1) Game 6 lasted 136 moves, making it the longest game in world championship history, surpassing the 124 move game 5 of Korchnoi-Karpov in 1978.
2) Carlsen's victory in game 6 was also the first decisive match game (excluding tiebreakers) since game 10 of Carlsen's defense against Karjakin in 2016. Carlsen's defense against Caruana in 2018 featured 12 draws before moving into tiebreakers.
3) Carlsen won this match 7.5-3.5, making it the most lopsided victory since Capablanca defeated Lasker 9-5 in 1921.
Re: Your point (1), I read somewhere that the match took longer than watching the entire "Queen's Gambit" NetFlix series start to finish. (To put it in perspective for readers who may not realise how much time is spent at the board during these sorts of games).
The 6th game alone took longer than The Queen's Gambit.
(This is probably what you meant, but in chess a game means a single contest, while a match always means a series of games between two players or two teams).
Thanks for pointing this out! Game 6 started at 4:30pm local time and ended at 12:17am, making the game length 7 hours and 47 minutes total. It was the first time since adjournments were abolished in the 90s that a championship game started on one day and ended on another.
It varies a bit, but in this case[1] they had two hours each to reach 40 moves, without additional time per move. After move 40 then they got an additional hour each until move 60. After move 60 they got 15 minutes each, as well as each move now giving them 30 seconds.
It could be the worst challenger performance in the history of the game. Nepo’s performance in the very long game 6 was actually quite good, even though he lost it. Neither of them played accurately in the in the time scramble to move 40, but Nepo didn’t lose to a massive blunder or anything.
However after that he was clearly tilted off the face of the earth. He was playing much too quickly and made blunders than even a competent amateur could have spotted. In game 11 I’m sure he simply gave up after seeing a draw was inevitable, because he didn’t want to show up for game 12.
The most remarkable aspect of this match for me was the absolute mental meltdown of the challenger. Nepo’s a great player, and I hope he comes back from this. But those last 5 games were the worst games he’s played in his career.
As a not-even-really-observer casual observer, game 6 must have just broke him. Even in those rare moments where he had played to an advantage, he unforced-error-blundered it away mere moments later. There were at least two instances where Magnus was so stunned at the nature and plainness of the blunder that he had to collect himself in a "am I walking into a trap, you couldn't have just made that mistake" sort of way. Opening himself to that pawn fork... these weren't carefully laid traps he was falling into. This was shooting himself in the foot and face with Magnus out of the room. Absolutely stunning meltdown. I feel sorry for him, but mental endurance is obviously no small part of the calculus to being world champion and Nepo showed he simply doesn't have it.
Good mental is one of the core skills, and I think the silver lining for Nepo in this is that it’s very clear what he needs to improve. Hopefully he’ll be able to pick himself up and become a stronger competitor from it.
Incidentally the mental test of this best of 14 format isn’t even as hard as it can get. They used to play to a certain number of wins. The 1984 championship was abandoned in February 1985 (it started in September 1984) after 48 games (40 draws). They also had longer time controls back then, and would adjourn games overnight if necessary, so when you woke up to play a game you wouldn’t even know if you’d be able to go to sleep that night having finished it.
How else would you explain the moves well below his level that objectively cost him? He is a great player but does not have Magnus’ mental and emotional consistency. Not everyone advances to the top in chess with the same combination of inner traits. This is also seen in other competitions where humans must perform at their absolute best in all aspects to reliably win.
He lacks enough of it to become one at this point in time (when we have Magnus and Nepo has his current mental edurance) :)
Actually relative strength is one of the things that wonder me the most I would say in the game: when one of the opponents is much stronger than the other the wins look so easy and the loses so stupid, but when the winner is matched against someone even stronger you see the same exact picture.
I love you all I dunno why I say that now but here you go.
It's interesting because this weakness of Nepo was known going into the championship. And I have to presume that he worked on it. But there was just not enough time to have him build up the necessary mental conditioning. I suspect if he had a year or two to prep, Ian would have done a lot better.
