Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title
chess24.comIt 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.
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...
Clicky without AMP: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/short-history-ai-school...
You are welcome.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe his opponents were too confused by his name being Go.
Go is the Japanese reading of his Chinese name. He was born Chinese, and his surname is 五, the number “5”, pronounced Wu in Chinese and Go in Japanese. Not the same “Go” as in igo (… but the same “go” in “gomaku”, the game of five-in-a-row)
His opponents who played him were sometimes mystified, though the reason often becomes clear many moves down the road. He was not afraid of starting complex fights, even ko fights, and the games often have huge swings in territory. He played in a way with great freedom. Opponents would play thinking they played a forcing move, only for Go Seigan to tenuki (play elsewhere on a board, often at strategically vital points). People have tried to replicate his style, but it is difficult to put into practice without Go Seigan’s reading skills.
His surname is 吳. Not only is it a different character from the one used to write 5, but it's also pronounced with a different tone in Chinese.
Also, his given name contains the character 源, which is read "gen" in Japanese, not "gan".
> Also, his given name contains the character 源, which is read "gen" in Japanese, not "gan".
This may be way outside of your wheelhouse, but I have to ask -
The Mandarin reading of 源 is yuán. The phonetics are something like [ʲyɛn]. A similar raising of the written vowel occurs in the pinyin syllable yan (e.g. 言, 严, 眼), which is [jɛn]. In other pinyin syllables, an "a" represents /a/, which is something sort of intermediate between the English PALM and TRAP vowels.
It makes perfect theoretical sense that /a/ might be realized as [ɛ] when following a high vowel. But I've always wondered whether yuan and yan really do have a phonemic /a/ there or whether there might be an /ɛ/ phoneme. And it's interesting to me that the Japanese reading of 源, presumably taken from a much older Chinese, uses /e/ there instead of /a/. Can you provide any insight?
I think you might find this entry interesting.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%BA%90
Some highlights:
* Different Chinese variations (Cantonese, Min, etc.) have different readings. Initials, vowels, and finals all differ.
* When borrowed into Japanese, the Chinese initial was ŋ, which isn't used as an initial in Japanese, and was substituted.
I also wouldn't assume that sounds that are grouped together are supposed to sound the same. en/yin/wen/yun use the same final in bopomofo, but sound different.
this smells exceptionally offtopic but if there's no phonemic -ja- then there's no reason to distinguish it from -jɛ- in a phonemic analysis, is there? although i believe mandarin can be analysed as a weird two vowel system if you take this approach too far though i don't have the paper handy
There is a /ja/ syllable. 亚，丫，鸭，呀.
There is a separate /jɛ/, 也，耶.
Within-syllable -jɛ- exists in yan and its "compounds" tian, mian, lian, etc; changing the final consonant to -ŋ gives you the yang / niang / liang / xiang series of syllables, which have -ja-. This would suggest that, if the vowels are to be unified into one phoneme, the realization of that phoneme is driven more by the following consonant than the preceding vowel/glide.
There's something weird going on where -ɛ- in a complex syllable can appear with more onsets than -a- can. We see e.g. tie, tian, die, dian, mie, mian, bian, pian (with -ɛ-) where we don't see tia, tiang, dia, diang, mia, miang, piang (which would use -a-). xia, jia, qia are all fine, and so is niang. My working hypothesis for that would be "it's a coincidence".
I believe without being able to cite anything that one reason for the spelling of yuan and similar codas with "a" is local variation in how the vowel is pronounced.
Local variation is indeed a hint since there are varieties that have more of an [ɑ] than an [ɛ] in <mian>, <lian> and so forth. Secondly, one can indeed analyze at least all the clearly compound finals (as opposed to the five simplex candidates, in Pinyin a, e, yi, yu, wu) as having either a high (as in, raised tongue) or a low (lowered tongue) nuclear vowel. Let's symbolize the former as ɵ and the latter as ᴀ, then Pinyin yin, yan, ying, yang can be analyzed as /iɵn/, /iᴀn/, /iɵŋ/, /iᴀŋ/. PY yong, BTW, comes out as a slightly surprising /üɵŋ/ (with /üᴀŋ/ missing), yue as /üɵ/ (with /üᴀ/ missing), yun and yuan as /üɵn/ and /üᴀn/. One hint that /üɵŋ/ for yong might be a good solution is the observation that Zhuyinfuhao (aka Bopomofo) writes this syllable as ㄩㄥ, which is analyzed (within this orthographic system) as ㄩㄜㆭ, so roughly PY üeng.
Further note - traditional Chinese phonology categorizes syllables by their onset and rime. mian is [mjɛn], notionally m- onset and -jɛn rime. yan is [jɛn], notionally zero onset and -jɛn rime. (And analogously for many syllable series involving a glide.)
One distinction that some Chinese speakers fail to make, though, is between the r- onset and what I would prefer to think of as the j- onset. Thus, for these speakers, rang / yang or rou / you are the same sound.
