By the same token, we should scrap most of the Olympics. For example, why run a marathon there? We already know who is fastest in a year, and we do have a series of grand slam events (http://worldmarathonmajors.com/US/)
However the Olympic marathon is special because it is completely different. In most other marathons, runners care more about their time than about winning, because it determines whether/how much they get paid to run other marathons. In the Olympics, on the other hand, nobody cares about times.
Similarly, the classical one on one match for the world championship in chess is different from tournament play. In the former, you have to beat the strongest player in the world; in the latter, you have to beat the weaker players or top players with an off day and prevent getting beaten on your off day or by stronger players.
It's the same in soccer. There, there are both national competitions where consistently beating weaker teams is the way to win and national knock out tournaments where one has to beat the best team to win.
And yes, knock out tournaments are more likely to have the weaker team win, but that can make them more attractive, as determining the strongest player may take a long time (for an example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1984)
IMO, the 'only' problem with the chess world championship is that the organization is a shambles. Fix that, and nobody will complain that the knock out tournament is different from regular tournaments.
In this scenario, chess's biggest advantage is it has an extensive, well developed rating system--Elo[1]. The tennis example given in the article isn't a good one, because the point system used to determine rankings is somewhat arbitrary. I wrote about this a little more in depth [2] while I was developing a free android app to bring elo ratings to any multiplayer game [3].
If we are going to stick with the title of World Champion, I believe the best way to go about it is an annual double round robin tournament featuring the 10 highest rated players. Each player plays every other player twice, once with black, once with white, and the player with the most points (win = 1 point, draw = .5 points, loss = 0 points) wins.
The problem with having candidates matches--or really any qualifying tournaments--is that it heavily favors the current champion. Even a player as strong as Carlsen probably has a < 50% chance of winning a tournament(s)/series of matches against other top ranked players. This means that the top rated player may have a cumulative probability of <10% of gaining the title, while the current champion, even if ranked eighth like Anand currently is, could have a 40-50% chance of retaining the title.
This is why the title of World Champion should be based off a round robin tournament of all the top players. Chess already has a robust, accurate, and thoroughly tested and revised rating system. We ought to make more use of it.
Edit: Another problem with matches, as opposed to tournaments, is that transitivity doesn't exist in chess (as I've learned in my years of competitive play). If A regularly beats B, and B regularly beats C, it does not mean that A will regularly beat C. This is where matches are flawed--one player could have a particular weakness against the other and lose a match to him, while still being the strongest player in the world, as measured by his results against all the other top players (which is what the elo rating does).
The problem with double round robin (or long tournament in any non-ko form) is that after some time most players play for nothing or not so much. It's not ideal that the winner of the tournament is a person who scores the most points against opponents who already lost their chances and are not so motivated anymore.
Another problem is that it's just another tournament, we have a lot of those in chess. If you want a system to determine the strongest player just look at the rating list which is formed from results of all those tournaments. You don't need to play long additional one.
On the other hand world championship matches have tradition. Most chess fans remember at least some of those. Maybe Fisher's match, maybe Kasparov-Karpov battles, maybe the one when Kasparov destroyed Anand or maybe the one when he banged his head (unsuccesfully) vs Kramnik's Berlin Wall. Matches are popular, they excite the audience, people talk about them long before and long after. The winner guarantees his place in history as a member of very narrow group of players (only 15 of them, for what is over 100 years of world championship history).
People yelling "anachronism" don't understand what value this tradition have for chess players and chess fans around the world. Every sport has its own. Tennis has grand slams, football has the world cup, athletics has Olimpics. Chess has world championship matches and please all the armchair revolutionizers leave them alone.
The kinds of top chess players that participate in the supertournaments we're talking about are extremely serious about every game, even if they have no chances in the tournament. Their ELO rating is equally affected by every game in the tournament, and their ELO often determines which tournaments they'll be invited to next.
Their personal 'career records' against other players in the field are also very hotly-contested. Nobody in the top 20 would give up a win or a draw against anyone else in the top 20 without a very serious fight.
It's very difficult to remain serious for 18 rounds when you play last 12 with no hopes for anything.
It's not even about being serious. You will have less motivation for preparation, you may be willing to gamble more etc. once your chances are gone. Those soft forms of not caring that much matter and in my opinion they are human nature - it's difficult to put 100% of effort if you already lost.