> Carlsen's defense against Caruana in 2018 featured 12 draws before moving into tiebreakers
I really hope they are able to figure out some not-too-unnatural way to reduce the likelihood of draws. One easy possibility I saw suggested a number of times would be to remove the increment. Give additional time at certain move thresholds like they do now, but then at some point, that's it. No more time. Time pressure should remain a legitimate possibility of a threat throughout the match. When two GMs are in the endgame, +30s each move is an eternity, and how many tiny moves did we see them make just to get another +30s?
Oh well. I know excitement isn't the main driving force, I just think it's a real shame to see a world championship matchup like Carlsen/Caruana go to 12 straight draws and be decided by tiebreakers.
Strongly disagree. The main series of WCC should have players playing at the highest level, so there should not be too much time pressure. If it's all draw, that means players are equal at that level, so the tie-breaker match has more time pressure.
With Fischer his lopsided path to the championship should also be considered.
In the 1970 Interzonal to pick 6 players to go to the Candidates Tournament (along with Korchnoi and Petrosian), Fischer won with 15 W, 1 L, 7 D giving 18.5 points. The next 5 were 3 tied at 15 and 2 tied at 14.
You can change every one of Fischer's draws to a loss in that tournament and he'd still have tied for first.
Then in the Candidates, he played Taimanov, Larsen, and Petrosian.
He beat Taimanov with 6 W, 0 L, 0 D. (Taimanov, a Russian) got into considerable trouble over this. The Russian government did not believe it was possible for a player of his level to be so thoroughly beaten unless it was on purpose. They stopped paying him and banned him from foreign travel).
> You can change every one of Fischer's draws to a loss in that tournament and he'd still have tied for first.
Nitpick: that’s incorrect. Reading https://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/7072$iix.htm, he drew with Hübner, so if you change that to a loss, Hübner would get half a point more, moving to 15½.
Although Fischer achieved the same 4 point margin, Spassky had 3 victories (including the forfeit) in that match, whereas both Lasker and Nepomniachtchi had none.
I was looking at Go vs Shogi time control and was surprised that at top level Shogi match usually give more time to players, despite being mathematically less complex. AFAIK the longest allotted time in Go is Japanese Mejin match at 8 hour/player. Longest for Shogi is Shogi Mejiin Match at 9 hour/player. Even standard ranking match in Japanese Shogi allow 6 hour/player, more than any Chess tournament I have seen (at present).
I watched a lot of Shogi match, and that just make 3.15 hours allotted in WCC looks low.
(The 8-9 hour match is a 2-day match. At specified time on the first day player do sealed move, to be reveal at the beginning of a match the next day.)
3) That depends on what games you count and how you define lopsided. I'd say a reasonable quantification of lopsidedness is [winning score]/[games played].
By that metric Carlsen-Nepomniachtchi is fairly lopsided at 68.2%, Capablanca-Lasker is only 64.3%.
The disputed era FIDE world championship final in 2000 had Anand beating Shirov with 3.5 of 4, a whooping 87.5%. But you might no count that as it was not a traditional long 1v1 match.
So if we discount that we have to go all the way back to 1910 Lasker-Janowski, 9.5 of 11, 86.4% to find a more lopsided match.
The only other 1v1 world championship matches that have been more lopsided are:
Even if the quality of play in this match has been not great, one thing I really enjoyed was the extremely high class of commentary.
Caruana, Giri, Anand, Svidler and Nakamura have been doing commentary (simultaneously!) throughout the match. It has been a real treat, I don't believe any match before has had such a deep level of live analysis. I have had five different streams open at times just to listen to them all :)
I didn’t think the commentary was that good this year, too many awkward personalities. Anish was constantly talking over Judit. I tuned into to Vishy’s stream for a bit, but the person he had with him was incredibly awkward. I find Danny Rensch to be completely insufferable, which is a shame because Caruana is so good. Howell and Houska are pretty good, but they had some terrible guests on that stream, and all of the beard guys segments were incredibly cringe.