Pinyin ran uses the standard /a/ vowel, but yan does not. I don't know whether, for speakers who don't distinguish r- from y-, a distinction remains in the vowel of ran/yan syllables.
> 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.
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.
How does your comment differ from my comment?
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).
> 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
Yes, that's exactly what I said in my original comment.
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
> 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.
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
> 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.
No, pruning is by far the majority of the work the computer does. It is very much not trying to review all possible scenarios indiscriminately, because that can't be done, because there are too many possible scenarios.
And "pruning" and "making sense of the position" refer to the same thing. Interpreting the position is how you prune.
I think what many people in this thread are trying to stumble over is that the way a computer prunes moves and the way humans prune moves is qualitatively different.
A computer prunes its moves from either an explicit or implicit (implicit when it's say a trained neural net) database of known positions, with some quantitative sense of strength (usually a probability to win or something like that).
A human needs to assign a narrative to particular branching pathways. These are qualitative instead of quantitative assessments.
A human isn't saying, if I make a certain move there is an 85% chance of winning, and so that makes it my best bet. They're assigning arbitrary structures and narratives to positions, hence why many positions, tactics, and strategies in chess and other games are given colourful names.
The two approaches are very different and have different strengths and weaknesses. Which is why the best play outcome is to combine the computer generated moves with the human generated moves.
The human approach is very good at generalising new information very quickly. Assigning unusual or unfamiliar information in a broader qualitative framework about what good play looks like, think about players who are trying to create certain structures, shapes and patterns on the board.
The computer is very good at applying knowledge about individual moves at great depths. But cannot combine it with any external information. All information about the success rates of moves are determined from the database of all past moves. The computer can't condition those probabilities on things like, does my opponent need to win, or only draw. Do they have a tendency to be aggressive or defensive. Probabilities of success only make sense when taking a population view of the computers input data (a literally impossible task if your talking about the kinds of neural nets used in chess).
So a hybrid approach lets good players condition computer generated moves based on external information. Maybe the computer generates a line of play with 80% confidence of winning, but the human can see that because of certain qualitative structures on the board, the opposing player is more likely to see the solution than the computers population, and so can recondition the lines of play on this new information, even if the human has no idea why the line of play should work 80% of the time. Lines of play that would otherwise have very similar success rates (differing by only a few percentage points say) can be re-ordered based on human judgement.
Both the computer and the human can tell obviously bad from obviously good moves. But their approach is very different when nuance is required.
thank you, this is pretty much what I was trying to say. Especially the narratives part. there are plenty of instances of humans finding winning moves in positions that the computer did not 'see' the advantage of until after it was played. That doesnt happen because the human saw more moves ahead than the computer. It happens based on work done building a generalized intuition about the game itself which i would argue extends beyond what would be expected from "pruning" algorithms.
If a computer could assess every single move, it would. A human would still prefer to rely on narratives and game sense if it's good enough
I'd argue that if the human sees a line that the computer didn't see any advantage of at all, then the engine is just wrong.
The more likely outcome if the engine is 'correct' is that it sees the line but thinks an alternative one offers a much greater advantage.
The computer can't condition this information on what you or the opponent is likely to do though. For example, there are lines of play that an engine can generate where you can checkmate in 60+ (even examples where the number goes into the hundreds) moves but only if you play every move absolutely perfectly, this kind of strategy is very brittle, a human might make adjustments to preserve the general idea of the line of play but make it more robust to error. The engine might also generate lines of play that have one or two flaws, but the engine thinks it's very unlikely that the opponent will find those flaws, because the population of games in it's database tells it that very few opponents see them. As the human you might see that your opponent is taking a certain line of play to try and get some sort of positional advantage, and that they are more likely to see the flaw in the engines line of play because the goals are in direct opposition to each other, in this case you would not choose this line because the computer is unable to condition its lines of play on the quality of your opponent.
IMO this is the fundamental reason chess masters around the world don't feel threatened by the computers yet. The way computers play chess relies on past information, often this past information is generated by humans. Humans are also able to generalise the insights that engines can find creating more robust strategies that are hard for engines to beat, until the engine adds it to the database.
>The more likely outcome if the engine is 'correct' is that it sees the line but thinks an alternative one offers a much greater advantage
No I mean it literally does not see the advantage until after the move is played and it runs depth on the new position. then if you "undo" the move, the engine will now assert it as the best move instead of its previous recommendation (thanks to its cache). It is a very rare occurrence, but Ive seen it happen watching analyses of top games.
another similar thing is that engines aren't that great at detecting "fortresses". So a position that is a draw might be evaluated as an advantage for the attacking side, even though there is no successful attack available. technically the attacking side does have the advantage / more powerful position.. but since it cant be won it should be evaluated to 0. by evaluating it to +1 or similar, that might make the engine favor it over a +0.5 position where attacking chances still exist.
