121–130 of 461 posts
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
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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…
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.
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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 n…
Say a player just rote memorised moves from a chess engine and just played it. Would that be considered cheating?
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Not sure if this was sarcasm, but that's like saying NP-hardness is no big deal because we only care about finite problems.
Chess on an 8x8 board is not NP-hard. That doesn't mean it's easy but invoking NP-hardness is kind of meaningless.
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 cham…
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. T…
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...
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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.
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."
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.
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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?
It is both okay to stop and do other things eventually and it also counts as ‘breaking’
Surely, if one can quit without it being considered breaking, resigning while on top is how.
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…
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.
It 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…