Magnus Carlsen retains title after winning lopsided match
en.chessbase.com
en.chessbase.com
1) Game 6 lasted 136 moves, making it the longest game in world championship history, surpassing the 124 move game 5 of Korchnoi-Karpov in 1978.
2) Carlsen's victory in game 6 was also the first decisive match game (excluding tiebreakers) since game 10 of Carlsen's defense against Karjakin in 2016. Carlsen's defense against Caruana in 2018 featured 12 draws before moving into tiebreakers.
3) Carlsen won this match 7.5-3.5, making it the most lopsided victory since Capablanca defeated Lasker 9-5 in 1921.
In the 1970 Interzonal to pick 6 players to go to the Candidates Tournament (along with Korchnoi and Petrosian), Fischer won with 15 W, 1 L, 7 D giving 18.5 points. The next 5 were 3 tied at 15 and 2 tied at 14.
You can change every one of Fischer's draws to a loss in that tournament and he'd still have tied for first.
Then in the Candidates, he played Taimanov, Larsen, and Petrosian.
He beat Taimanov with 6 W, 0 L, 0 D. (Taimanov, a Russian) got into considerable trouble over this. The Russian government did not believe it was possible for a player of his level to be so thoroughly beaten unless it was on purpose. They stopped paying him and banned him from foreign travel).
Then he beat Larsen with 6 W, 0 L, 0 D.
Then he beat Petrosian with 5 W, 1 L, 3 D.
Nitpick: that’s incorrect. Reading https://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/7072$iix.htm, he drew with Hübner, so if you change that to a loss, Hübner would get half a point more, moving to 15½.
If the player runs out of time they lose.
[1]: https://www.chess.com/article/view/world-chess-championship-...
Or not spent at the board - Nepo seemed to prefer the side room ;-)
(This is probably what you meant, but in chess a game means a single contest, while a match always means a series of games between two players or two teams).
However after that he was clearly tilted off the face of the earth. He was playing much too quickly and made blunders than even a competent amateur could have spotted. In game 11 I’m sure he simply gave up after seeing a draw was inevitable, because he didn’t want to show up for game 12.
The most remarkable aspect of this match for me was the absolute mental meltdown of the challenger. Nepo’s a great player, and I hope he comes back from this. But those last 5 games were the worst games he’s played in his career.
Incidentally the mental test of this best of 14 format isn’t even as hard as it can get. They used to play to a certain number of wins. The 1984 championship was abandoned in February 1985 (it started in September 1984) after 48 games (40 draws). They also had longer time controls back then, and would adjourn games overnight if necessary, so when you woke up to play a game you wouldn’t even know if you’d be able to go to sleep that night having finished it.
Actually relative strength is one of the things that wonder me the most I would say in the game: when one of the opponents is much stronger than the other the wins look so easy and the loses so stupid, but when the winner is matched against someone even stronger you see the same exact picture. I love you all I dunno why I say that now but here you go.
“It remains to be seen, of course, if Ian will be more resilient than he has been in the past if he is down”
So yes, it seems he has a bit of a problem in that department.
(https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/nov/24/magnus-carlsen...)
See, for example, https://senseis.xmp.net/?LongestTimeSpentThinkingAboutAMove
I watched a lot of Shogi match, and that just make 3.15 hours allotted in WCC looks low.
(The 8-9 hour match is a 2-day match. At specified time on the first day player do sealed move, to be reveal at the beginning of a match the next day.)
I really hope they are able to figure out some not-too-unnatural way to reduce the likelihood of draws. One easy possibility I saw suggested a number of times would be to remove the increment. Give additional time at certain move thresholds like they do now, but then at some point, that's it. No more time. Time pressure should remain a legitimate possibility of a threat throughout the match. When two GMs are in the endgame, +30s each move is an eternity, and how many tiny moves did we see them make just to get another +30s?
Oh well. I know excitement isn't the main driving force, I just think it's a real shame to see a world championship matchup like Carlsen/Caruana go to 12 straight draws and be decided by tiebreakers.
Edit: Embarrassingly I had a good laugh at my own joke after writing this.
I don’t see why removing slower chess tournaments on top of that is necessary.
By that metric Carlsen-Nepomniachtchi is fairly lopsided at 68.2%, Capablanca-Lasker is only 64.3%.