>The engine might also generate lines of play that have one or two flaws, but the engine thinks it's very unlikely that the opponent will find those flaws
do engines do this? this seems much closer to human strategies. In general I totally agree with the larger point that a mix of human and machine is the best combo.
>chess masters around the world don't feel threatened by the computers yet
what do you mean by this? If any master needed to play against stockfish for their life, I think they would feel overwhelmingly threatened. Or do you mean this strictly in the context of human + engine being better than just engine alone?
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.
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.
that's one hell of a story!
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.
It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life.
Not in checkers. The Chinook team later proved it is a draw if both players play perfectly.
In the context of the GP quote, Data did ~~achieve victory~~ busted him up, in a sense, by playing for a draw, so...
One of my favorite quotes of all time.
The only winning move is not to play.
Are you saying he busted him up?
Whoosh
Nah, he's quoting a TNG episode where Data does the exact same thing.
Data may have said it in TNG, but pretty sure this originated with the 1983 film “WarGames” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames).
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'.
Ah,oops, my whoosh!
Not at all true in general; consider tic-tac-toe.
“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”
"I'm not standing still; I am lying in wait."
Skynet doesn't have to do anything, it just needs to be patient.
...and self-replicating so it ensures its own survival long term of course, but that's a problem yet to be solved.
If you have a few hours to kill, here is a game the situation reminds me of:
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...
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.
If you like that you might like Jonathan Schaeffer's (the creator of Chinook) book "One Jump Ahead" in which he discusses Chinook and Tinsley in great detail.
Just bought it thanks. I had no idea checkers was so involved!
> 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."
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.”
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)
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.
Along the same lines of utterly dominant and lesser known, Jahangir Khan in the sport of squash. Most famously for 555 consecutive victories.
> "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.
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.
It turns out Checkers was solved, for perfect play, in 2007 if anyone was wondering.
https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/publications/solving...
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).
All the links are broken on that webpage.
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.
Oh, intriguing title. How is the book?
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.
Is it a junior high math textbook, or does it convey any other information?
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
This is really a riveting book. You don't need any interest in checks or computer science to enjoy it.
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].
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...
> ... 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.
Sounds like an urban legend. Gin rummy has too much luck for someone to have a perfect record.
> Ungar destroyed anyone who challenged him in a gin match, including a professional widely regarded as the best gin player of Ungar's generation, Harry "Yonkie" Stein. Ungar beat Stein 86 games to none in a high-stakes game of Hollywood Gin, after which Stein dropped out of sight in gin circles and eventually stopped playing professionally.[0]
86 wins in a row against one of the best opponents at the time has to indicate that skill can overcome much of the luck involved.
Not nearly as much luck as poker, especially Texas hold ‘em which is almost pure luck with very little room for strategy or calculation.
Hold em has a lot more of a skill factor than the losers of a game want to admit, bit a lot more of a luck factor than the winners do.
The list of sound defeats is kind of a who's who from back in the day: Black, Hawk, Robison, Klein, Leo the Jap, Price, Stein.
> indeed it is hard to think of a competitor in all of history more dominant over his sport or game than Tinsley.
Not a "he", but Heather McKay won 16 consecutive British Open squash titles. Squash got a World Open only in 1976, and she won the first two editions. In a career spanning 1960-1981, she was only defeated twice and both times were early in her career.
Where do I sign up for your daily checker facts newsletter? :)
That's a drake meme if I ever saw one.
No -> Fact checkers
Yes -> Checker facts
Surely you want fact checked checker facts?
Only checkers fact-checker checked checkers facts.
Checkmate
I’m not the fact checker I’m the fact checker’s son. I’ll be checking facts till the fact checker’s done.
He died in Humble.
Fantastic write-up. Thank you so much.
that is a cool story, thanks for sharing
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.
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.
> 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.
Viewership is not all that matters. I doubt it will happen, but I certainly wouldn't cheerlead the death of very high-level chess.
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 :)
I don't think it will ever go away if chess is still around. But perhaps it stops being the main viewership draw
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?
Did the invention of artillery cause javelin throwing to be dead?
I do not know the name of a single javelin throwing champion. But I know the names of chess champions… up to Kasparov.
You have no knowledge of Kramnik, Anand or Carlsen?
I’ve heard of these guys. But I do not know which of them is/was a champion. But I can name the previous champions, and I think I can still remember the exact sequence: Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanka, Alekhin, Eiwe, Botwinnik, Tal… missed somebody?
But I’ve lost interest after Deep Blue event. Alpha Zero plays were fun to watch though.
You missed a guy named Bobby Fischer, for one - a rather big name in chess history I would say. He was arguably a major driving force in turning chess into a professional discipline outside of the USSR.
As for computers, they've certainly changed the landscape tremendously, but it doesn't mean that players simply play like chess engines. You don't just get to transfer the chess engine heuristics to a human mind. Chess engines help players find ideas, refutations etc., and they're certainly significant when it comes to opening theory. The role of memorization in opening theory (at the highest level) predates computers though.
