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Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship

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Re: Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship

#251

Post by sigmoid10 »

Retric wrote: post #242
sigmoid10 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's it. There was no win because the opportunity to even compete was taken away. Imagine you train your whole life and finally win the Olympic Gold medal, but everyone knows it's only because the true nr 1 ignored to compete in this format.

Winning a title is never about facing the greatest possible opponent. Even the people who show up aren’t at their absolute best, but consider everyone who doesn’t devote their lives to the sport. The greatest potential chess player of all time likely does something else with their lives. Without prep Magnus would be vastly less likely to win, and he’s not doing the prep because he’s not competing. How exactly is that…

Is it though? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You're making some pretty bold assumptions about competitive athlete psychology here.

Re: Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship

#252

Post by [deleted] »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #251
Retric wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Winning a title is never about facing the greatest possible opponent. Even the people who show up aren’t at their absolute best, but consider everyone who doesn’t devote their lives to the sport. The greatest potential chess player of all time likely does something else with their lives. Without prep Magnus would be vastly less likely to win, and he’s not doing the prep because he’s not competing. How exactly is that…

Is it though? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You're making some pretty bold assumptions about competitive athlete psychology here.

[deleted]

Re: Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship

#253

Post by [deleted] »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #251
Retric wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Winning a title is never about facing the greatest possible opponent. Even the people who show up aren’t at their absolute best, but consider everyone who doesn’t devote their lives to the sport. The greatest potential chess player of all time likely does something else with their lives. Without prep Magnus would be vastly less likely to win, and he’s not doing the prep because he’s not competing. How exactly is that…

Is it though? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You're making some pretty bold assumptions about competitive athlete psychology here.

[deleted]

Re: Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship

#254

Post by bsder »

renewiltord wrote: post #247
bsder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ageism also just one of these shitty unproven biases You might be right, if we were talking about anything except chess. Chess, unlike everything else, has a clear ranking system and lots of records for people to analyze. And unfortunately, the record is very clear: chess ability decreases after a certain age. However, the decrease is more likely due to stamina than mental decline. Chess tournaments take a long tim…

He’s got a point. If the measure works for age, then let’s run it for sex, race, and religion. Then we can make conclusions about these categories and test if we’re willing to accept them. If we’re not, but we’re willing to accept them for age, then the balance of chance is that we’re ageist and just blinding ourselves to it because we are ageist. I think looking at the data you’d have to conclude that women can’t pl…

> I think looking at the data you’d have to conclude that women can’t play chess as well as men, that black men can’t play chess as well as white men, and that Judeo-Christian (and perhaps Hindu Brahmins) beliefs are just as indicative.

Actually, chess data suggests that all of them are as good as one another. As soon as you have enough candidates in the pipeline, magically, any specific group suddenly becomes as good as any other.

On the women's side, the Polgar sisters are both exemplar and counterexample. Clearly, given sufficient training, women CAN be rated highly (Judit cracked 2700). The fact that the women's side hasn't exploded just like the men's side can mostly be tracked to the fact that chess isn't considered a "feminine pursuit" worth putting the time into (that finally seems to be changing slowly in recent decades).

Re: Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship

#255

Post by Retric »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #251
Retric wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Winning a title is never about facing the greatest possible opponent. Even the people who show up aren’t at their absolute best, but consider everyone who doesn’t devote their lives to the sport. The greatest potential chess player of all time likely does something else with their lives. Without prep Magnus would be vastly less likely to win, and he’s not doing the prep because he’s not competing. How exactly is that…

Is it though? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You're making some pretty bold assumptions about competitive athlete psychology here.

I make no claims about what’s going on in people’s heads here just the underlying reality.

I was pissed I didn’t go to nationals in high school largely because I got no sleep the night before due to a crappy hotel stay. Losing a close game to board 1 while trying to stay awake sucked, but I was hardly the only person off my game, so that’s just how things workout.

Re: Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship

#256

Post by avadodin »

OJFord wrote: post #200
somenameforme wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On average players start declining in their mid to late thirties, just about the age of Magnus (and Hikaru). But even with that decline, it's not like they simply can't play anymore. Drag Kasparov out of retirement and he's still going to be an extremely strong player, even in his 60s. And a lot probably comes with environmental rather than physical issues. Staying at the highest level in chess requires never-ending…

> The rise of freestyle chess could viably see players extending their dominance for much longer, because there's currently believed to be no realistic way to do impactful opening prep in that game. For those out of the know like me, the tldr seems to be that it shuffles the positions in the first rank - symmetrically with your opponent, but not the usual rook/knight/bishop/royal both sides. So you can't study openin…

It goes to show my expertise in chess that I watched a whole encounter and it looked exactly the same as regular chess with castling and all.

I don't know if I would call the positions symmetrical, though, they seem mirrored(I just checked and regular chess is mirrored as well).

Re: Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship

#257

Post by jojobas »

gpm wrote: post #223
jojobas wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have the will to compete nobody is obliged to chase you.

Magnus obviously has the will to compete, he competes all the time. Elite sporting events are absolutely obliged to chase talent, just like any other business is. If they don't, they quickly stop being the elite sporting event. There's a reason why athletes are paid so well...

He expressed lack of will to grind prep for classical matches.

Re: Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship

#259

Post by NetMageSCW »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #194
tux1968 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point the poster was making, is that there is an asterisk beside Gukesh and Liren's world champ status. Nobody really thinks they're the actual world-champ, regardless of what FIDE says. FIDE failed to attract the best player, to even play.

By the same logic, why would anyone expect that the best player in the world for any given sport happens to compete in the olympics? The issue here is the semantics. FIDE titling someone "world champion" is at the end of the day no different than a burger joint claiming to be the best in the country after winning some competition or another. To be clear, I don't mean to take issue with the competitions themselves.

Because pretty much every country in the world runs competitions to select the best in every Olympic sport from all who are interested in the sport?

Re: Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship

#260

Post by Mr_Minderbinder »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #161

Chess is in such a sad situation again. The world champion (which is determined for classical chess) isn't even remotely the best player. He's barely even in the top 10 and may soon fall out of that too. In terms of strength he's the weakest player to win in half a century even in absolute terms. And I can't think of any time in modern history of chess when such a low ranked player won. We really need to do something…

> In terms of strength he's the weakest player to win in half a century even in absolute terms.

Gukesh is arguably stronger than either of Khalifman, Kasimdzhanov and Ponomariov, who won the FIDE title before it was re-unified. Also his current rating is higher than either Karpov’s or Kasparov’s were when they first won the title. His rating when he first won was about the same as Fischer’s when Fischer first won. Neither Kramnik or Anand were clearly the best player throughout the entirety of their reigns and both of their ranks fluctuated amongst the top ten positions.

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