The disputed era FIDE world championship final in 2000 had Anand beating Shirov with 3.5 of 4, a whooping 87.5%. But you might no count that as it was not a traditional long 1v1 match.
So if we discount that we have to go all the way back to 1910 Lasker-Janowski, 9.5 of 11, 86.4% to find a more lopsided match.
The only other 1v1 world championship matches that have been more lopsided are:
1896-1897 Lasker-Steinitz 12.5 of 17, 73.5%.
1907 Lasker-Marshall 11.5 of 15, 76,7%.
Caruana, Giri, Anand, Svidler and Nakamura have been doing commentary (simultaneously!) throughout the match. It has been a real treat, I don't believe any match before has had such a deep level of live analysis. I have had five different streams open at times just to listen to them all :)
Jan and Svidler from the Karjaken match was the best commentary team we’ve had for a championship imo. I remember the main Chennai team being pretty decent as well, Tania’s a very good commentator, so I don’t know why they had her running around the event center interviewing people.
I'm also not a huge Maurice Ashley fan - but think he did a good job handling the press conferences. What was interesting was that for Karjakin/Carlsen, Jan Gustafsson was doing commentary, but also was part of the Carlsen analytics/prep/second team. Svidler's analysis is always enjoyable, but sometimes he seems bored with games and his language almost becomes 'this is over let's move on'.
Let Fabio speak!
If there's one person who could handle him and remain completely cool throughout it's Judit, they made a good team.
Nepo only squeezed in because the Candidates tournament was so weird with Covid and all. Caruana again, Ding Liren or Firouzja would have been much stronger opponents. I think the 18 year old Iranian phenom and world #2 Alireza Firouzja is the champion in waiting. But Magnus is still king and even Magnus would take another 10 years of dominance to claim GOAT from Kasparov.
Some big opinions here. Magnus has 5 undisputed titles. Only Lasker is ahead of him on 6, and Botvinnik ties him on 5. Vishy also ties him on 5, but one of those was from when the title split in the 90s. Karpov and Kasparov each have 6 titles, but two of Kasparov’s and 3 of Karpov’s come from when the title was split (and they were each playing on different sides of it). One more title make a good case for GOAT Magnus, two more seals it.
Comparing Magnus to Kasparov is kind of like comparing Steph Curry to MJ. Could it happen? Yes. But Magnus has to go out and do it. I think if he can beat Firouzja he makes a better case but tying Caruana and Karjack at classical wasn't all that impressive. Beating the great Anand was.
(Actually, MJ is probably a bridge too far for even Curry. Maybe LeBron is a better comparison.)
You could pick a similarly silly way to compare their careers by comparing their peak ELO. Which for Kasparov was 2851, and for Magnus 2882 (highest in history incidentally). Which is a rather large difference given the ELO system gets so wonky at that level that you can drop in ELO after winning an event (as I believe happened to Magnus after he won the Norway tournament this year).
Dropping Elo after winning an event isn't really that 'wonky' - it's just a Bayesian update for underperforming your statistical expectations. The same thing happened when Carlsen won the Candidates in 2013, he went +5=7-2, but he was 2872 rating against a field of 2774, so 8.5/14 would mean he loses ~6 rating.
Please explain obscure or very domain specific acronyms.
Interestingly, my comment got a handful of upvotes before it was modded to oblivion, so apparently I wasn't alone in not knowing this very common acronym.
I'll try to be more American next time I'm on the Internet.
I've been doing this for a while and it now seems I'm getting some support.
The last few years however I have given up Google and after using DDG for a few years I'm now testing out Kagi and I am happy to say that not only is the business model much better aligned with me as a user, but the results also seems to be significantly better than both Google and DDG now.
I learned this only a month ago, I am wondering if this is a new thing? I am not from US so maybe this term is used a lot on TV/radio/speech but not used as much in writing(blogs,news not sure about social media/memes) so it could explain why I never known about this until recently.
"goat meaning" -> first result
"goat acronym" -> first result
"goat definition" -> first result
Of those four, Nepo is the one with the best record against Carlsen even after this match.
Nepo (before this match): 4W 1L 8D (2/0/5 as black, 2/1/3 as white).