Computers have also levelled the playing field, improving (buzzword alert) inclusiveness. Players from countries with flourishing chess tradition, such as Russia, don't have the inherent advantage anymore. That's why the current top 2 (on the rating list) are from Norway and China, which would be rather unlikely a few decades ago.
They were/are all world champions :)
Carlsen, yes. But only because of his personality and streaming. I played in the chess club every day in high school in the 90s, and I must have had a similar reaction about computers, because I don't know what happened after Kasparov.
I also stopped watching red sox games once they won the world series. Fandom is weird.
I mean ... yes?
Oh fuck yes it would. I rather have a classical 960 tbh
Yeah, classical 960 would be amazing since it de-emphasises preparation.
There have been a few 960 world champs. The first FIDE one was in 2019. Wesley So won it.
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.
Exactly.
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.
Did you watch PogChamps? It had some great moments like this: https://youtu.be/YyG6HtsaF0w
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.
> 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:
Guggling.. gas!
> I feel like Fide should focus more on rapid, and get more involved in the online scene. Maybe this is the opportunity.
This cheapens the tradition and the prestige of the discipline. Chess has attained a revered status over the years. It's not perceived as a game like any other. That's why it's able to attract luxury sponsors, if nothing else. Shifting the focus onto the "double bong cloud drunk banter blitz" territory destroys this legacy. This casual, fun aspect exists and does very well independently of the official, suited up aspect. They are complementary. But I'd really think twice before trying to remove one of the pillars. Chess is the most known, researched and commented mind game on the globe, it doesn't suffer from niche viewership. There's no need to try and fix a problem that doesn't exist. Tradition and legacy is something no amount of online clicks could ever buy.
I didn't say anything about removing classical. It obviously has a place.
As for prestige and tradition... we shall see, I suppose. Prestige follows the prestigious. We are now entering terrify, with Magnus at least, where the best players don't want to compete in traditional matches and the chess watching public doesn't want to follow it anyway.
If you think FIDE involvement in rapid/online cheapens chess... then you'll eventually be in a world that has tradition & prestige on one side and popularity and the best players in the other.
> We are now entering terrify, with Magnus at least, where the best players don't want to compete in traditional matches
[Citation needed] :) Says who? What exactly indicates the best players "don't want to compete in traditional matches"? What implies that Magnus forfeiting his title (having collected five) is a result of such general trend?
Either it's "best players", or only Magnus, in this specific situation, having already built a remarkable legacy.
> and the chess watching public doesn't want to follow it anyway.
[Citation needed] again : ) Because I'm not sure if the chess watching public KNOWS that it "doesn't want to follow" traditional matches. Regarding the previous world championship match:
"Total viewership for the event exceeded 12.6 million hours watched with a record peak streaming viewership for chess of 613,000 concurrent viewers making the FIDE World Championship in Dubai one of the most watched events in streaming globally."
https://kommunikasjon.ntb.no/announcement?publisherId=168238...
> In total, viewers of the World Championship spent more than 12.6M hours on broadcasts, which is twice as much as at the World Championship 2018. The average audience of the World Championship 2021 was 239.7K viewers, which is almost 2.5 times more than at the previous iteration of the tournament
https://escharts.com/news/fide-world-chess-championship-2021...
Guess the chess watching public didn't get that memo. Viewership can grow substantially, despite this era of shortening attention spans. I can't see a problem in need of fixing here, much less a trend going in the opposite direction that these numbers show.
> If you think FIDE involvement in rapid/online cheapens chess...
Involvement in and of itself, no. It has its place. And they're involved already. There are World Rapid and World Blitz championships. But these titles don't hold the same value as "the" World championship. Ask Abdusattorov ("who"? Exactly :)) if he wouldn't prefer to be the classic world champion.
What I'm saying is that this involvement should be kept in proportion, and pushing towards rapid/online, with the goal of attracting more publicity (which is already larger than ever before, the internet takes care of itself without the need for any official blessing), steers towards diminishing returns, while the long-term costs would tend to increase.
> 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)
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.
> 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.
> 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%20Fischer-...
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
I think your argument here actually favours Fischer's dominance. ELO metrics don't matter as were talking about the best players of the respective eras
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.
Magnus didn't destroy Nepo, he was the first to win a game. At the level of chess in the first 6 games catching up after a loss is difficult, and Ian likely decided not to fight too hard. Also he said he overprepared for the match and was to burned out.
A fresh match with a new score could be very interesting.
7.5 - 3.5 is pretty much definition of total destruction. Bouncing back from defeat is part of the game (See Carlsen Karjakin match).
After the first five games it was 2.5 - 2.5. Whatever happened to Ian after the first loss does not indicate the level of the play he is capable of, and does not even in the slightest predict what would happen in the rematch.
I understand that Magnus glory hunting fans are everywhere and they love to pretend that once he had someone beaten, he'll repeat the feat with certainty, but have some more sense than that. More than one world champion has won the crown not on his first attempt, including one of the all-time greats, Kasparov.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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...