Jan and Svidler from the Karjaken match was the best commentary team we’ve had for a championship imo. I remember the main Chennai team being pretty decent as well, Tania’s a very good commentator, so I don’t know why they had her running around the event center interviewing people.
Agree with all your first paragraph points. Although he's only an IM, I really like Eric Rosen - he's a pretty reasonable personality and is able to crack jokes and keep the conversation moving nicely. Unfortunately he was part of the broadcast with Danny Rensch. Giri just seemed downright rude to Judit. He ignored what she was saying in many instances, argued with her when he was listening, and failed to credit her when he predicted or calculated something incorrectly.
I'm also not a huge Maurice Ashley fan - but think he did a good job handling the press conferences. What was interesting was that for Karjakin/Carlsen, Jan Gustafsson was doing commentary, but also was part of the Carlsen analytics/prep/second team. Svidler's analysis is always enjoyable, but sometimes he seems bored with games and his language almost becomes 'this is over let's move on'.
Anish did talk over Judit a lot, but quite often that was justified. At the moment of the c5 blunder, for example, they were analysing that exact move because Judit had suggested it, and Anish was explaining how it was just a whole piece.
Judit had a huge amount of patience and didn't seem frustrated by Anish at all, through any of the coverage. And even though Judit did initially play the c5 blunder, she was really great and insightful through the entire match, many times seeing things that Anish missed. Really they made a great duo and added to the fun and enjoyment of a difficult and long match.
Yeah, they did work as a pairing, and I regularly switched over from the Levitov Chess World stream (admittedly more often to see Magnus reaction shots though).
Yes while I understand how Giri could come across as rude, personally I thought he was just extremely passionate. As the 3rd place finisher in the Candidates he was very personally invested in this match, it could have easily been him sitting across from Carlsen.
If there's one person who could handle him and remain completely cool throughout it's Judit, they made a good team.
Svidler and Miro with the occasional kramnik and karjakin was great. I do miss the svidler gustie duo but we're not likely to get that while Jan is a second for Magnus.
Excuse my ignorance. Is Jan really that good of a player to be Magnus' second? Somehow his laidback style commentary made me feel he was not too serious with preparation
He's a good theoretician, and always shows interesting sidelines in his broadcasts. His job isn't to teach Magnus to be better at chess, it's to be on top of current theory and help anticipate what the opponent's team might prepare. I think Magnus's team has done that very well the last couple of cycles.
Game 6 was pretty tight and pretty good. You have to realize they were playing the last moves after midnight and they were playing them on increment, 30 seconds a move, basically rapid. Nepo's 'blunder' is an extremely natural looking move, 130. .. Qe6 and it only loses in 49 moves. But as was predicted before the match, if Nepo lost one it'd be an avalanche.
Nepo only squeezed in because the Candidates tournament was so weird with Covid and all. Caruana again, Ding Liren or Firouzja would have been much stronger opponents. I think the 18 year old Iranian phenom and world #2 Alireza Firouzja is the champion in waiting. But Magnus is still king and even Magnus would take another 10 years of dominance to claim GOAT from Kasparov.
Wow, I hadn't heard that Firouzja is now world #2 in classical. Good for him. Magnus answered a question about him in the post-match press conference, saying that Firouzja's impressive performances "motivated him more than anything else" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6FLv6lj0-0).
So, for anybody else who wasn't familiar with the term GOAT, and don't want to spend minutes fighting search engines all too eager to tell them about goat cheese, it apparently means to Greatest of All Time.
Please explain obscure or very domain specific acronyms.
My apologies. I'd never seen it, and since it was in the context of chess, I included that in my searches. There was lots of information about cheese, and lots of questions about who the GOAT was, but not what it meant.
Interestingly, my comment got a handful of upvotes before it was modded to oblivion, so apparently I wasn't alone in not knowing this very common acronym.
I'll try to be more American next time I'm on the Internet.
