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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

#31

Post by rawoke083600 »

jmyeet wrote: post #21

Obviously this raised the issue of Bobby Fischer. The article mentions this but doesn't really go into the details. Fischer beat Spassky in Rejkyavik in 1972 for the World Championship. This took almost 3 months (July to September) and there was controversy, disagreement and negotiation about where and how it would take place. This had the backdrop of being a Cold War proxy too of course. Interestingly, Fischer didn'…

>Bobby Fischer

For anyone that likes the weird, wacko and genius (all the same thing ?) there are few excellent short documentaries on YouTube about Bobby Fischer. Well worth a watch!

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#32

Post by matsemann »

taude wrote: post #10
matsemann wrote: post #2

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 know next to nothing about competitive chess, other than watching the Magnus documentary about a younger Magnus. What kinds of things are chess players doing to prepare for a match for 6 Months? Is there something they're memorizing, studying video (what would they be looking fro)? I'd have always just thought they were good to play at any time. This sounds super stressful.

In a normal tournament, you meet so many different people (and you often don't know in advance exactly who you will meet of all the participants), so it's hard to specifically prepare. For a match of this kind, however, you know your opponent will prepare specifically against you. So you kinda have to do the same.

That entails analyzing all of their games and finding defenses and weaknesses. But also trying to find new novelties in the openings etc. And since the opponent will do the same, you yourself have to prepare defenses for lots of potential new openings 16 moves deep or so. It's an insane amount of studying.

Of course, that pays off for future games outside the match as well. But when you know your challenger will spend half a year on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to beat you, you probably have to do the same. So have to say no to everything else.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#33

Post by rawoke083600 »

haunter wrote: post #30
rawoke083600 wrote: post #23

Honest question: Would somebody at this "level" be better than good at something like StarCraft ? Noted that SC takes more than "just strategy" i.e micro comes to mind. Like I would pay good money to see Serral Vs Magnus, maybe after some coaching sessions with Harstem ? :D ? EDIT: Just out of curiosity will there be anything else that someone at this level is "exceptional" good at besides chess ?

He held the number 1 spot in the Fantasy Premier League for a time so yes https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/dec/16/chess-champion...

Oh interesting ! I didn't know that !

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#34

Post by pred_ »

TomGullen wrote: post #17
sgjohnson wrote: post #11

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…

In theory, wouldn't the player who takes the first move have a tiny tiny edge? Or is the second mover always able to guarantee a draw if they play perfectly?

Unless I missed something recent, it is not known whether any player has a winning strategy (or a drawing strategy, for that matter). It would be quite the discovery as well.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#35

Post by fileeditview »

TomGullen wrote: post #17
sgjohnson wrote: post #11

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…

In theory, wouldn't the player who takes the first move have a tiny tiny edge? Or is the second mover always able to guarantee a draw if they play perfectly?

Many think that perfect play from both sides will result in a draw but there is no prove for that yet. So I'm reality we do not know.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#36

Post by Tenoke »

TomGullen wrote: post #17
sgjohnson wrote: post #11

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…

In theory, wouldn't the player who takes the first move have a tiny tiny edge? Or is the second mover always able to guarantee a draw if they play perfectly?

It's not a solved problem but our best players and best computers perform better with white. The edge isn't tiny either.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#37

Post by pmontra »

ginko wrote: 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.

Many national go tournaments have a similar format in all of the 3 countries it's worth talking about (China, South Korea and Japan): the champion waits for the result of the challenger tournaments and plays only the final series of games (3, 5, 7.)

International tournaments tend to be shootouts with everybody playing from the first round.

You can get a picture of how they are set up by looking at the tournament tables at https://www.go4go.net/go/tournaments/news

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#39

Post by chalst »

bfuller wrote: post #29
kamaal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us who don't follow this closely, why is the format such a problem? Is it because its stressful, and demands too much work and prep from participants. Just asking as competitive sport at the top level be it chess, football, or even swimming for that matter demands lots of work and a kind of work ethic not easy for most of us.

No idea their reasoning, but if I were a top football, swimmer, or other athlete and knew that a computer could outperform me even at my highest level would be pretty disconcerting.

I guess swimmers have known that the performance of powered aquatic vehicles runs circles around them on many metrics for longer.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#40

Post by akyu »

kamaal wrote: post #15
matsemann wrote: post #2

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…

For those of us who don't follow this closely, why is the format such a problem? Is it because its stressful, and demands too much work and prep from participants. Just asking as competitive sport at the top level be it chess, football, or even swimming for that matter demands lots of work and a kind of work ethic not easy for most of us.

The format to the world championship in chess has historically always been a point of contention, and the current format is no exception.

The Candidates tournament has some seemingly arbitrary qualifications that players must meet, and you could argue that the format doesn't necessarily produce the strongest player to challenge the world champion.

The World Championship match itself is problematic because it gives the defending champion a fairly huge advantage, in that they retain the title if they can draw out the match, although more recently it goes to rapid chess tie breaker rounds. So in practice the Championship is decided by these tie breaker rounds, which doesn't really seem appropriate.

Given the prep time players have and the engines available, players go into these matches extremely well prepared and draws over the board are quite a typical outcome unless someone makes a mistake.

I believe Magnus wants the Championship to become a knockout tournament to reduce the advantage that so much prep time can give. There is a big difference between prepping for a field of 12 players versus prepping for a single opponent.

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