Nepo (after this match): 4W 5L 14D
Ding Liren: 0W 1L 8D
Caruana: 5W 11L 38D
Firouzja: 0W 4L 2D
He "squeezed in" because he won the pretenders tournament, beating all other challengers who played on exact same schedule as him.
He also played incredibly well until that loss in Game 6 demoralised him, unfortunately.
And somehow, watching the rapid WC at the end of December has become sorta a Christmas tradition for many in Norway. It's a kind of slow TV that works really well.
Online chess( pandemic apart) would never be considered equivalent to tournaments over a board
The same engines that people cheat with are the same engines used to detect cheating. If you’re using an engine to play your moves, you’ll be caught very quickly.
But suppose you sample from the engine's ranked moves to have some decent ACPL (average centipawn loss) error rate. Just a slightly lower rate than you'd have on your own.
If you further bias your sample to moves to that look reasonable to you, then I don't see how you'd get caught.
Current engines may not have the right support for such sampling, but it wouldn't be hard to implement, e.g. with a private fork of Stockfish.
Detecting a stockfish moves over enough sample size is easy sure, but detecting a engine which is designed to imitate human play not make the best move everytime is not easy with number of moves a human would play in their lifetime.
The original commenter say it’s easy to cheat at chess. While potentially possible, I wouldn’t consider building a ML model to mimic your own play an ‘easy’ cheat method.
I’d also say building a model to mimic your own play consistently would be incredibly difficult. But, that’s for a different conversation.
The point is cheating is bigger concern in online chess than other eSports
Anyway, I don’t think we’re disagreeing on chess cheating. For me, the small chance someone is cheating doesn’t ruin the esport for me - For you it does, which is a perfectly reasonable response to it.
Secondary thought in the engine idea you had - chess fraud detection, I imagine, goes well beyond just the engine and move likeliness. It will also human-like interaction (Can’t confirm this, but the PM in me has me consumed with thinking about solutions to this problem)
When people play a chess game online, they are frequently evaluating positions. This results in cursor/mouse behavior that’s sporadic. If a user is considering moving the queen, they’ll move their cursor over to it. A user relying on an engine for every move would interact with the board in a very precise manner.
A player with a perfect engine to mimic humans will still get caught as their interaction with the board would differ greatly because only one position is considered for each move.
Chess is only there because of history but it checks none of successful esport checkmarks. One might even argue that it has been a "solved" game for decades which is the opposite of what you want for a successful esports game.
One of the most important esport features is updates be it meta changes or new patches. That's why our current esport games are so huge even though they are relatively very new.
Id much rather watch competitors competing on 100% equal terms, without any developed advantage other than one created through the competitors skill.
Rocket league is a fantastic esport, and it’s been the same mechanics for years. There are no ‘special items’ or OP’d power ups. Both sides are 100% equal. It’s why I love it, the game is pure - Competitor vs competitor.
Most (all?) esport games use fog-of-war (RTS) or level design (FPS) or some other mechanism that hides the enemy from you. Without that, esports games have also been "solved by computers" for decades.
There is of course a chess variant with fog-of-war (dark chess). As far as I know, computers don't beat humans at that.
Chess is often played on software and tracked on software, and my understanding is that there are sometimes issues related to cheating.
You can't similarly use the strength of hydraulic cylinders to aid your strategic skills in a heavy lifting contest, or trebuchet skills, etc
I understand what you mean though, so fair enough. But I think it's generally only worth being nitpicky about definitions if it's important to maintain them and I think in this case formally solved is one of the important ones.
As for meta changes and new patches, chess kinda sees this in the rise and fall of certain openings. For example, the popularity of the London System in the recent decade and the development of new theory within popular openings (I recall the Tal Variation of the Advanced Caro-Kann being popular in a recent tournament even though the Short variation was seen as the most critical way to continue for white for a long time). And this is just at the highest level, anyone in online blitz has had to learn to refute the Stafford Gambit because it "entered the meta" after Eric Rosen popularized it a few months ago.
I've been playing online since the 90's and I can count one hand the times I've been certain I was playing a cheater.
Lichess and FICS are great (and free).
The "smarter" cheats use the engine only when they need to and those are harder to spot but again it's moves that make no "sense" with the direction of play - be like playing sunday league football and having the chubby dude with the beard take of down the pitch like Messi.