That is actually an amusing but interesting failure mode for search, linking "GOAT" to "goat" and "chess" to "cheese" is pretty natural, but totally misleading in this case. I wonder if there's a good solution (for google/ddg/etc users) for that beyond just putting everything in quotation marks, as that doesn't seem to help much anymore.
We could point it out and pester Google employees with how dumb it has become in every discussion where it is brought up.
I've been doing this for a while and it now seems I'm getting some support.
The last few years however I have given up Google and after using DDG for a few years I'm now testing out Kagi and I am happy to say that not only is the business model much better aligned with me as a user, but the results also seems to be significantly better than both Google and DDG now.
I hadn’t heard of the term before but since it was in all caps I searched for ‘GOAT acronym’ and the first match was on the money. Obviously searching for goat is going to find lots of stuff about goats.
>GOAT isn't obscure or domain specific and is a very common acronym used online for almost anything competitive and doesn't need any more explanation.
I learned this only a month ago, I am wondering if this is a new thing? I am not from US so maybe this term is used a lot on TV/radio/speech but not used as much in writing(blogs,news not sure about social media/memes) so it could explain why I never known about this until recently.
So I only had 1 contact with this and it was indeed about sport , something like "football player X is the GOAT" and I had to have this explained to me. so it might be a sports only term, since I am not watching or reading sports then it makes sense I do not see it used.
Same on DuckDuckGo too. Which is how I found out about the, before-unheard, term. Only saw it being used in Chess articles during the World Championships.
I'd recommend searching terms like "GOAT abbreviation" or "GOAT acronym" in such cases, both of which have explanations as first result for me. Otherwise, searching GOAT on wikipedia and going to disambiguation also has it under "other uses". wikipedia's disambiguation can be a bit overwhelming with long lists of other possible meanings, but it's usually helpful enough.
> But Magnus is still king and even Magnus would take another 10 years of dominance to claim GOAT from Kasparov.
Some big opinions here. Magnus has 5 undisputed titles. Only Lasker is ahead of him on 6, and Botvinnik ties him on 5. Vishy also ties him on 5, but one of those was from when the title split in the 90s. Karpov and Kasparov each have 6 titles, but two of Kasparov’s and 3 of Karpov’s come from when the title was split (and they were each playing on different sides of it). One more title make a good case for GOAT Magnus, two more seals it.
Kasparov has the longest tenure as world #1 from 1984 to 2005, 21 years. Magnus is currently at 12. Kasparov has the most consecutive tournament victories at 15 and 9 years of winning every super tournament.
Comparing Magnus to Kasparov is kind of like comparing Steph Curry to MJ. Could it happen? Yes. But Magnus has to go out and do it. I think if he can beat Firouzja he makes a better case but tying Caruana and Karjack at classical wasn't all that impressive. Beating the great Anand was.
(Actually, MJ is probably a bridge too far for even Curry. Maybe LeBron is a better comparison.)
Comparing ELO like that is silly. Kasparov had his final championship victory in 1995, and it was during the period in which he had left FIDE. Karpov won the FIDE championships (which of course Kasparov didn’t compete in), in ‘93, ‘96 and ‘98.
You could pick a similarly silly way to compare their careers by comparing their peak ELO. Which for Kasparov was 2851, and for Magnus 2882 (highest in history incidentally). Which is a rather large difference given the ELO system gets so wonky at that level that you can drop in ELO after winning an event (as I believe happened to Magnus after he won the Norway tournament this year).
It's just "Elo", not "ELO" - it's not an acronym, but rather named after the guy who created it.
Dropping Elo after winning an event isn't really that 'wonky' - it's just a Bayesian update for underperforming your statistical expectations. The same thing happened when Carlsen won the Candidates in 2013, he went +5=7-2, but he was 2872 rating against a field of 2774, so 8.5/14 would mean he loses ~6 rating.
curry is easily the greatest shooter, but yah, no way he's gonna pass mj (or lebron) for the goat title. lebron is definitely the better comparison there.
