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Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

chess24.com

241–250 of 461 posts

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#241

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…

I would make the following changes: - Make the candidates be the main event, the winner is WC. - score games as in soccer, 3 points for a win, 1 for draw, 0 for lose.

These changes increase the stakes, incentivize offensive chess, allow the sitting WC to play all the best players rather than one, reduces the time commitment to a single event for the challengers, and allows the WC to partake in the most prestigious tournament.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#242
post #3

From the outside the champion system in chess seems so weird. I know they do something similar in boxing, but there it sort of makes sense because attending too many boxing tournaments isn't exactly healthy.

> I know they do something similar in boxing, but there it sort of makes sense because attending too many boxing tournaments isn't exactly healthy. Also a boxing match is a maximum of 12 rounds over 47 minutes (since 1982), not 12 games over 3 weeks.

[deleted]

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have also become less entertaining. The classical World Championship matches have never been entertaining to watch live. In fact they used to take 2 days for one game. > No one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive and all games ended in a draw. Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw. It's not a game of "risk" in classical time format. You can take risks in blitz and rapid, but…

> Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw. While this is highly likely and essentially agreed upon by all experts on the matter, it's not proven yet.

I think no expert will claim it’s a win for either player, but I don’t think all experts agree it’s a draw. There will be some that don’t claim to know either way.

(If they had to bet, I think all experts would bet on “it’s a draw”, but some experts won’t be wanting to bet, even if they think that’s almost certain)

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#244
post #90

Funny that they mention Arkady Dvorkovich, I would expect him to quietly retreat from managing current affairs in FIDE because of his high position in Russian civil service. How can one of the closest allies of Putin head an international organisation nowadays?

International sport federations are non-profits and follow own statutes. While many sports federations banned russian and belorussian athletes and officials, they had to do it within the legal boundaries and their statutes. For example, the reasoning ISU (International Skating Union, second oldest sport federation) gave on banning russians is "...we obliged to protect athletes during event, so because of war, russian…

>the reasoning ISU (International Skating Union, second oldest sport federation) gave on banning russians is "...we obliged to protect athletes during event, so because of war, russian and Ukrainian athletes can have a fight or situation that endangers them, thus we ban russians from participation or officiating...".

That's the most disingenuous justification that I've heard.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is going to waste the CPU time running Stockfish (or GPU with Leela) against each other at classical time controls long enough to see a decisive game which might never happen anyway so we will likely never know. I think current Stockfish on a modern ThreadRipper with classical time control will never be beaten. I am not 100% sure I am right but I don't expect (but would love to!) to be proven wrong.

Stockfish won't solve it. We need a full game tree. Stockfish is not designed to build a full game tree. Generating a full game tree would be a truly daunting undertaking, and I can't even fathom how much memory would it take.

I am not saying Stockfish is going to solve it. I am saying it will not lose from the initial position. In other words my hypothesis is that we already have a soft solution to chess available. I can't prove it but I can proceed accordingly in practice (in opening preparation or correspondence games for example) and no one will prove me wrong or exploit it.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#246

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.

“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope it doesn't apply to coding too.

Perhaps you might say something like that for e.g. competitive coding or leetcode.

>>competitive coding or leetcode

Absolutely yes.

There is a big difference between inventing solutions to novel problems, and being 75,386th person to solve a problem on a website. The latter just makes you a sophisticated newspaper daily puzzle solver.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quote by Paul Morphy, one of the great old chess masters, seems relevant here - "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

I hope it doesn't apply to coding too.

I don't think that ability to code is a sign of a gentleman

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#249
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life.

One of my favorite quotes of all time.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#250
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting him again isn't that exciting. The first half of the match wasn't even close to a steamroll. It's just Ian broke mentally after that famous 6th game. The candidate tournament showed that he had more than recovered from that loss and I think he would be in a much better shape to challenge Carlsen again. Also, with Carlsen's current attitude, it is quite pos…

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?

I think the difference, and what Carlsen is doing well in this case, is just backing out now instead of trying to defend his title and then getting 5 games in and just going "I hate this and I want to leave. I forfeit".

That would look even worse for him, and be unsatisfying for his opponent and the public. In this case, he realizes he doesn't have the passion for this event any more, so he's doing the best thing for the sport and just letting two people who are still passionate about it compete instead of doing the mental-sports version of playing injured.

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