Mostly they catch them by running engine(s) over the games afterwards and looking for correlation between moves played vs what the machine wanted to do.
The funny ones are the players who drop a piece from a blunder then immediately start playing like Kasparov for the rest of the game.
[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
I first followed a WC match through live commentary in 2013 (incidentally Carlsen Vs Vishy in Chennai), which I think was the first ever live streamed on YouTube.
I've been following these WC matches since then; in similar boat as yours. Love watching all these analyses of immortal-games etc., but absolutely hate playing it :-)
Every day we have world class GMs (including Magnus) playing online, streaming play, commentary & such. It's put a real buzz into the game. A lot of it has to do with the personalities of current competition GMs and top streamers at the top.
It also really puts into perspective how impressive Caruana was in 2018.
He is a skilled player no doubt, and impressiven in his own right, but his 2018 performance is not a good way to gauge that .
Furthermore, I think this comment simply cannot be true for the simple reason that in no world does it makes sense for Fabiano to play for a draw. While you're right that's obviously "easier" to play for a draw than for a win, playing to draw for Caruana would actually be playing to lose, not only because it's a weak mindset but also because Magnus is the undisputedly stronger player in lower time formats.
Playing conservatively or defensively doesn't mean no prep or less work or less talent, it means only taking less risk.
Magnus is unusual for his aggressive playing style and makes piece sacrifices for activity while also being able to compute precisely better than most especially in the middle game.
The play styles become very different when same players play Armageddon ( black has draw odds , i.e. wins if it's a draw) so they can play more aggressively if they have more to lose .
IMO chess should default to armageddon if it wants to be better spectator sport.
You can thank alpha zero and Dubov for Magnus's willingness to sacrifice for activity, I think anyone watching a Carlsen game from before around 2018 would call Carlsen "aggressive", if anything Carlsen was known more to play into an endgame that he'd win off his persistence and accuracy. I also don't think this is accurate even for his more recent classical games. He'll take opportunities to go into inbalances that he feels are easier for him to navigate than his opponent, but he certainly isn't Tal and I think this mischaracterization also serves to downplay Caruana and Nepo's role in reaching sharp, lively positions in their matches, while overplaying Carlsen's. Again, all I am arguing is that Caruana's play in 2018 was both remarkable and admirable, and that it would be impossible for him to hold a drawn match against possibly the greatest chess player of all time if he only played to neutralize every position and didn't arrive with the mindset to win.
I disagree with your point about Armageddon for two reasons. 1. Draw odds means that one player is always playing to "not lose" which is exactly what you're critiquing. Sure white has to play aggressively, but black will be playing to neutralize all life in the position, and I personally don't watch to watch only Berlin defense games - it's bad enough that the Marshall has been reduced to a drawing weapon. 2. At lower time formats we see less deep lines and ideas and more mistakes. I personally enjoy high-quality chess and Armageddon isn't designed to produce that, it's designed to produce a decisive result. Plus, sacrifices aren't even unique to Armageddon, they might be rare, but queen sacrifices are still being played in top level chess, Dubov-Karjakin just last year comes to mind, and they're even more frequent in Rapid, Danyyil-Shirov being one that was extremely famous last year as well.
This is nonsense. Neither Caruana nor Carlsen were playing for draws.
At the world championship you would want to play conservatively , defensively and wait for a mistake to strike, there is a lot to lose if you try to force a mistake and play more aggressively.
It is not cheating or against the spirit of the game to do so, world championship matches have almost always been filled with draws.
That was an unusual feeling because normally I can only get a hint of what they are doing by loading the PGN into an engine interface and playing through the game trying out variations against the engine.
Either way, feels like we saw a couple of his lines come up. His influence on the game is fascinating.
c5: Not so much :-(
The pressure of a Word Championship match is not to be underestimated.
It’s reasonable not to expect it. But the real lesson is that spoilers can be anywhere. I used to listen to a radio station on the way to work every day, and I’ve heard them talk about Formula 1 exactly 1 time, when they decided the 7am commute show was a good time to spoil the race that happened at 4am. I have no idea why this mostly hip hop oriented radio station decided to talk about F1 that single time, but the lesson I learnt was just to wake up early and watch the sport if I don’t want to have it spoiled.