I don't think the existence of ELO means we should make more use of it - rather, it means we don't need a world championship if the objective is to measure who is best in the win=1 draw=0.5 loss=0 scheme of things (this is, I think, part of Someone's point above). Everyone in the chess world knows Carlsen is the better player, even before we know the results of this match. Likewise, we knew Kasparov and Fischer were the better players. But the matches against Karpov and Spassky were still phenomenal, because they involved psychological and technical depth that couldn't have existed in a mere "tally up the [bigger tournament/overall rating] points" system.
Also, 1-vs-1 gets beyond the ongoing debate about whether draws should count for 0.5 or less, which is nice. More specifically, the question of whether and how to reward being consistent (many draws, few wins and fewer losses) but rarely brilliant versus uneven but generally great isn't as pressing in a match, since it'd (likely) end up not mattering.
That's true. My comment was premised on the assumption that we want to retain a World Champion title. And there is definitely a whole new element that comes into play with matches. If we still want to stick to the tradition of a world championship match, perhaps the best way to do it is to have a double round robin of the top 10 players, and the top two finishers then play a match for the title of World Champion.
Your comment about rewarding consistent but rarely brilliant versus uneven but great bring up another interesting nuance about matches versus tournaments. Fischer complained that once a player gets ahead in a match, there is no motivation to play fighting chess because every half point bring him closer to winning a match, and players are therefore incentivized to play for a draw. In a tournament, that usually isn't the case since the leader will typically have a few players nipping at his heels.
> ... every half point bring him closer to winning a match, and players are therefore incentivized to play for a draw.
This tendency could be discouraged by making wins more weighted realtively than draws: win = 2 points (or, may be 1.5 pts), draw = .5 pts, loss = 0 pts.
Regarding 1/2 points for drawing: the "masters' draw" (where on the last days to positions draw after the opening to cement their positions) is a cancer to tournaments, perhaps 0.25 points for drawing or similar will help a bit.
How is the tennis points system arbitrary? Each tournament has set points depending on ranking of the tournament, each placing in the tournament has a set number of points. The points won are carried for 1 year.
Rankings are seen to be pretty accurate when you look at who gets through each Grand Slam round.
The system works for the top players, but I think once you move below the elite rank the rankings aren't really accurate. I think the system is arbitrary for a few reasons:
1) The number of points awarded for tournament performance seems pretty arbitrary. For instance, winning a grand slam results in 2000 points, while coming in second is worth 1200 points and coming in third/fourth is worth 720 points [1]. Is coming in second really only 60% as good as coming in first? It's hard to believe there's some deep, evidence-based rationale behind picking these precise values.
2) The tournament hierarchy is also arbitrary. A win at a Grand Slam is worth 2000 points, while winning gold in the Olympics is worth 750 points [1]. Why? Shouldn't the points awarded be based purely on the strength of your competition?
There are other issues, such as rewarding someone who plays a ton of tournaments with mediocre performances, versus someone who plays less often but with better results (though this is somewhat offset with the difference in points awarded based on performance). I've had friends complain about similar systems in video games-- apparently in Halo the top rung of players is full of mediocre players who play a lot, racking up points in the process and moving up the ranks.
Since tennis doesn't have a concept of "World Champion," I think the sport would be better served to switch to the Elo system like chess. It provides an accurate comparison of relative player strengths, it does a decent job dealing with the plays a lot vs. better results problem, and it functions exactly the same regardless of the tournament you play in-- you only get more points if you perform better or play stronger opponents. Another interesting tidbit is that it gives you a statistical probability of any player beating any other, which isn't possible under the ATP system.
Edit: One other problem with ATP points--since most tennis tournaments are knockout (as opposed to swiss pairings used in chess tournaments [2]) the only thing you know for sure is that the winner as the best player in the tournament, assuming tennis results are transitive (a big assumption). But if you're unlucky enough to be in the knockout branch that features the best player, you could be knocked out earlier than your would otherwise merit, which means you could get far less points than you deserve.
>Similarly, the classical one on one match for the world championship in chess is different from tournament play. In the former, you have to beat the strongest player in the world
The whole point of the article is that the current world champion isn't the strongest player in the world. In fact, there are several players that are stronger than he.
It's not his fault that he keeps winning though :-)
Old master against young wolf representing new generation duel has its charm. It's symbolic. It adds to the spirit of the match.
