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Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship

nytimes.com

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Re: Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship

#31

Post by tspiteri »

nisuni wrote: post #20
mindgam3 wrote: post #5

I’d like to offer a few thoughts on this match as a former internationally competitive player/US Cadet U16 champion, current ~2400 bullet chess addict, and someone who has played bughouse with Fabiano as my partner at the Sinquefield Cup in 2017. First, hats off to both players for a hard fought match. To Magnus for successfully defending his title, and to Fabiano for pushing Magnus right to the brink. This was an ex…

I am nowhere near you score, but I have heard many strong players stating that blitz is bad for you, and actually creates bad habits for classical.

Even today in the first rapid, there was a comment (from Svidler/Giri) that early on Caruana played a move too fast, as if he was already in blitz mode, when he should have thought a bit more and found a better move.

Re: Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship

#32

Post by qyv »

drewrv wrote: post #14
nevi-me wrote: post #6

I was disappointed in Carlsen's 12th game draw. He might have etched something out of the game, as computers were clearly saying he had some slight advantage. After seeing the first games from today, I eased down on my disappointment. Today's first few games changed my mind. Carlsen remains the better player, because he does better where it matters; time pressure. Caruana seemed to battle with time a lot, I observed…

> Carlsen remains the better player, because he does better where it matters; time pressure. I disagree. Carlsen is the better player under time pressure, but they appear evenly matched in what I'd consider "actual" chess. One of the things I love about the game is that it's a slow, pensive game.

Carlsen was a better player within the rules of this tournament. His strategy clearly shows he was playing to win the tournament, not beat the player.

Re: Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship

#33

Post by kmonsen »

simonh wrote: post #24
drewrv wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard similar proposals for soccer games, start with penalty kicks as a tiebreaker. Now, whomever lost the tiebreaker will have to play extra hard as they know a draw will be a loss.

I think it’s an awful idea, because it encourages the team that won the tie to play safely and defensively and aim for acdraw. That makes for a tedious game to watch.

It is kind of what happened here since Carlsen had sort of won the tie-breaker already.

Re: Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship

#34

Post by cdelsolar »

mindgam3 wrote: post #5

I’d like to offer a few thoughts on this match as a former internationally competitive player/US Cadet U16 champion, current ~2400 bullet chess addict, and someone who has played bughouse with Fabiano as my partner at the Sinquefield Cup in 2017. First, hats off to both players for a hard fought match. To Magnus for successfully defending his title, and to Fabiano for pushing Magnus right to the brink. This was an ex…

I'm a competitive Scrabble player, and to a lot of extent I agree with the development of intuition from blitz games. I probably played tens of thousands of 3-minute and fewer games online and although I am normally a very slow player in person, normally using up almost all of my time, playing blitz did and does help with play-finding, getting an intuition for when to play defense/offense, rapid anagramming, etc.

Re: Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship

#35

Post by mcqueenjordan »

simonh wrote: post #24
drewrv wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard similar proposals for soccer games, start with penalty kicks as a tiebreaker. Now, whomever lost the tiebreaker will have to play extra hard as they know a draw will be a loss.

I think it’s an awful idea, because it encourages the team that won the tie to play safely and defensively and aim for acdraw. That makes for a tedious game to watch.

Completely agree. Drawish behavior would likely increase with this policy, not decrease. Because it's incredibly hard at this level to beat a player that's explicitly playing for a draw.

Re: Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship

#36

Post by omega3 »

mindgam3 wrote: post #5

I’d like to offer a few thoughts on this match as a former internationally competitive player/US Cadet U16 champion, current ~2400 bullet chess addict, and someone who has played bughouse with Fabiano as my partner at the Sinquefield Cup in 2017. First, hats off to both players for a hard fought match. To Magnus for successfully defending his title, and to Fabiano for pushing Magnus right to the brink. This was an ex…

> The truth is, blitz chess is not only insanely fun but extremely good training to develop intuition for slow chess.

I find that actually quite controversial - correlation does not imply causation. The general sentiment within the community is that the causation works from the other side i.e being good at slow leads to being good at blitz.