> 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:
I think you are misunderstanding. His sentiment seems to be one of "I am burnt out and unmotivated to continue BUT the idea of playing against a young upcoming GM could be motivating enough"
So it isnt the most important reason, but nepo being the challenger didnt offer anything to change his mind like he was hoping the result of the candidates would.
Even wolves are only focused during occasional hunts. They also play, raise their young, mate, sleep, and care for their sick and injured.
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.
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.
Not sure there will be much distinction in the history books unless there’s an accompanying rule change, etc. that comes out of it.
It is both okay to stop and do other things eventually and it also counts as ‘breaking’
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.
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.
Yes, quitting is always breaking. It is just that breaking isn't always a bad thing for the player
For me it's the intent at the time a decision was made.
What intent constitutes 'breaking'?
It's a temporal question. If you decide in the middle of a competition that you don't care any more and want to quit/forfeit/throw the match, then you broke. You committed to playing an event, presumably because you thought you could win or at least compete, and instead your mental stamina broke and you gave up.
IMO, it's less the intent that you have when you quit - the intent is almost always at that point that you don't want to be there any more doing the thing. The more important part is the intent that led up to the moment where you quit.
In some ways, it's similar to quitting any job. If you just have a bad day or week at work and put in your resignation with no other plan because you just can't stand coming in to work again, you "broke". If you're still working, but interviewing elsewhere, get another job, put in your notice and walk away with something else lined up, it's a bit different.
So the only way for it not to be considered not 'breaking' is by losing. That makes no sense
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.
Well, there is another way: you can die undefeated, like Alekhin.
Yes, every championship title eventually goes to someone else.
Counterpoint: John Elway.
I don’t understand
> 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.
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.
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
> 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.
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).
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.
The overall match can be interesting, while still having some periods of lower intensity. The guests are typically celebrities which also has some relation to chess, for example a famous actress being an avid amateur chess player as well.
The guests will typically join in on the discussion of the positions, and as such often serves as a proxy for the viewers by asking questions like "but why doesn't he just do X now" and similar.
It doesn't always work but overall I think it's been a positive addition to their broadcasts.
I do watch the WC matches myself, but definitely not live.
Trips to Spain between moves.
> 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.
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)
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).
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
>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 :)
> 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.
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.
Chess on an infinite board is asymptotically difficult in the worst case. Chess on an 8x8 board can be solved in constant time.
Not sure if this was sarcasm, but that's like saying NP-hardness is no big deal because we only care about finite problems.
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.
I solve the TSP every time I run errands.
How Sudoku is NP-Hard?
If you generalise sudoku to a board with sides length, with subsquares with sides length n, then sudoku is no complete.
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.
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.
Chess on an 8x8 board is not NP-hard. That doesn't mean it's easy but invoking NP-hardness is kind of meaningless.
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.
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.
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.
Why hasn't it been done then?
We haven't build enough Dyson spheres to power a computer of the right size yet.
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.
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 :)
I invite you to sit down and solve it then
A hundred billion years is still constant time. That doesn't mean it's doable.
70% draws is a very small number, really. Not conclusive at all.
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)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
Would you play tic-tac-toe for a win with that scoring ratio?
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.
This reminds me of football analogy where goals scored at away matches count for two in competitions like Champions League.
I am not good at chess but would it help if win as black was rewarded more than win as white?
The current trend has to been to increase the value of any win, with things like 3 points for a win and only 1 point for a draw. In my opinion increasing the points based on color is an interesting idea, but it's unlikely to be seriously considered because of the fact that it would disrupt the "symmetry" in chess both the sort of abstract fashion, and also in the specific - such as requiring tournament pairing systems based on score to be completely reworked.
One tie break system, armageddon, does break the symmetry by giving black draw odds (he wins if the game is drawn) but less time in a blitz game. But it's very poorly regarded and generally only used as a this-game-MUST-have-a-decisive-result last resort.
This implies that top-level players aren't trying for a win.
> Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw.
Even the best human players are nowhere near perfect play.
Chess engines have proven that even players that are 1000 Elo stronger than the best players alive today can lose. Just look at how each new version of Stockfish absolutely trounces the previous version.
Stockfish 7, released 6 years ago, is nearly 500 Elo weaker than the newest version, Stockfish 15.[0] That's the difference between Carlsen and the weakest grandmasters.
0. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/64992190/179047597...
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?
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-...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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_solu...
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)
Having a winning strategy for black seems impossible though; the discussion is whether white have it or is it a forced draw.
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/20050330222720/http://www.chessv...). Versions that are more complex than chess and are a win for black may exist.
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.
That would give black two moves in a row, which is a different scenario, and might still be optimal for black.
Black doesn't know it's getting two moves in a row when it makes the first move. And on the second move, it can only take advantage if white's first move reduces white's optionality in a specific manner, e.g. by blocking another piece essential for response to a certain tactic, which by construction, would mean it wasn't really an opportunity to transpose the game to hand over the initiative.
