1. Didn't realize chess content was popular on HN.
2. Don't understand why people upvote a spoiler.
3. Was watching the stream, and couldn't stop watching, was too nervous for Ian.
Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time
151–160 of 167 posts
Re: Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time
#152Genuinely enjoyable and timely game. Out of prep early, machine evaluations useless throughout, plenty to play for and Magnus's quality and stamina showed. I'm of the opinion that there's nothing to gain from fans having engines open during a game, despite working in sports analytics and ostensibly being on the side of the machines. Obviously engines have a lot to say about the modern game, and the match so far had c…
> I'm of the opinion that there's nothing to gain from fans having engines open during a game Isn't this game a great argument for engines. Using a threshold of 2 to be well above your 1.5 this game had a total of 4 moments where one of the players had a very good chance for a win, and one of those moments was for Nepo: https://analysis.sesse.net/ Having the engine show you that is a great complement to hearing the c…
If I were to make a serious point it would be this: sometimes a machine learning model shouldn’t be optimised for accuracy, it should be optimised for teaching humans an effective policy. Often those are the same goal, for example in opening preparation in chess. But often they’re not, and just having 1000 fans suggesting lines from Stockfish without really thinking about a position or its human contestants isn’t particularly edifying for me. It feels like shopping for great art based on the price tag alone.
So yes, I agree with your second point, the engines/metrics/stats could be doing more here. Just relying on the evaluation at ridiculous depths isn’t very interesting, and I don’t believe those scores necessarily translate to a very good chance to win. 33 Rcc2 would have been very hard to calculate and involves a double pawn sacrifice. 36… Bxb4 probably was the move most humans would have made but I’m still not convinced Nepo always wins from there. I’m sure there were other swings I’m forgetting. But outside of “this line exists at depth 30 if you see it” there’s a lot to learn about the components of that evaluation, like mobility and king safety etc that do mirror some of the human thought process and which you can apply yourself. I’d love to see more detailed metrics like that, especially if they could capture why the humans felt it was a very good Catalan for white with lots of options, and not just zeroes. But as of today, I’d rather hear what Kramnik thinks than Stockfish. And the difficulty of holding a position is far more accurate coming from humans than the machines (game 5 for example). Even when the computer thinks there’s only one move in a position, that’s often based on the opponent playing perfectly to a great depth afterwards.
I don’t want to sound too much of a curmudgeon here, I like engines, I write my own and of course I have Sesse and my own copy of Leela open most games. But I think too often they short circuit one’s brain, and I’ve found my enjoyment increases when I follow the human thought process and not the machine one. I’d love to see a richer synthesis of the two though!
Re: Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bottom line is still that a chess.com rating will be more indicative of what a theoretical FIDE/USCF rating would be, and there's value in that, even if it's not rigorously tethered.
Comparison sites will give you ±150 Elo relative error (with I assume P=0.95). 150 Elo on levels below 2700 FIDE is almost night and day difference. Chess.com ratings show nothing about theoretical FIDE ratings. Comparison tables have been built with data mining and lucky guesses, there's no quality difference between Chess.com FIDE and LiChess FIDE.
Yes they do show 'something'. They correlate with them.
It's just a fact that chess.com ratings are closer to 'real' ratings than Lichess are. It's not perfect but that doesn't mean it's a zero-information statement either.
Re: Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that chess.com pays some people to use their website on streams, etc. Although Lichess isn't perfect and it's kinda annoying. One of the bad things about Lichess is how unrealistically inflated their ratings are; 2100 on Lichess is equivalent to about 1800 on Chess.com. Chess.com is much more similar to the FIDE rating and other real-world systems. Lichess is just super inflated for some reason and it makes i…
Its just a relative number. After getting to your stable rating, you don't care about the actual number, you are just focussed on improvement. Lichess is overall better in my opinion, better & slicker product, free analysis, opening explorer etc. Chess.com only leads in video content imo.
I don't care except when I am talking to people IRL -- if I talk about chess and we compare ratings, we also have to talk about site they're from, essentially only because Lichess is such an outlier.
Re: Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because there's a very hard working person focused on making great software without relying on profitable privacy abuse. Go donate to them.
Sorry, I meant to ask what makes it so good.
It's just good in almost every way. It's super well-made, has tons of features, and is free, even including compute tasks like having servers run analysis on your games. It's like one of the nicest things on the internet, I swear.
Re: Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the very highest level, the draw percentage is much higher. In the last World Chess Championship in 2018, all twelve classical games went to draws! It's complete garbage from a spectator point of view.
It's not the level, but the WCC format, which makes current players not want to take risks at all. Today's game is a great example of why they are conservative: Taking any risks with black, like Nepo did when he avoided an early queen trade, is just too dangerous. A single loss means your opponent can aim for a draw in every single further game. If a super GM wants a draw out of the game from the very opening, choosi…
Interesting, thanks for the clarification.
Re: Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
The computer also does not take time limits into consideration. If the players could take as much time as they wanted, they might have been closer to the perfect match. Maybe that would be a fun concept. A game where the players would start with 1 year on the clock?
That's kind of how mail chess is, isn't it?
Correspondence chess.
Re: Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time
#158Bit of a spoiler :( I prefer to watch analysis of games from YouTubers like Agadmator or Jerry from Chessnetwork and discover who the winner was by watching the game. I wonder if these long games are not particularly helpful. Most chess final games end in draws as players are reluctant to create an imbalance and instead play it safe. There tends to be more exciting games played in games with a shorter time limit. I'm…
You all need to watch GothamChess if games of chess seem boring :) I love Jerry, and I do watch him occasionally. But https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhJl3BKA-n8&ab_channel=Gotha... is well done. (If you do want to watch Gotham for this particular match, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoY5RSCi5pE&ab_channel=Gotha... starts the series, I think.)
and if you want to learn then you should watch Daniel Naroditsky's videos (pick the series/part that suits your level) https://www.youtube.com/c/DanielNaroditskyGM/playlists
He also comments frequently, and keeps his analysis understandable to my amateurish level while having better insight than Levy. Unfortunately his comment for the world championship is in the Russian channel (although he's from the US).
Re: Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time
#159Imagine lasting 136 moves against Carlsen... This is the guy who gives people eight free moves and still destroys them two minutes later.
Nepo has previously worked as part of Magnus's team (one of his "seconds"), and they have been friends who compete against each other since childhood. It is likely that this is the most evenly matched world championship of the 21st century, as both players are extremely well-prepared to face each other at the highest level.
If you’re talking under classical time formats only, I would disagree with you since Caruana and Magnus were at equal strengths coming in and the consecutive 12 draws proved that too.
The rapid tie-breaker was a different story however.
Re: Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It was the first decisive game in the classical rounds of a world championship in over five years." I wonder if there’s some way other than time constraints to encourage higher variance moves.
The usual suggestions are things like making a draw worth 1/3 of a win instead of 1/2, so that positions with more variance actually have higher EV for both players. Obviously this wouldn't work for a match like the current one, though: if there are only two people in the tournament, it's still zero-sum. A lot of people also don't like this sort of plan in general for other reasons.
The common counter is that there are tournaments like this already and they have the same draw average.