The author of the article whines that Anand is not the strongest player anymore. So what ? If you want the strongest player look at the rating list. He holds the title which because of its tradition and all the battles fought for it has big value for chess fans around the world.
Winning Wimbledon in tennis is prestigious because of all the players who won it before and because all the great matches played there. It's because of tradition and living memories. It's the same in chess. The author proposes just scratching it off. His idea is similar to getting rid of Wimbledon and creating some new tournament in Dubai instead.
The existing system significantly favors the incumbent, who only needs to win a single match to retain his title for another cycle. Most other sports do not hand the title holder a free pass to a 1:1 match. Anand could have shaken up the chess world, and won himself a great deal of respect, by offering to go through qualification himself, but he didn't.
He holds the title which because of its tradition and all the battles fought for it has big value for chess fans around the world.
You're begging the question here. The author is saying that the title should not have so much value.
What author wishes doesn't matter, you need decades of tradition, games and drama to have this kind of value. It already exists and we can just move it at will. One thing to do is to exploit it by organizing new matches with maybe some adjustments to qualification system (and maybe even getting rid of incumbent advantage). Other thing which author proposes is just scratching it all off and start a new thing - this new thing being yet another tournament (with it being long bringing disadvantages I wrote about in other post).
Again, it's like scratching Wimbledon because it's on grass or World Cup because winning it is easier than placing say 4th in Primera Division. Still people care 10x more about "silly" Worlc Cup as they care way more about anachronic World Championship match.
New system might be fairer, better, w/e but just because it's new you just lost many fans, interest and sponsors.
Actually, Anand is in top 3 strongest players in the world. Aronian might be better than him but Anand is certainly better than Gelfand, Caruana, Grischuk, Nakamura, & Kramnik. All these players have higher ratings.
The author is too hung up on the rating being an absolute measure of ability, but Elo has its own set of problems (e.g. rating inflation). Anand has very little incentive to play open tournaments and compete for rating points when he can instead spend all his effort defending his title for a big payout.
The idea of a "World Champion" doesn't make sense in boxing, either. It doesn't make sense in most professional sports, in which "championship" status is essentially the result of a random walk through a succession of games or matches over a given timeframe. But fans prefer randomness. Fans like upsets, underdogs, unexpected outcomes, turnaround stories, and changing fortunes. Fans would hate long-term statistical regressions across N population of teams or athletes.
A lot of sports need champions. More accurately, they need the idea of champions. Fans and enthusiasts have an intrinsic desire to know where everyone stands. Competitors need something to strive for. And that something has to be in constant contention. Someone has to occupy the throne, but his seat needs to be sufficiently precarious.
Chess has swung in and out of the public eye over the decades, but by and large, it's occupied the fringes of pop-cultural obscurity. Take away the Garry Kasparovs, Bobby Fischers, and Anatoly Karpovs of the game -- or rather, the idea of these people as "champions" -- and chess would be even more obscure in the public eye than it is today. Chess, to put it bluntly, has never had a great PR plan. The championships, flawed though they might be, are the fraying threads tenuously holding the game above the abyss of public irrelevance. Chess insiders need the wonkiness of Elo ratings and normative comparisons. But outsiders and casual fans need the romance. Chess needs to strike a balance between these two groups and their oppositional desires.
The point of the "world championship" in any sport or game isn't actually to determine who's the best. It's to determine who's currently on top over X timeframe (by a mostly arbitrary arrangement of circumstances and outcomes). Fans won't articulate it as such, but that's what they like about championships. Championships satisfy the human desire for narrative.
The author is suggesting scraping the world championship in favor of a golf or tennis-like grand slam: have four major tournaments per year. These tournaments would still have champions, upsets, underdogs, and narratives to them. It works well enough in golf and tennis.
There's the Wijk aan Zee tournament every year which should be on the list. It's up for debate what the others would be.
I like the suggestion personally and hope to see it happen. This is coming from a chess player and fan.
Also, up until recently, you used to be able to find chess columns and puzzles in the newspapers. Nowadays they've been cut or replaced by sudoku. But for a long time that was excellent PR. I don't think it's fair to say chess never had great PR, since even in the US it used to be in the newspapers regularly. And it's still popular in Europe.
That's an interesting point. Regardless, I still see a world champion boxer who has defended the title a few times as more of a champion figure than a tennis player who is currently ranked number one. A tennis player consistently winning most of the grand slams (like Federer a few years ago).