Not sure I follow.
The scenario we're positing is that perhaps, in fully-solved chess, white is actually in zugzwang, where every initial move is actually bad for them.
If there were some way for white to hand the first move to black, then clearly this would be the best solution.
But all the take-back solutions (e.g. move the knight forward and back again) actually give black two moves, which is a different situation.
And the stutter-step solution of white moving a pawn only one space instead of two doesn't work because that's simply refuting the premise that white is in zugzwang.
It's not a solved problem but our best players and best computers perform better with white. The edge isn't tiny either.
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.
> always
Not always. Almost always.
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.
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.
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].
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.
Stockfish lost a handful of games against Leela from starting positions that were a couple of moves into mainstream openings. I don't think it's at at all unlikely that there's a route that beats it.
Can you provide an example of such a game? I am following computer chess pretty closely and it's just all draws if we start from mainstream openings. By mainstream I mean things that are considered solid by today top players and engines. Some of the traditional mainstream openings turned out to be problematic (King's Indian for example). I am talking about recent Stockfish (the one with NNs) as the traditional version had pretty serious problems in certain positions and needed an extensive opening book to steer it out of trouble.
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.
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.
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.
What do you mean skip the first move? Like play a neutral move? Why would such a move exist?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ahh okay I think I get it now, you are saying if chess is win for black, that immediately implies zugzwang for white from starting position. In the same way, chess being a win for white implies zugzwang for black starting position.
So chess being a win for one side is equivalent to starting position being zugzwang for the other side.
It's obvious now, but so interesting to me, I never thought about it that way! Thanks for taking time for explaining yourself.
White could win without zugzwang! Because white starts. After the first move, the position is no longer symmetric, so it doesn't help black to skip to switch sides.
You can play e.g.
1. e3 e5 2. e4 whatever
And you effectively have a king's pawn opening with colours reversed
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?
Provably there's little that can be said about chess at large when it comes from opening to endgame. Heuristically speaking though matching moves against even a beginner is a very bad strategy for play, as a recent speedrun being done by GM Aman Hambleton on youtube has been showing.
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.
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.
Still an open problem.
Unlike tic-tac-toe we're not certain if it is a win or a draw for perfect players.
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...
AFAIK it's not a solved game so we cannot say with certainty.
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
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 ⅓ 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)
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Say a player just rote memorised moves from a chess engine and just played it. Would that be considered cheating?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
No, that is exactly what they do in opening preparation.
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.
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.
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.
That would depend on the opponent doing the same, and picking the same engine and settings for their side too.
> Is there something they're memorizing
Yes. Their upcoming opponent's past games (including analyzing them for strengths and weaknesses), and engine lines mostly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>>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)?
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.
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.
> Is it because its stressful, and demands too much work and prep from participants?
The problem is that the world champion is out of play for 6 months out of every two years, preparing for just one game.
It's boring for him as well as the fans to spend that much time in isolation just trying to memorize everything about one particular opponent.
It would be better to have him out and about playing tournaments and beating lots of different opponents.
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.
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.)
Of course a human can't outrun a car. This isn't some unprecedented idea, people have retired for this reason before:
I guess swimmers have known that the performance of powered aquatic vehicles runs circles around them on many metrics for longer.
Not to mention some other mammals.
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.
That only takes prep time away from the world champion, not the candidates winner.
The candidates winner probably won't have spent that much time preparing for Magnus, since they had to prepare for all the candidates matches.
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.
The WC would basically become a part of the candidates tournament. So they could use the same sponsors.
This would be really great. Less prep could also lead to more opening mistakes and decisive games.
Chess960 or other variants would be nice to mix things up over time
You can't just change the format. Then it's not the same sport. It's like saying we should change football (soccer), reduce the field size, make goals bigger and reduce play time to 60 mins. Then it's not football anymore, it's another sport.
If Magnus doesn't want to play this sport anymore, it's his decision, and totaly understandable. But don't try to change like a century of tradition (much like the rules of chess).
EDIT: fix typo
> 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.
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.
How about a very short gap, say a week, after the Candidates tournament to the Championship match to avoid long opening preparations?
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.
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!
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.
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.
> Time to change the format
The format has been changing way too often, if anything.
> 12 matches is long (edit, 14 now), but no one dares to take any risks.
Not really: 12 or even 14 games is short, which is exactly why players aren't particularly willing to take risks - short format makes it hard to catch up should they fall behind. The format used to be 24 games in Kasparov times, and some WC matches were decided by the "first to X wins" rule, which could last very long, given that draws wouldn't push things forward (and for example Alekhine beated Capablanca after 34 games).
> And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting him again isn't that exciting.
It wasn't such a steamroll, the score doesn't tell a full story. Nepo's play quality was excellent and he arguably had more winning chances throughout the first half of the match. His first loss was in the longest WC game ever played (136 moves, and theoretically drawish almost until the very end when Nepo finally slipped). He collapsed psychologically right after, starting to make errors that - in his own words - were "simple things you would never overlook in a blitz game".