Here are some quotes you might find interesting:

"Playing rapid chess, one can lose the habit of concentrating for several hours in serious chess. That is why, if a player has big aims, he should limit his rapidplay in favour of serious chess." – Vladimir Kramnik

"He who analyses blitz is stupid." – Rashid Nezhmetdinov

"Blitz chess kills your ideas." – Bobby Fischer

"To be honest, I consider [bullet chess] a bit moronic, and therefore I never play it." – Vladimir Kramnik

"I play way too much blitz chess. It rots the brain just as surely as alcohol." – Nigel Short

"Blitz is simply a waste of time." – Vladimir Malakhov

Re: Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship

#37

Post by msbarnett »

fipple wrote: post #15
drewrv wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Carlsen remains the better player, because he does better where it matters; time pressure. I disagree. Carlsen is the better player under time pressure, but they appear evenly matched in what I'd consider "actual" chess. One of the things I love about the game is that it's a slow, pensive game.

Yes, as a non chess player I think of the game as two people each taking about 15 minutes per move. Blitz chess isn’t what the cultural concept of “chess” is.

> Yes, as a non chess player I think of the game as two people each taking about 15 minutes per move.

Not even classical time controls play that way -- 15 minutes per move would rapidly lose you the match. Prepared openings come quite quickly, obviously, but most moves even beyond that are played within a very few minutes of each other, with time being saved to spend on a "deep-think" of 15-30 minutes on only one or two key moves.

Which makes sense. Classical time controls in this tournament were, counting the per move increments, 120 minutes per player for the first 40 moves. That means you need to average a move every 3 minutes over your first 40 (and in reality, they spend less than that most games, preferring to maintain a healthy cushion).

Rapid (not Blitz, they did not play any Blitz games) only drops that down to 45 seconds per move over the first 40. Since they tend to live closer to the margin in Rapid anyways vs Classical, this is even less of a drop than it might appear.

It's unquestionably less time to think, but not nearly as much as you're suggesting.

Re: Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship

#38

Post by microtherion »

mindgam3 wrote: post #5

I’d like to offer a few thoughts on this match as a former internationally competitive player/US Cadet U16 champion, current ~2400 bullet chess addict, and someone who has played bughouse with Fabiano as my partner at the Sinquefield Cup in 2017. First, hats off to both players for a hard fought match. To Magnus for successfully defending his title, and to Fabiano for pushing Magnus right to the brink. This was an ex…

I'm reasonably comfortable (though on a much lower level than you) playing blitz, because at least time management is in my control. bughouse was much more problematic, because much of the time one has is often spent sitting for developments on the other board, so one is forced to play much of the game at super bullet speeds.

Re: Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship

#39

Post by vertline3 »

Strength in faster time controls strongly fits overall strength.

Caruana knew he was the underdog in Tie-breaks, he had 12 chances to avoid that and he was unable to.

Carlsen could have pressed in game 12 but he knew he was much stronger in faster controls, why risk anything?

Using computer evals through the match, I felt that Carlsen was slightly stronger, and their head to head record suggests as much.

Re: Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana to Win World Chess Championship

#40

Post by Jach »

mindgam3 wrote: post #5

I’d like to offer a few thoughts on this match as a former internationally competitive player/US Cadet U16 champion, current ~2400 bullet chess addict, and someone who has played bughouse with Fabiano as my partner at the Sinquefield Cup in 2017. First, hats off to both players for a hard fought match. To Magnus for successfully defending his title, and to Fabiano for pushing Magnus right to the brink. This was an ex…

My aspirations for Chess are pretty low these days (my estimated ELO max was around a mere 1500 over a decade ago when I played regularly..) but I'm curious how your web interface actually works to improve play and whether it would translate to other games. I've heard conflicting advice about the value of blitz games for Go as well, though the strongest person I've played in person (5dan amateur chinese) thought that I should think carefully about each move and take the time to do it, rather than bust out a bunch of games playing by intuition. Do you think your scheme for improving at rapid Chess would apply to Go's full 19x19 game?
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