I think you can just look at thee things as extensions of the rules of the game itself. A close tennis match isn't won on a simple count of points won. Tennis' scoring system rewards the ability to win important points, rally, etc. Those are the rules of tennis.
The rules of championship boxing (or chess playing) is that you have to beat the champion to be the champion. They are also that a boxer is ranked where fans and fighters think they're ranked, not based on some objective analysis of past scorecards. Come from behind knockouts and coming out on top of a close war counts more than winning every round by technical point fighting. Beating a fighter at his own game or being aggressive too. Beating a famous former champion on his way out can count more than a higher ranked but lower profile contender.
Games have their own logic. So do meta games like tournaments or championships.
It's also a 100+ year old tradition that even many of the "chess insiders" cherish and respect. For example Aronian (world #2) said in an interview that he thinks Anand deserves to be considered the strongest player because he's defended the title so many times.
The World Chess Championship has been through difficult times in recent decades, often due to bizarre decision making by an ineffective governing organisation. However there are good signs that stability and coherence is returning, it's on an upswing. Anand has been a great World Champion, winning many brilliant games in his defences against worthy opposition. Carlsen-Anand has captured the imagination of chess players around the world to a much greater extent than any recent tournament, no matter how prestigious. Oh except maybe for the Candidates tournament - which gained it's outscale gravitas because it was a step towards the throne.
The World Championship of Chess has tradition, gravitas, drama. Statistically speaking the strongest World Champion has not always been the strongest player at any given point. But so what; Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik .... Anand, [Carlsen?]. These players have ascended the pantheon and achieved a kind of immortality. They're all worthy. Don't you dare tell me that Petrosian isn't (see original article). I'd hate to interfere with a tradition like that.
(Note: yes I am flushing the period between Kramnik and Anand as a sad anachronism).
Chess stopped being interesting to me a long time ago, when I realized the only way to be a competitive player was to become a human database. If you don't devote significant effort to massive amounts of memorization there is no way you will be able to compete.
The magic of the game to me is/was in working hard to figure out how to out-think, out-strategize and even trick your opponent. And, yes, that still exists. World Chess championships are not robotic regurgitations of prior games. Some aspects of them might be, but there's plenty of hard thinking applied as well. All I am saying is that you reach a level beyond which the only way to progress is to become a database and that's simply not interesting to me. I also happen to think it is an absolute waste of time unless you happen to be particularly gifted at chess and have aspirations on the world stage.
This is the reason I don't encourage my kids to continue playing competitive chess beyond a certain stage. One of my kids was killing it in local competitions all the way up to the stage where kids started to become walking databases. I wasn't going to do that to my son. There are better things to focus on in life.
The other realization was that getting better at playing chess didn't make you better at everything else. It is a fallacy to think that because someone is amazing at chess they have superior reasoning abilities in other domains. That is rarely the case. There are early to mid-stage cognitive gains to be had from learning and playing chess. Beyond a certain point getting better at chess simply means you got better at chess and nothing else.
For it's not so much the database aspect, but the risk-reward curve is awful. You're probably better off pushing your child to become a professional athlete, in those terms (not that I'm encouraging that).
The time commitment to becoming a world class player is such that consumes most of a young person's life.
I was a Master level player by the age of 17, through some talent, supplemented by hours upon hours of studying and coaching. This was not pushed upon me by parents, but more out of my own competitiveness. This is not a prodigious level - you should probably be an International Master by that age to be called a prodigy. I was only a top 10 or so player nationally for my age category, with a 0% probability of making a living or anything close to it from the game.
By the time I reached University, I all but completely abandoned chess. Studying Computer Engineering meant I couldn't devote enough time to it to stay competitive, and real life happened.
Same as you, I will teach my kids chess, and help them get to a certain competitive level, because I do believe that playing chess at a high level improved my brain function in a way that has helped me in other analytical tasks (e.g. engineering), but I won't push them to continue with it beyond a certain point.
I realized the only way to be a competitive player was to become a human database.
I would have agreed with you five years ago. Today, Magnus Carlsen is known for being less booked-up than most elite players, playing openings just to get in the game, while rated #1 by a significant margin. So maybe there's hope.
Beyond a certain point getting better at chess simply means you got better at chess and nothing else.
No argument there. And isn't that true for most things in life?
Correct. Carlsen has destroyed the preparation/memory junkies. Chess did flounder for a while as everyone started using computers for preparation and helping memorize openings, but it has been made redundant by his style of play.