In part due to that gruelling, exhausting loss, for sure, but some have theorized he may also have folded due to realizing how many good chances he had missed before that.
GM Sam Shankland (US champion of 2018, for those not up to date with the who-is-who of chess world) went as far as to say Ian was two different players in the match: Nepo A and Nepo B.
Subverting people's expectations, Nepo won the Candidates now so convincingly (some suspected he might not recover, and certainly not to such an extent) that I see no reason why one would expect a landslide Carlsen's victory in the upcoming match.
Especially since there's an enormous difference between having NEVER played a WC match (which was Ian's situation the last time), and having already played one.
To quote Kramnik reminiscing on his first WC match: "it was still a very unfamiliar situation, like playing all your life for Lokomotiv and then coming out to play for Real Madrid in the final of the Champions League. Of course, you have to get used to the new situation, kick the ball a couple of times so they don't laugh at you."
> Even Carlsen didn't like the format
Yeah, well - he didn't like it, isn't that a bummer :) But come on, it's not like Carlsen has no say in the matter of the format, especially now that he already is a 5x world champion. He could have negotiated a different one with FIDE - or at least try. Obviously it's too late for that once the challenger has already been revealed, the time for that was before the cycle started. The format isn't set in stone though, far from it, and the #1 player, the reigning WC, has a lot of weight to throw around.
Carlsen may have not liked the format from an objective point of view, but the format was certainly very convenient for him. He excels in rapid chess, so if his winning chances are, say, around 80% in the classical portion of the match, they probably reach something like 95% once it comes to rapid tiebreaks. And the shorter the format, the larger the likelihood of getting to the tiebreaks.
> 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.
This isn't something new. Kasparov was still the world's #1 for years after he lost the title to Kramnik. (He had actually hoped for a rematch, but they couldn't work the conditions out, and since age was catching up with him, he finally retired.)
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.
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."
The Wikipedia page on Paul Morphy says he gave up chess age 22, tried to establish a law firm, all his clients wanted to talk to him about chess instead of legal matters, and he ended up living a life of idleness on his family's fortune.
That seems to put the quote in a different context.
I hope it doesn't apply to coding too.
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.
I don't think that ability to code is a sign of a gentleman
Perhaps you might say something like that for e.g. competitive coding or leetcode.
>>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.
> There is a big difference between inventing solutions to novel problems,
how many programmers/software developers can claim to inventing solutions to novel problems though? 0.01%? less?
Code golfing!
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.
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…
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.
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.
But that doesn't actually separate the players from their time. Opening theory and endgame knowledge is developed with computers now, and humans use and learn from them. Move accuracy for thousands and thousands of GMs and IMs will easily be higher than Kasparov in peak form back in his heyday. But Kasparov came up with those moves, learning only from lesser minds.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
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.
>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!
>I've always found it fascinating the level of commitment required to play Chess at this level.
There's several intellectuals I could name which were headed towards world class status like Demis Habbasis & Aleister Crowley decided to give up the game and later became remarkable men in their own right. I think of Paul Morphy who is probably the player furthest above his peers in history who decided to quit and be a lawyer and got annoyed whenever people would try to bring up the game.
I find it interesting to think of these men who are great enough to become the worlds best at chess, and some decide it's not worth it, some achieve that greatness and then require, and some seemingly are in it for life.
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.
Speaking of Bobby Fisher I found the book End Game fascinating and engrossing.
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.
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.
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.
...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...
Did the preparation pay off?
No
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
>elo distribution has nothing to do with how good players are
Nothing to do with it? That's a bit much.
It's not a perfect system, nor is it a trivial problem to solve, but elo definitely highly correlates to how good the player is.
I think the point is it's a relative rather than an absolute measurement and you can't compare across time because the number of players in the system influences the scores.
> but elo definitely highly correlates to how good the player is.
it only measure how good a player is compared to the other ranked players.
> #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.
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.
My read is he's being honest and will not in fact enjoy playing the World Championship.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
How do you disincentivize win trading?
How do you mean one can trade when someone has lose? Do you mean that all russians agree to lose to their number 1?
He means I let you win with white, and you let me win with white, and we both end up ahead by doing so.
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.
This year's candidates was pretty combative, I don't think they have a problem to solve more with that.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Hikaru kicking himself about that last game, now.
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.
My thoughts exactly. One game away from playing for the world championship. Would have been awesome to see, and I think he would have had a very solid chance against Ian.
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.
So if you win the WC once, you then only perpetually play the WC games and not all the games leading up to it? Yeah, that's really strange and seems to favor the incumbent
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 ?
"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.)
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.
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.
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.
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...
Oh interesting ! I didn't know that !
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
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.
Magnus would do well if he applied to anything involving math and calculations.
SC has a sane dose of reflexes and micro management.
Nepo is an ex professional Dota player
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...
