He'll be 910 years of age. I'd say barring some major scientific break-through, his chances of reaching 2900 are not great.
I love this comment.
What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?
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Re: What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?
#62I still can't understand how chess ratings work --even after 'RTFM' and having people try and explain it to me. Far far below the lofty heights of Carlsen &co., I play a fair bit on Lichess. Sometimes I'll play someone with a similar ranking to myself and beat them and will earn 3 or 4 points. Then we'll have a re-match which I lose and they'll gain 12 or 15 points. I just can't fathom how them beating me earns them…
Lichess doesn't use ELO rating but a different rating system. And yes, I don't understand that difference either. About white versus black, there is some consensus that after about 20 moves, white's advantage is gone. I doubt that statement is supported by statistics. I guess the rating just assumes everyone plays white and black just as often, so it will even out in the end. (edit) By the way, if you are strong with…
Lichess' page on rating systems: https://lichess.org/page/rating-systems
Re: What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?
#63“The Elo system only measures differences between players, it has nothing to do with absolute player strength.” But it seems ratings have been deflating lately ( https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-elo-ratings-inflation-or-d... is a fun read), so hitting 2900 would be even more impressive!
Is the top end deflating? If deflation comes from young high-variance players does that affect the players at very top? As they might be good enough to consistently beat the young players.
Re: What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would also argue that there is a source of ELO deflation going on. As the top level players all get better, theory evolves, people generally play better chess. A player with a rating of 2750 today might have beat Kasparov in his prime, simply because chess has evolved. In a way, it's similar to sports. Plenty of people today might have beat Carl Lewis at 100m 30 years ago, but they would probably not be considered…
> In a way, it's similar to sports. Plenty of people today might have beat Carl Lewis at 100m 30 years ago, but they would probably not be considered greater athletes. Same with Lance Armstrong...
Carl Lewis’ positive tests would now be marked as negative due to being under the threshold.
Re: What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?
#65ELO is always a fascinating thing. I waste far too much time on boardgamearena.com which has a system where people start at 0, 100 is, I think, equivalent to the chess 1500, except that it becomes a floor rating. I “retire” from a game when I can get to 300. I got up to 285 recently on cribbage and was the 86th rated player at the game, while in other games, being a rated player requires a score of 400 or more.
Re: What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?
#66I wonder why Magnus has fixated on 2900. It's sort of a dumb goal for someone at his level because it's out of his control. He can win a lot of games but if his opponents don't win their games that aren't against him then he's not going to get there.
Well if he is bored being the world champion, he may just be looking for any hard to reach goal at all.
If the top players are not winning their games, they will not stay at the top for long.
Re: What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?
#67I think one major piece is consistently missed in those articles. Yes, the chances of him hitting 2900 do not depend only on his performance against other players, but from their elo as well. If the following 25 players in the world where all 2800+ Carlsen would already be 2900+. Thus, Carlsen's best chances largely depend on elo inflation to widen the elo distribution itself. One example of this: Louis de Bourdonnai…
"If the following 25 players in the world where all 2800+ Carlsen would already be 2900+."
Why are you assuming that Carlsen would always win against other players if the other players are that much stronger? Maybe if the following 25 players were all 2800+ then Carlsen would take more losses.
Re: What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
One person reaching 2900 when it's not by changing the scale shows their relative position to others is a new record. it's a worthy psychological goal, like breaking a 4 minute mile even though a minute and a mile are made up quantities. Or scoring 300 in bowling, when 10 rounds is arbitrary. Pretty much every record in every sport is arbitrary, yet people like to set goals for motivation.
Yes but the examples you mentioned are (in practice) absolute and can be reached independently of how others are performing. In that sense, ELO _is_ different (as also explained in another answer, he can reach 2900 more easily if others start performing worse).
What about being "NBA Champions"? It's "relative to how others are performing". Why does that make it not valuable?
Re: What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?
#69The whole 2900 thing is so strange. ELO is a relative scale. The number only makes sense in relation to the ratings of other. You could shift everyone or scale it differently and it wouldn’t change anything. What a poor goal. I view the whole thing more as a criticism of the sorry state of FIDE and the world championship that an actual serious goal.
One person reaching 2900 when it's not by changing the scale shows their relative position to others is a new record. it's a worthy psychological goal, like breaking a 4 minute mile even though a minute and a mile are made up quantities. Or scoring 300 in bowling, when 10 rounds is arbitrary. Pretty much every record in every sport is arbitrary, yet people like to set goals for motivation.
> their relative position to others is a new record.
This doesn't seem necessarily true to me. If Magnus was in his prime in say 1980s it's not clear if he could ever get so close to 2900 since every other super-GM had lower ELO which would make his progress slower than now. Not only do we not know how an average 2022-super-GM compares to a 1980-super-GM, we also don't know how Magnus compares to an 1980-super-GM. E.g. Tal achieved his peak ELO 2705 in 1980, but at that time Korchnoi had an ELO of 2695 (diff of 10), whereas, Magnus currently has 2864 and #2 Ding Liren has 2808 (diff of 56). But Magnus' peak rating of 2872 is 30 less than Caruana's peak rating of 2842 during the same time.
Re: What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lichess doesn't use ELO rating but a different rating system. And yes, I don't understand that difference either. About white versus black, there is some consensus that after about 20 moves, white's advantage is gone. I doubt that statement is supported by statistics. I guess the rating just assumes everyone plays white and black just as often, so it will even out in the end. (edit) By the way, if you are strong with…
Lichess' page on rating systems: https://lichess.org/page/rating-systems
They say that Glicko 2 is more accurate than Glicko 1, and they reference a kaggle leaderboard. On that private leaderboard, I only see "Glicko benchmark" and "Real Glicko," so I don't see how they made that claim. I find it dubious that Glicko 2 would be more accurate out of sample.