If you encouraged you son to do no opening preparation, aside from general principles, encouraged him to turn up at the board physically fit, full of energy, concentration and determination to win instead of tired a sallow from spending all his time studying, then he would be killing it even more. Those other players may now and then score the odd point from their preparation, but usually only against other preparation junkies.
You have to be a walking database to be good at chess the same way you have to be a walking database to be a good programmer: hundreds of patterns small and big, thousands of tricks and some learnt by heart information. After all that comes creativity. Chess is very similar in this respect. As to it not being useful... well one thing is it's competitive activity. That teaches you about winning and losing and dealing with it. All the thing which comes with it: dealing with luck, seeing hard workers coming out on top, realizing you are not very special snowflake and there are hundreds people as talented (or more) than you. It's quite a skill. I am for one very grateful I learnt about it when I was a kid by doing competitive chess.
It's a lot easier to make a living as a programmer than as a chess player. Also, winning and losing as a programmer doesn't apply (except at a hackathon or similar competition).
Winning and losing apply to everything in life. I think people who were exposed to competitive activity as children deal with setbacks way better. That being said chess is not exceptional here - about any sport would do as long as compete, train and are part of the team.
As to making a living as a programmer being easier - no argument but it doesn't relate in any way to my post.
"Winning and losing apply to everything in life" is nonsense. As well say winning and losing apply to nothing in life.
Certainly learning to lose is probably a good thing when you are a youngster, but "everything in life" sounds miserable to me, and perhaps only reflects your worldview, and is not in fact an absolute as you suggest.
The saying goes "Good chess players develop their brains, great chess players waste theirs".
As a FM, I prefer that my kids do not study chess but something with more helpful side benefits, programming, math, basketball even piano.
I would have much preferred to become a master at programming that a chess master. A candidate master in programming can make a pretty good living, while a chess master would be living in a park.
It is as Buffet said "Do something that you do not hate for a living".
This makes me sad to read, but I had a similar thought when I was seriously studying chess (I'm only an 1800-1900 player though.) I ultimately abandoned chess, with the occasional blitz match on ICC these days.
I was spending 2-3 hours each night by myself alone and really enjoying it. I was also paying IMs for lessons. I was improving a lot. However, I was alone most of the time and couldn't share my experience with anybody. There was also very little tangible benefit to me other than entertainment and mental stimulation. Two things I can get elsewhere. Since I do have a masters degree in computer science I decided to focus on two things: Software Engineering and Violin.
I took up violin and haven't looked back. I had zero music ability an when I started couldn't read music. It's the same amount of hark work as chess. Like chess, I probably started too late to be anything other than an intermediate player. The difference is, I can play for my wife and my parents. A random person on the street can appreciate what I'm doing. I try to practice only 30 minutes a day.
I also doubled down on software engineering. Instead of spending 2-3 hours playing chess, I spend more of my evenings writing code.
You are so right. When I played a bit of chess I thought I'd teach my future kids chess, kind of like the Polgars. Then I read "Searching for Bobby Fisher" and "The Chess Artist" and completely changed my mind.
Wouldn't overspecialization be common with most pro sports?
Playing sports is great but becoming a swimming world champion, for example, is just hours every day of swimming. Hardly world-changing or helpful outside the pool.
I believe the contention focuses on the difference in how you play against an opponent. In chess, by this contention, ultimately what your opponent is doing has little bearing on what you do. There is a "correct" response to every board position.
Now, I think this is accurate for essentially single player sports. Golf and the like. Many competitive sports, however, you have to adjust what you are doing based on what your opponent is doing. Not just in a "correct" way, but to account for changing circumstances.
In the book How to Choose a Chess Move by Andrew Soltis, Andrew analyzed high level chess games and counted the number of moves into four categories. Here was the breakdown:
1. Forced moves 6%
check with a forced move, forced defensive move, etc.
2. Book moves 28%
opening moves following the opening book
3. Clearly best moves 30%
there's one clearly best move out of all the moves on the board
4. Discretionary moves 36%
there are many best moves, so one person would choose one move, but another person could choose a different move, and neither would be "right"
What does this mean for your playing?
It means that there is not always a best move, and so you shouldn't obsess over trying to find it. You have to accept discretionary moves.
I'm not really sure this disagrees with the assertion, though. Upwards of half of the moves are either "following a book" or "clearly best."