Not sure chess players would be able to do 300+ apm though....
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
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.
no, dude. it would take at least couple years of intense training for Serral v Magnus to be somewhat interesting
I'd love to see that.
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.
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.
Aside from watching the Magnus documentary about a younger Magnus while I was in high school, I have almost no knowledge about competitive chess. What sorts of things do chess players engage in during the course of the six months leading up to a match? Is there something that they're trying to remember or a video that they're studying (what would they be looking for)? From the beginning, I was under the impression that they might be played at any moment. This sounds like a really difficult situation.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Why does the WC take so much more prep than other tournaments? Is it because of the format, or just the pressure to win?
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.
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.
The preparation. Studying your opponent’s history for 6 months without spending time actually _playing_ is not fun.
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
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."
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.
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".
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.
Magnus' streams in blitz chess are way more interesting than official plays IMO.
Yes, finishing his World Championship affiliation.
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".
Perhaps Magnus is going to pull a Kasparov and start his own competing World Championship.
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.
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)
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.
He has every right to decide so. It is his prerogative.
Nonetheless, this will, for sure, be disappointing for many chess fans.
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.
Expected by many. Still, disappointing for many, including me :)
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
Time for a chess rules change?
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.
Russia is playing China in the world championship. I wonder if US is getting a serious heartburn
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
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.
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).
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.
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?
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".
Isn't he still the Chairman of the Board of Russian Railways, a state-owned company?
According to their website, he left that board in 2020.
https://ar2020.rzd.ru/en/corporate-governance/board-director...
So, he worked for the Russian state until 2020, then? Or until March 2022, when he resigned as head of Skolkovo?
As you can see, he was sticking around until the war actually started. Did he precipitate the war by lending his name and skills to Putin? IMO, definitely yes.
Should he resign from FIDE? Russians do not resign, they cling to positions of power indefinitely.
Should FIDE fire him? Definitely yes, its rules are made for respectable gentlemen.
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.
>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.
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.
To be fair he does "go win that one".
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.)
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.
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.
Why not handpick his opponent? The tournament hasn't been great at choosing opponents, and the format of the championship sucks
because if a title defender can handpick an opponent that creates glaringly atrocious incentives, the most obvious one being that they can pick whoever they think they're most likely to beat, turn down candidates they personally dislike, and so on. Basis of fair competition is that the process of selecting opponents is impartial and based on merit.
Other two claims are hard to substantiate either. Why has the tournamnet not been great at choosing opponents? They've all won fairly and they've all been among the strongest players in the world.
He said the same thing way before the candidates.
Face it FIDE, chess.com is where the chess world is at these days, and when in a mood, Lichess.
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.
I understand his decision but still I'm disappointed.
Wow, what an impressive run though!
Weird flex: drop out of WC to promote scam artists:
> I feel, the FTX Crypto Cup, which is going to be awesome
Chess at this level is hard work, by resigning now he "sort of" stays world champion
Too many other people are using computers and earbuds to cheat too.
he's just fucking with Naka :D
Wow, this site's GDPR cookie nag exhibits the worst dark pattern I've seen in the genre, and that's saying something.
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)
"Did Michael Jordan win all six championships convincingly? All series went 5 games or more."
While Karpov's opinion is debatable of course (although the man knows a thing or two about the subject), I frankly can't see how this analogy is applicable here?
If anything, Carlsen's WC matches fell definitely on the short side (which is one of the reasons why 2 of them were only decided on rapid tiebreaks, which is kind of ridiculous in and of itself; not saying it's Carlsen's "fault", but still). And all but the last one - where Nepo self-destructed anyway - were 12 games long.
Back in the dya of Kasparov vs. Karpov a WC match was at least 24 games long - so for example Carlsen's both wins against Anand in 2013 and then 2014 combined were only as long as a single match before his era. And the (in)famous aborted match of 1984-85 lasted for 48 games. The struggle used to be much greater.
How does the analogy with Jordan fit here exactly?
Both Jordan and Carlsen won championships. Many of Jordan's games were very tight, down to the last second. I can find another player who won more handsomely, that does not negate Jordan's achievements. That's the analogy.
As I'm not a basketball fan, I can't really comment on how Michael Jordan compares against other greats of the sport in terms of level of dominance, longevity, sportsmanship etc.
This being said, I don't think anyone NEGATES Carlsen's achievements though. Certainly noone in the thread. So this looks like a textbook strawman to me
You used the word "GOAT", I gave you an example of another GOAT, showing that your argument that Carlsen is "not one of the goats" does not hold water because "he did not beat people convincingly" (itself quite a bizarre statement, the objective is to win, and Michael Jordan is one of GOATs because he won so many championships, and Karpov's argument can be made against him to, if you know the games played). This is not a straw-man, I don't think we have the same definition of that. Besides that one quote from Karpov, you cannot find anyone else making that point, so you used one quote for a a pretty substantial statement. If it was an opinion held by many, I might entertain it a bit, but it's just very wrong.