Game 6 was thrilling for someone like me who plays only blitz. I could never calculate all those rook moves without blundering, so the game looks more wild to me than it probably was haha. It sure was hard fought! The games after that were a let-down, but that's because Carlssen is just so damn consistent.
> Nepo only squeezed in because the Candidates tournament was so weird with Covid and all. Caruana again, Ding Liren or Firouzja would have been much stronger opponents.
Of those four, Nepo is the one with the best record against Carlsen even after this match.
Nepo (before this match): 4W 1L 8D (2/0/5 as black, 2/1/3 as white).
It's cool how big chess has become in Norway. Since Carlsen's first WC match, there's been live coverage on TV, streams from big online newspaper etc. And internationally it has also looked good the last few times. This year there were lots og different online streams of different styles, many gaining a huge view count.
And somehow, watching the rapid WC at the end of December has become sorta a Christmas tradition for many in Norway. It's a kind of slow TV that works really well.
Yeah, I remember how people at work all began building their own chess engines. It was nuts. I wonder how much this interest will affect Norwegian ability to bring up new chess talent or if Magnus will remain some kind of Norwegian chess anomaly.
Is it just me, or is Chess becoming a thing lately? I've recently started to really enjoy watching it (kinda hate playing it, haha), so maybe it's just because I'm paying attention?
You could say Hikaru single handedly popularised chess because he's a GM who started memeing on twitch.tv. There are other streamers who are also big, and some youtubers, but I'd say the fact that he's so highly ranked was required for success. Then Pogchamps tournament happened and chess exploded.
While Hikaru and other Twitch streamers/content creators are definitely a part of the puzzle, I'd say that this comparison of search trends[0] indicate that the more likely kick-off event was Queen's Gambit, which reached a lot of people that are not that into Twitch.
I don't think we have ever had these many GMs live commenting a chess match. Add to that a bunch of very entertaining (and often insightful) post-match analysis by IM/GM level players turned YouTubers. It all spices up the match quite a bit.
I first followed a WC match through live commentary in 2013 (incidentally Carlsen Vs Vishy in Chennai), which I think was the first ever live streamed on YouTube.
I've been following these WC matches since then; in similar boat as yours. Love watching all these analyses of immortal-games etc., but absolutely hate playing it :-)
Chess is in many ways, the perfect esport. I'm sure I'll take some flack for calling it an esport due to its rich history and the fact that it was not originally a "video game", but in 2021 those lines are blurred. In my opinion, it checks all the boxes.
It really is! The rules are fairly easy and a significant amount of people already know them; the game is free to play with no freemium model; the skill ceiling is really really really high. Sure you may not understand why Magnus makes his moves, but there's something very fascinating about watching a master at work.
Chess is only there because of history but it checks none of successful esport checkmarks. One might even argue that it has been a "solved" game for decades which is the opposite of what you want for a successful esports game.
One of the most important esport features is updates be it meta changes or new patches. That's why our current esport games are so huge even though they are relatively very new.
While I completely disagree with your characterization of chess as a "solved" game, whether it's solved or not also doesn't really matter. Aimbots can crush CSGO pros, and OpenAI beat TI winners OG in 2019, but at the end of the day the strength of computers is irrelevant because we want to watch sports being played between humans, the strength of algorithms or computers (mostly) doesn't play into our enjoyment so long as the game remains complex for the human players and spectators.
As for meta changes and new patches, chess kinda sees this in the rise and fall of certain openings. For example, the popularity of the London System in the recent decade and the development of new theory within popular openings (I recall the Tal Variation of the Advanced Caro-Kann being popular in a recent tournament even though the Short variation was seen as the most critical way to continue for white for a long time). And this is just at the highest level, anyone in online blitz has had to learn to refute the Stafford Gambit because it "entered the meta" after Eric Rosen popularized it a few months ago.
I disagree. Meta updates take away from the enjoyment for me.