I'm also assuming for a large portion of the remaining "discretionary" moves, there is a "clearly bad" set of moves that should not be picked. This is a large set of things you have to memorize that are not really based on what or how the opponent will play.
Just because this correct response exists (and almost surely it's not unique anyway) doesn't mean it matters. What your opponent does and what his style is has huge meaning in practice and that will remain the case as we are not solving chess in near future and even if we did the solution will be too big to memorize anyway.
I think I agree. Just saying what my understanding of the assertion was. Basically, that there are only so many "meaningful" positions on the board. And at the upper levels, the question becomes more of how many of those positions have you memorized. Not, "how does your opponent play?"
As opposed to a game such as tennis. Where you really have to consider not just what you are capable of against a volley, but what your opponent will do with it.
No, chess is not about memorizing position and most games leave memorized territory fast. I don't know why this idea that chess is about memorizing openings got so much traction, it's nonsense. Top level games are rarely decided in the openings these days (although it happens that someone got nailed but usually it's because choosing very sharp variation and then forgetting the analysis) and there is a lot of play in positions never seen before in most of them.
Top level games are rarely decided in the openings because top level players typically don't make bad ones. :)
Is this akin to saying that top level tennis games are rarely decided by double faults. Likely true, but completely ignores the point that learning to serve over the net correctly is a vital skill. Just as learning a vast repertoire of studied moves and board continuations is key to chess.
The World Chess Championship, like all other competitive sports and games, provides entertainment - it doesn't feed people, cure cancer, etc. Gaffney's argument is logical, but for that matter, abolishing competitive chess would be just as logical - or illogical.
Weird to see this on a mainstream site like slate.com. The world title is merely one symptom of the professional chess world's many problems.
Good point. Does the world champion also have to play through the rounds up to the final match? That could help, having to go through the round of 8/16, so the championship match doesn't end up being the best vs someone who was the best a while ago. Then it'd always be a fun match between the two top. Not to mention drawing to keep your title doesn't seem fun
No; the defending champion automatically plays in the World Chess Championship. The problem with the champion playing in the candidates matches is that the champion and the candidate will play each other before the championship title match, which kind of kills the hype.
Chess is more about the games than the outcomes. While drawing to keep your title doesn't seem fun from a statistical standpoint, the draws, in this case, are often hard-won.
Even more interesting is that one of the reasons that Carlsen has progressed so amazingly is that he has been known to play on in positions where most grandmasters would agree to a draw.
I agree that the World Championship is rather arbitrary nowadays, but we already have the tournaments for a "Chess Grand Slam." Dortmund, Linares, Tata Steel, and the Tal Memorial are known as the strongest four tournaments during the year, aside from Candidates. These could serve as the benchmark for what the author is suggesting, but large tournaments aren't the answer to everything.
There is certainly a difference between match play and tournament play - personally, I feel that the World Championship should still be decided by a one vs. one match. Carlsen has demonstrated his dominance in tournament play and is clearly the favorite, but Anand's match experience allows for a competitive dynamic.
Of course, the entire system is a bit unfair and convoluted. Recall the whole World Chess Federation business from the 90s and the Offical vs. Unofficial World Championship nonsense. Carlsen abstained from the 2011-2012 cycle because of his dissatisfaction with the extant process. Nevertheless, I feel that this title is a bit too harsh. I'm supportive of a balance between larger tournaments and a bracket-style approach to decide on a world champion, not abolishing the title altogether.
I'm surprised the guy writing this is a US national master, he should know better.
1) There is a huge difference in winning a round robin tournament vs. a head to head match in chess. The psychology is completely different. Anand has played in many matches, so he knows what to expect. Carlsen not so much. Carsen is also playing in Anand's native India.
2) The author puts too much stock in chess ratings as the absolute measure in chess ability. Elo has its own set of issues (e.g. rating inflation over time).
3) The author also fails to point out why Magnus rating is so much greater than Anand's. Anand simply has less incentive to play in open tournaments knowing he is going have to defend his title in a years time for a big cash payout. Throughout the course of studying he finds novelties (moves that have not been played/analyzed before, but he thinks are solid moves) and he does not want to tip his hand (preferring to have his opponent try and figure out the continuation over the board instead of with the help of a computer.) The result? He plays in just enough tournaments to stay sharp and in those tournaments he plays safe chess.
