champion tournaments
| where he must perform well to reach 2900.
|
| My guess is he will focus on 2900. Then, come back as world
| champion. Then, retire after 7 championships or his performance
| deteriorates.
| epolanski wrote:
| Isn't elo eventually inflated by the number of ranked players
| anyway?
|
| The more people will be eventually fide rated and climb through
| the distribution the more the better players will drift at
| higher elos.
|
| That's also a reason why in modern days we have more 2750+
| ranked players than ever.
|
| One common, wrong, argument is that modern players play better,
| while this is true this does not affect the elo ranking at all.
| The elo system merely tracks how did you do against opponents
| with a different ranking and assigns a score based on the win
| or loss, how well the players did is absolutely irrelevant to
| the distrubition.
| matsemann wrote:
| I think that the rating inflation debate has concluded that
| there isn't that much inflation. Compared to the old 2600
| generation, the 2700 people now are just that much better.
|
| An analysis here: https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-elo-
| ratings-inflation-or-d...
|
| It claims that a 2500 player now is better than a 2500 player
| in 2000. So in that sense it's actually been a deflation.
|
| Also https://www.playmagnus.com/en/news/post/rating-
| inflation-myt...
| epolanski wrote:
| But that's my point: elo distribution has nothing to do
| with how good players are, it merely tracks your win/lose
| status against opponents with a different elo.
|
| If you take, e.g. two unranked players that are very bad at
| chess or two unranked masters they are still going to end
| up with a +16 and -16 elo change. And you can keep adding
| great or bad players to the pool, and elo is still going to
| only look at the outcome not how players play.
|
| The point with elo is that if there's only 2 players it is
| basically impossible to reach a 2000 elo, because even if
| one consistently wins at some point he's not gaining any
| point by beating the same opponent, thus to go from 1700 to
| 1800 he'll need to face an opponent that has a similar elo.
|
| The more people slightly below his skill the more he'll
| rise in the elo distribution, this trickles down all the
| way up and down.
|
| Of course it is very likely that modern 2500 players are
| better as they have better tools than players of 20 years
| ago, but the same applies to people lower and higher in
| rating.
|
| Thus, at the end of the day, the only factor that matters
| in an elo distribution and how wide it is, is the number of
| games and players.
|
| If tomorrow there will be an influx of another million
| ranked players the distribution will get a bit wider and
| this would also inflate in the long run ratings of the
| highest rated players.
| mbauman wrote:
| > #1 got in the way of #2 because all the elite grandmasters...
|
| ... also focus on grabbing draws. Draws against lower rated
| players (that is, everyone for Magnus) drop your elo. Winning
| the world championship may very well _drop_ Mangus ' elo score
| if it involves only a handful of wins and lots of draws.
| matsemann wrote:
| Carlsen was 2853 rated in November 2016, December 2016 it was
| 2840 after playing the WC match against Karjakin in November.
|
| Winning against Anand in 2013 gave him 2 points. I think he
| got 1 point for beating Nepo in 2021.
|
| With that, reaching 2900 seems almost impossible. He was at
| 2882 two times, but when you need almost perfect score to
| achieve it it's hard.
| endorphine wrote:
| My read is he's being honest and will not in fact enjoy playing
| the World Championship.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I think he had issues with the challenger selection process.
| That's why he was willing to play if it was Firouzja but
| isn't interested in a rematch with Nepo.
|
| And I think pretty much everyone predicted that had Naka won
| Magnus would play.
| tzs wrote:
| Nakamura on a video posted to his YouTube channel earlier
| today said he also thinks Carlsen would have played if he
| came in second in the Candidates.
|
| His reasoning was that he and Carlsen are the two most
| widely known and followed active chess players at the
| moment, and Carlsen is not going to allow a world where
| Nakamura is Champion instead of him.
|
| Nakamura doesn't seem upset or anything over not coming in
| second at the Candidates, which up until the last game it
| looked like he almost had a lock on.