Id much rather watch competitors competing on 100% equal terms, without any developed advantage other than one created through the competitors skill.
Rocket league is a fantastic esport, and it’s been the same mechanics for years. There are no ‘special items’ or OP’d power ups. Both sides are 100% equal. It’s why I love it, the game is pure - Competitor vs competitor.
Chess is "solved by computers" today, as in they will outplay the best humans, but that's in part because chess provides you with perfect information about the enemy's position at all time.
Most (all?) esport games use fog-of-war (RTS) or level design (FPS) or some other mechanism that hides the enemy from you. Without that, esports games have also been "solved by computers" for decades.
There is of course a chess variant with fog-of-war (dark chess). As far as I know, computers don't beat humans at that.
Solved by computers has a formal meaning, pertaining to absolute knowledge of the best move in every situation. My understanding is that chess not solved in that sense.
I understand what you mean though, so fair enough. But I think it's generally only worth being nitpicky about definitions if it's important to maintain them and I think in this case formally solved is one of the important ones.
Yeah, you are absolutely right, this is why I put it in scare quotes. (I felt that this distinction, though important, was not relevant to the point I was making.)
If we take it outside the esports realm, you could say the vast majority of sports has been "solved" since cars are trivially faster than humans, trebuchets are way better for throwing things over long distances, hydraulic cylinders beat anyone at lifting heavy stuff, etc. Nobody is advocating to stop holding athletics events because machines can do the specific task better, so why should we stop holding chess events for humans because a computer can do it better?
Some of the best esports with the deepest meta have no/little patch updates and their meta is constantly evolving. It’s the same in chess too. If anything, continuous patch updates that change the meta are a sign of weak game design.
Chess does have meta changes, though. Especially as chess engines become more advanced, like with the release of AlphaZero, different strategies have become popularized as a result
Its easy to cheat, but also easy to get caught. You can’t cheat yourself to a high score.
The same engines that people cheat with are the same engines used to detect cheating. If you’re using an engine to play your moves, you’ll be caught very quickly.
It depends on how you use the engine. Obviously, picking its best move or nearly best move when they're close in value, will get you caught.
But suppose you sample from the engine's ranked moves to have some decent ACPL (average centipawn loss) error rate.
Just a slightly lower rate than you'd have on your own.
If you further bias your sample to moves to that look reasonable to you, then I don't see how you'd get caught.
Current engines may not have the right support for such sampling, but it wouldn't be hard to implement, e.g. with a private fork of Stockfish.
I can imagine training ML models that can imitate human play closely enough and even your play specifically to increase the odds you win.
Detecting a stockfish moves over enough sample size is easy sure, but detecting a engine which is designed to imitate human play not make the best move everytime is not easy with number of moves a human would play in their lifetime.
The original commenter say it’s easy to cheat at chess. While potentially possible, I wouldn’t consider building a ML model to mimic your own play an ‘easy’ cheat method.
I’d also say building a model to mimic your own play consistently would be incredibly difficult. But, that’s for a different conversation.
While ML model building is bit more difficult , fuzzing a standard engine moves do only what you can understand is certainly possible without too much difficulty.
The point is cheating is bigger concern in online chess than other eSports
Yes, it’s a concern. But that doesn’t mean unfair advantages and cheating doesn’t occur in other esports.
Anyway, I don’t think we’re disagreeing on chess cheating. For me, the small chance someone is cheating doesn’t ruin the esport for me - For you it does, which is a perfectly reasonable response to it.
Secondary thought in the engine idea you had - chess fraud detection, I imagine, goes well beyond just the engine and move likeliness. It will also human-like interaction (Can’t confirm this, but the PM in me has me consumed with thinking about solutions to this problem)
When people play a chess game online, they are frequently evaluating positions. This results in cursor/mouse behavior that’s sporadic. If a user is considering moving the queen, they’ll move their cursor over to it. A user relying on an engine for every move would interact with the board in a very precise manner.