I think the fact it is an anachronism is what makes it worth continuing. It has a history.
There is a lineage stretching back to the 1800's. It is a significant thing to beat the current champion, who beat the previous champion etc. And the process of selecting the candidate to challenge the champion hasn't always been perfect, but in general it is pretty good and fair.
And regardless of ratings / performance etc, the World Champion is a match play champion. Elo is a very objective way of deciding who is generally the strongest player, and that is published and acknowledged. There is on and off : a world knockout champion, a world blitz champion, a world rapid play champion. So loads of other different scenarios are taken care of, so why not preserve the match play champion lineage.
Anybody know if the sports writer is a rated chess player? While I don't particularly agree with the article it is at least interesting. From my perspective, the world championship is somewhat like the superbowl---if I like the opponents, I pay attention; else not. Should it be fixed? I think it better to spend time 'fixing' FIDE first, then returning to the layered approach of some decades back. Most of what many rated players that I talk/play with think the obvious corruption and manipulation need to go, but many point out that the bent politics is a tradition in of itself :)
Matt Gaffney got his National Master title from the U.S. Chess Federation in 1991. He wrote Slate’s political crossword from 1999 to 2003 and now writes a similar puzzle for The Week. He blogs about crossword puzzles at www.gaffneyoncrosswords.com.
An interesting tidbit is that while the difference in rating between Carlsen and Anand is 95 points, the difference between Carlsen and Houdini 3 is 376 points.
Elo scores in different rating pools are not directly comparable at all, only the difference in ratings in the same pool is significant (although generally computer chess rating lists try to make them look reasonably close to the FIDE list).
More big problems in comparing these ratings: intransitivity of chess strength, variation of strength for different time controls, volatility/time variation of human strength, and the much lower statistical significance of human rating lists. There's probably more that don't come to mind.
But anyways, yeah, it's pretty indisputable that computers absolutely massacre humans at chess these days.
The problem with this assessment is that computers basically cheat. Carlsen isn't allowed to turn up to a game with an openings book, and some way of looking up all possible 7 piece or less endgames.(if I remember correctly), but the computer can. Another way of looking at is that if Carlsen had all that information at his disposal every time he played another human, his rating would be 300+ higher than everyone else as well.
This is not cheating in any real sense of that word. The computer has that opening book in its memory, so why shouldn't it make use of it any more than Carlsen is making use of his memory?
What's the alternative? Harrison Bergeron-style handicapping of computers, to soothe our human egos?
I wouldn't say that was cheating. It's not like they've got the books sat in front of them. They are simply using one of the many advantages of being a modern computer - huge and fast memory capacity.
But whilst the fact that computers are now better than humans at chess is interesting and impressive, it doesn't really matter in terms of things like the world championship.
Machines can beat humans at all manner of competitive events - plenty of vehicles, and probably some robots, could go faster than Usain Bolt for example - but that's irrelevant when it comes to discussing the Olympics.
Today's computers would still dominate even if their opening books were taken away.
Open book essentially represents a very extensive analysis of one position (the starting position) that has been carried out by humans over centuries. We aren't as fast as computers, but we've been working on this one problem longer and with massive parallelism, and so we've got the main lines covered quite deep.
It used to be that most of book went deeper than a bookless computer could analyze in the time available for the opening in a timed game. This meant that a booked up human could steer the game into lines that appeared favorable for the computer when analyzed to the depth the computer could analyze, but were actually favorable to the human when analyzed to book depth.
Computers are now fast enough that they can reach or surpass book depth in most lines, making it much much harder for a booked up human to steer the game into a favorable line.
As an example of how fast computers are now, I just let Stockfish 4 64bit have a go at the start position on my 2008 Mac Pro (dual 2.8 GHz quad core Xeon processors, without hyper threading). I gave it 3 minutes (3 minutes per move is common in world class chess events).
These were the settings: 8 threads, idle threads do not sleep, 8 GB hash table.
It reached a depth of 30 ply (44 ply in selective search), and examined 940 million nodes, averaging around 5.3 million nodes per second. (It picked d4 as its move, and expects a reply of d5).
The endgame tables also aren't as important as you might think at first. They only cover endgames without pawns, and so it is not that often that positions from these tables appear in a game. If one of these positions DOES show up in a game, and the computer misplays it without access to the tables, that isn't likely to give the human the win--it most likely will just let the human draw in a lost position. That's because the problem computers have with these endings without using tables is that they aren't able to see how to make progress from a won position so they end up hitting the 50 move draw rule. (Note that this only applies to games with a lot of pieces left. Even fairly old chess programs could do the basic piece-only endgames without needing tables).