|
| The person he said is probably the most upset by Carlsen's
| decision is Caruana. Caruana collapsed in the second half
| of the tournament, which Nakamura thinks is because Caruana
| thought that only 1st mattered and so had to play for wins
| to try to catch Nepo. If Caruana had played for top 2
| instead of 1st, Nakamura thinks he would have had no
| trouble achieving that.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Nakamura also said he doesn't believe Magnus won't play
| the WC.
|
| Perhaps, just maybe, Nakamura doesn't quite understand
| what Magnus thinks, being different humans and all. So
| far it seems Magnus has been more accurate at predicting
| what Magnus will do.
| ShivShankaran wrote:
| Russia is playing China in the world championship. I wonder if US
| is getting a serious heartburn
| dmurray wrote:
| Four of the world top ten currently [0] represent the US,
| versus one from each of six other countries. They're the
| favourites for the upcoming Olympiad. Elite level chess in the
| US is just doing fine.
|
| [0] add your own asterisks for how important it is, but all
| four moved from abroad, three when they were already world
| class players
| jstx1 wrote:
| It's 3 - Caruana, Aronian and So - https://ratings.fide.com/
|
| Also, Caruana was born in Miami to Italian parents and lived
| in the US and played for the US until he was 12.
| dmurray wrote:
| And Nakamura, who is joint 9th on that list although it
| displays as #11. (he's outright 8th on the 2700chess live
| list, which I used originally but is less authoritative).
| ShivShankaran wrote:
| At some point Americans have to realize that this unwarranted
| hostility towards China, Russia and India will bite them
| back. It's already biting the lower and middle class back and
| this is most likely the beginning of the end of American
| empire led by a senile demented dude.
|
| Love always trumps hate but the arms industry of US will keep
| pushing for arms inside and outside of US at all times even
| if the people being murdered are it's own kids.
| xiaodai wrote:
| meh. this will never happen in shogi or weiqi world. chess is a
| mess. the issue with top level chess is that draws are the most
| common result. it doesn't matter for mere mortals like us but it
| does get boring to follow top level chess vs go and shogi.
| xiangqi's got the same issue
| baby wrote:
| Go/weiqi really is much more entertaining than chess, but chess
| has won the west. I think the US has the same issue with
| football being quite boring to watch compared to soccer/rugby,
| but marketing has prevented the other sports to proliferate.
| tweakimp wrote:
| Time for a chess rules change?
| V-2 wrote:
| While he's (this goes without saying) perfectly within his rights
| to do so. I feel this decision will undermine his status as one
| of the GOATs of the game in the long run.
|
| "However, one cannot say that he has beaten Caruana or Karjakin
| convincingly. [Both matches were decided on tiebreaks]. There
| were questions in his match against Anand too. If he had beaten
| all three of them as clearly as he won against Nepomniachtchi, I
| would understand Carlsen. But is he already tired of winning
| after winning one match clearly?" (Karpov)
| why-el wrote:
| "Did Michael Jordan win all six championships convincingly? All
| series went 5 games or more."
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I totally support Magnus Carlson's decision. He really loves
| travel and playing in many tournaments and now he can do more of
| what he loves. I enjoy watching him, and others, do Chess
| streaming and I went to the US Chess Open in 1978 but I never
| even played 25 rated games so my rating was never official.
|
| I do like do slowly read through Chess games, especially old
| historic games. I do the same with the game of Go: I like the
| several hundred year old Shogun Palace games. I did take online
| lessons from a Korean Go master a few years ago, and once a month
| play a long game against CSPro Go program, let it spend an hour
| after the game analyzing my moves, then I look at what moves I
| should have played in critical parts of the game.
|
| I guess what I am saying here is that different people enjoy
| games differently, and I respect Magnus optimizing playing Chess
| for his own fun and lifestyle.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Face it FIDE, chess.com is where the chess world is at these
| days, and when in a mood, Lichess.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-20 23:00 UTC)