A player with a perfect engine to mimic humans will still get caught as their interaction with the board would differ greatly because only one position is considered for each move.
How do you tell? With CS it's reasonable easy to notice people headshot at uncanny accuracy / see through walls / etc. How can you tell someone didn't think of pawn D4 on their own?
With 100% certainty you can't but you generally get a feeling that something is off, in the case of an actual straight out and out cheat it's easier because typically 1500 rated players don't calculate accurate exchanges 12+ply deep.
The "smarter" cheats use the engine only when they need to and those are harder to spot but again it's moves that make no "sense" with the direction of play - be like playing sunday league football and having the chubby dude with the beard take of down the pitch like Messi.
Mostly they catch them by running engine(s) over the games afterwards and looking for correlation between moves played vs what the machine wanted to do.
The funny ones are the players who drop a piece from a blunder then immediately start playing like Kasparov for the rest of the game.
Definitely. Bullet & Streaming have changed everything.
Every day we have world class GMs (including Magnus) playing online, streaming play, commentary & such. It's put a real buzz into the game. A lot of it has to do with the personalities of current competition GMs and top streamers at the top.
Many twitch streamers have been playing it recently due to initiatives such as the Chess.com "PogChamps" tournament (particularly xQc, who is currently the most popular streamer on twitch)
Felt like a boxing match where Carlsen knocked Nepo down in the 6th game, and after that he just wasn't the same boxer/chess player. The next 3 decisive games had blunders by Nepo that would be bad for even the #1000 chess player.
One enthusiast on Reddit predicted Nepo would crumble after the first loss and Carlsen would win 4 games to 0. What was really frustrating was Nepo had plenty of time left on the clock during those blunders, almost like he was resigned to the fact that he wouldn't beat Carlsen.
It also really puts into perspective how impressive Caruana was in 2018.
Playing for draws is easier than playing for wins. At the world top level it is easier to try and draw games, so it doesn't that say that much really, Caruana's draws were not that remarkable or memorable as well.
He is a skilled player no doubt, and impressiven in his own right, but his 2018 performance is not a good way to gauge that .
I think this comment underrates not only Caruana's strength but also Carlsen's ability to navigate the incredibly difficult positions Caruana placed him in. Sure, no game from 2018 can compare against game 6 from this year, but game 6 was a historic game, but it arose from a subtle position that just as easily could have been played in 2018. I think game 8 most easily demonstrates how Caruana fought incredibly hard to win, with at least 19 moves of preparation in a rare line of svenishnikov and making a pawn sacrifice for long term chances. Just because a game is even until the end doesn't mean that they're easy, at the top level it means that its balanced on a knifes edge the whole way through.
Furthermore, I think this comment simply cannot be true for the simple reason that in no world does it makes sense for Fabiano to play for a draw. While you're right that's obviously "easier" to play for a draw than for a win, playing to draw for Caruana would actually be playing to lose, not only because it's a weak mindset but also because Magnus is the undisputedly stronger player in lower time formats.
Players play not to loose all the time that is nothing wrong or unusual about it, if both players play not to lose most of the game you are going to likely have a draw at the top level.
Playing conservatively or defensively doesn't mean no prep or less work or less talent, it means only taking less risk.
Magnus is unusual for his aggressive playing style and makes piece sacrifices for activity while also being able to compute precisely better than most especially in the middle game.
The play styles become very different when same players play Armageddon ( black has draw odds , i.e. wins if it's a draw) so they can play more aggressively if they have more to lose .
IMO chess should default to armageddon if it wants to be better spectator sport.
Again, while I agree that playing to not lose involves less risks, this doesn't characterize all the games between Caruana and Carlsen or Nepomniachtchi and Carlsen. Keep in mind that just because Caruana or Nepo aren't sac-ing a piece every game, doesn't mean they're not going for sharp positions and taking risks, that's just not how chess is played at the top level. The inbalances that they capitalize off of are nuances of position and structure, not necessarily just material.