Thus, if the tables were taken away, the overall result would be that in the games where pawns remain (most games) computers would win a lot more than humans, and in games where all the pawns go away while there are still several pieces left humans would get some draws in lost positions.
Overall, take away both opening book and endgame tables, and computers would still dominate, just not by quite as much because of the rare pieces only endgame that humans would sometimes draw from a lost position, and the rare case where the human could steer the opening into one of the few lines where book is still deeper than the computer can reach and that line's evaluation changes between the depth the computer reaches and the depth the book reaches.
Table bases do include pawns. I don't think anyone would think humans are stronger than the best computers even if the computer didn't have opening books and table bases, I was just saying that to compare ratings isn't really fair.
Another interesting tidbit is that the difference in rating between the top ranked player (Carlsen) and the World Champion (Anand) is the largest since Spassky-Fischer in 1972, when Champion Spassky was rated 2660 and Fischer was rated 2785--a 125 point difference!
Anand is older and has less incentive to play in open tournaments when he gets a huge payout for defending his title every 1-2 years. He's playing just enough chess to stay sharp, and saving all his analysis/novelties/hard work for the big payout of the world championship. He simply doesn't care about rating.
At least some (if not all) of that can be explained by rating inflation. The same gap in ability translates to many more points today than 40 years ago.
>The same gap in ability translates to many more points today than 40 years ago
Not really. Ratings inflation means you can't compare the absolute values, but is much less noticeable on ratings differences.
So 2660 + 4.7% = 2785 (125 points) in 1972.
The equivalent today would be something like;
2750 + 4.7% = 2879 (129 points)
The same gap in ability translates to only 4 more points.
Actually even that modest difference should not arise from ratings inflation. That is because the Elo system is based on the idea that a given "gap in ability" is supposed to yield a constant Elo delta. An Elo delta of 100 points is supposed to translate to a 64% score for the stronger player, a delta of 200 points to 76% etc.
Interesting, that sounds reasonable, but two questions:
1. Is it certain that rating inflation is linear?
2. Is there actually any evidence that the constant Elo delta property actually holds even with inflation? It's well known that Elo is flawed, which is why people have been working on alternate rating systems...
I am not a ratings expert, just a (serious) player, chess programmer and amateur chess journalist. I am not sure ratings inflation even exists. If it does exist and you are talking about rating differences between world class players, then you are talking about small differences in big numbers and you are going to get a good approximation to linearity. But it's only approximate because in my previous example the linearity yielded 125 points v 129 points when the key underlying property of the system requires 125 points v 125 points. But unfortunately I don't know the answer to your question 2), I don't know how robust that property of the system is.
Why do I say ratings inflation may not exist ? It is true that in Fischer's time there was one 2700+ player. Now there are 30 or so. That's the evidence for ratings inflation. But it seems likely that the top players are just better than they used to me. Maybe there really are 30 players today who can play at 1972 Bobby Fischer level.
One statistician has developed a system to compare players across time. I don't know enough about statistics to say if it's valid or not, but it's interesting to look at. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in almost a decade, since it says Carlsen's peak rating was 2556 in January 2005. http://www.chessmetrics.com/cm/
Considering that Pentagram recently bought World Chess and their World Chess Championships it looks like there'll be changes made in the running of world chess but not sure if they'll do away with the World Champs.
However the Olympic marathon is special because it is completely different. In most other marathons, runners care more about their time than about winning, because it determines whether/how much they get paid to run other marathons. In the Olympics, on the other hand, nobody cares about times.
Similarly, the classical one on one match for the world championship in chess is different from tournament play. In the former, you have to beat the strongest player in the world; in the latter, you have to beat the weaker players or top players with an off day and prevent getting beaten on your off day or by stronger players.
It's the same in soccer. There, there are both national competitions where consistently beating weaker teams is the way to win and national knock out tournaments where one has to beat the best team to win.
And yes, knock out tournaments are more likely to have the weaker team win, but that can make them more attractive, as determining the strongest player may take a long time (for an example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1984)
IMO, the 'only' problem with the chess world championship is that the organization is a shambles. Fix that, and nobody will complain that the knock out tournament is different from regular tournaments.