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Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

chess24.com

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Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#131

Post by mark_l_watson »

I totally support Magnus Carlson’s decision. He really loves travel and playing in many tournaments and now he can do more of what he loves. I enjoy watching him, and others, do Chess streaming and I went to the US Chess Open in 1978 but I never even played 25 rated games so my rating was never official.

I do like do slowly read through Chess games, especially old historic games. I do the same with the game of Go: I like the several hundred year old Shogun Palace games. I did take online lessons from a Korean Go master a few years ago, and once a month play a long game against CSPro Go program, let it spend an hour after the game analyzing my moves, then I look at what moves I should have played in critical parts of the game.

I guess what I am saying here is that different people enjoy games differently, and I respect Magnus optimizing playing Chess for his own fun and lifestyle.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#132

Post by jstanley »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #72
adrianN wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess on an infinite board is asymptotically difficult in the worst case. Chess on an 8x8 board can be solved in constant time.

Not sure if this was sarcasm, but that's like saying NP-hardness is no big deal because we only care about finite problems.

The reason chess is hard to solve is not because it's NP-hard (which it is not, being a constant-sized problem), it's because chess is a big problem.

It can simultaneously be true both that NP-hardness matters, and that constant-sized problems can be hard.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#133

Post by moffkalast »

SeanLuke wrote: post #92

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…

Chinook was obviously playing the long con. Knowing Tinsley's weakness was his humanity, so it continued to draw until his frail human body succumbed to the forces of nature, thus winning once and for all.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#134

Post by sweezyjeezy »

jstanley wrote: post #132
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this was sarcasm, but that's like saying NP-hardness is no big deal because we only care about finite problems.

The reason chess is hard to solve is not because it's NP-hard (which it is not, being a constant-sized problem), it's because chess is a big problem. It can simultaneously be true both that NP-hardness matters, and that constant-sized problems can be hard.

I never said chess was NP hard, it was an analogy. The equivalent would be some kind of chess on an NxN or Nx8 board I guess, I don't know how hard would be.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#135

Post by prionassembly »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #98
jstx1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like Kasparov because he remained active after the FIDE split. Still a bit different because Magnus isn't running a parallel WC of his own. It's also funny how the only 3 World Champions who have refused to defend a title because of disagreements with FIDE are probably the 3 best chess players ever.

Fischer is clearly the goat in my view. But it’s not so obvious to me that Kasparov and Carlsen are better than say Vishy or Morphy or Botvinnik or Capablanca…

On one view, Morphy et al. picked low-hanging fruit, no longer available to Kasparov. On the other, Morphy and Capablanca etc. laid the foundations on which Carlsen and Kasparov walk.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#136

Post by jmyeet »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #98
jstx1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like Kasparov because he remained active after the FIDE split. Still a bit different because Magnus isn't running a parallel WC of his own. It's also funny how the only 3 World Champions who have refused to defend a title because of disagreements with FIDE are probably the 3 best chess players ever.

Fischer is clearly the goat in my view. But it’s not so obvious to me that Kasparov and Carlsen are better than say Vishy or Morphy or Botvinnik or Capablanca…

I find these conversations amusing because it really is the nerd (I mean that as a nerd myself; not perjoratively) version of arguing about whether LeBron is better than Jordan (in their respective primes) or whether the GOAT is Brady, Woods or LeBron.

It's just funny that this same argument structure repeats in radically different fields with (often) very different people.

Personally I've never gotten too invested in any of these arguments because they're ultimately unknowable but, more importantly, they're kind of pointless. You can't separate someone from the time they existed in. I was only ever at best average at Chess but even I could recognize that the grats of 100-200 years ago would get wiped out by the modern greats but obviously we know more now, we have better tools now and so on. And you can never really say how a historic great would do in the modern times with modern ideas, knowledge and tools because they're a product of their time.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#137

Post by ihateolives »

SeanLuke wrote: post #92

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…

Where do I sign up for your daily checker facts newsletter? :)

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#138

Post by fdeage »

SeanLuke wrote: post #92

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…

> He was utterly dominant; indeed it is hard to think of a competitor in all of history more dominant over his sport or game than Tinsley.

Very interesting comment. This sentence about dominance in a field made me think of Stu Ungar, who dominated Gin Rummy so completely that he had to switch to Poker (where he became a 3-time world champion) to meet interesting adversaries.

I couldn't find an exact reference for the following quote, but still: "Some day, I suppose it's possible for someone to be a better No Limit Hold'em player than me. I doubt it, but it could happen. But, I swear to you, I don't see how anyone could ever play gin better than me."

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#139

Post by jstx1 »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #122
jstx1 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Anand it's really obvious that both Carlsen and Kasparov are better given that they've beaten him in World Championship matches (Kasparov once, Magnus twice), have positive head-to-head scores against him and have better other achievements like peak rating or time spent at number 1. There's no metric on which Anand comes out on top in comparison to Carlsen and Kasparov.

There’s also not really any metric where any of them are better than Fischer. Neither Carlsen nor Kasparov challenged Vishy’s title during the peak of his career. He’s also such a phenomenal player, that if he’d been the one to abdicate the FIDE title instead of Kasparov, you’d easily be able to make the same kind of “top 3” comments about him.

> There’s also not really any metric where any of them are better than Fischer.

Off the top of my head - World Championships matches won, time spent as number 1, peak Elo.

> Neither Carlsen nor Kasparov challenged Vishy’s title during the peak of his career.

When was the peak? He was WC between 2007 and 2013, he wasn't even the top ranked player for most of that time and then he lost the WC to Magnus (then lost the rematch too).

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#140

Post by Accacin »

BobbyJo wrote: post #128
dwighttk wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is both okay to stop and do other things eventually and it also counts as ‘breaking’

So no one can ever quit without it being considered 'breaking'? If not, what would distinguish between 'breaking' and not 'breaking'? Surely, if one can quit without it being considered breaking, resigning while on top is how.

For me it's the intent at the time a decision was made.
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