You can thank alpha zero and Dubov for Magnus's willingness to sacrifice for activity, I think anyone watching a Carlsen game from before around 2018 would call Carlsen "aggressive", if anything Carlsen was known more to play into an endgame that he'd win off his persistence and accuracy. I also don't think this is accurate even for his more recent classical games. He'll take opportunities to go into inbalances that he feels are easier for him to navigate than his opponent, but he certainly isn't Tal and I think this mischaracterization also serves to downplay Caruana and Nepo's role in reaching sharp, lively positions in their matches, while overplaying Carlsen's. Again, all I am arguing is that Caruana's play in 2018 was both remarkable and admirable, and that it would be impossible for him to hold a drawn match against possibly the greatest chess player of all time if he only played to neutralize every position and didn't arrive with the mindset to win.
I disagree with your point about Armageddon for two reasons. 1. Draw odds means that one player is always playing to "not lose" which is exactly what you're critiquing. Sure white has to play aggressively, but black will be playing to neutralize all life in the position, and I personally don't watch to watch only Berlin defense games - it's bad enough that the Marshall has been reduced to a drawing weapon. 2. At lower time formats we see less deep lines and ideas and more mistakes. I personally enjoy high-quality chess and Armageddon isn't designed to produce that, it's designed to produce a decisive result. Plus, sacrifices aren't even unique to Armageddon, they might be rare, but queen sacrifices are still being played in top level chess, Dubov-Karjakin just last year comes to mind, and they're even more frequent in Rapid, Danyyil-Shirov being one that was extremely famous last year as well.
Not playing for the win aggressivly enough ends up becoming playing for a draw ? .
At the world championship you would want to play conservatively , defensively and wait for a mistake to strike, there is a lot to lose if you try to force a mistake and play more aggressively.
It is not cheating or against the spirit of the game to do so, world championship matches have almost always been filled with draws.
I feel sorry for Ian. That c5 move totally destroyed him. Some people don't understand how elementary mistake that was. And to make it in slow chess... I hope he recovers from that and goes on to win some tournaments. But as for the next candidates match, I think Alireza or Giri have the best chance to win it.
I'm a patzer, I hover around 1600-1700 elo and I'd seen c5 and ruled it out as losing becuase it traps the bishop, when he played it was I like "oh, I guess it doesn't and I missed something".
That was an unusual feeling because normally I can only get a hint of what they are doing by loading the PGN into an engine interface and playing through the game trying out variations against the engine.
Was he? Svidler implied that given he was close to both Magnus and Ian, they'd all decided not to put him in a difficult position and ask him to take sides. But Magnus did say it was the same team I guess.
Either way, feels like we saw a couple of his lines come up. His influence on the game is fascinating.
Doesn't really feel like this whole World Championship cycle hit great heights. Ding disappointed in the Candidates, Ian collapsed in the match. But that's life. I hope we get good results in the 2022 Grands Prix, especially now there's no qualification by rating.
NH having sports spoilers on the front page barely ever happens. Chess stories are also very uncommon here.
It’s reasonable not to expect it. But the real lesson is that spoilers can be anywhere. I used to listen to a radio station on the way to work every day, and I’ve heard them talk about Formula 1 exactly 1 time, when they decided the 7am commute show was a good time to spoil the race that happened at 4am. I have no idea why this mostly hip hop oriented radio station decided to talk about F1 that single time, but the lesson I learnt was just to wake up early and watch the sport if I don’t want to have it spoiled.
1) Game 6 lasted 136 moves, making it the longest game in world championship history, surpassing the 124 move game 5 of Korchnoi-Karpov in 1978.
2) Carlsen's victory in game 6 was also the first decisive match game (excluding tiebreakers) since game 10 of Carlsen's defense against Karjakin in 2016. Carlsen's defense against Caruana in 2018 featured 12 draws before moving into tiebreakers.
3) Carlsen won this match 7.5-3.5, making it the most lopsided victory since Capablanca defeated Lasker 9-5 in 1921.