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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

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feel is that from a game theoretical approach, a 3:1:0 scoring ratio would encourage enough players to at least try for a win sometimes that it would restore some of the interest and competitiveness to the sport.

Would you play tic-tac-toe for a win with that scoring ratio?

This is an inappropriate analogy. Chess at the highest levels is not drawish because the game is inherently drawish but because the meta of it is.

The easiest way to illustrate this is with openings, though it applies throughout the game in different ways. Against e4 the Najdorf defense was once the opening of champions, being a major part of the repertoire of players like Kasparov and Fischer. In modern times it's an increasingly rare guest at the highest level. It's not because it's considered unsound or even slightly dubious - it's a rock solid opening that gives black real winning chances. But the problem is it also gives him real losing chances. It's complex, difficult to play, and if you get outprepared by your opponent you may lose without him even having to make a single move himself, which is really one of the worst feelings in the world.

So instead the meta has largely shifted to openings that are more about minimizing risk where black, more or less, aims for a draw - and usually gets it. Changing the risk:reward ratios in a sufficiently extreme way is most certainly capable of changing the meta.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#352

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. True, but that doesn't mean that you can't treat chess like other sports and try to incentivize wins - for example giving win/loss/draw a 3:1:0 point ratio. The world championship is not a good format to decide "who's the best at chess", and anyway we already know who that is right now. Might as well treat it as a spectator sport and add some drama in my op…

An alternative is to have tie-breaks for every game, playing increasingly rapid time controls until the result is not a draw.

1. Classical game, win = 5 points.

2. Rapid game, win = 2 points

3. Blitz game, win = 1 point.

4. Armageddon game, win = 0.5 points.

This point layout might backfire and make the classical games even less interesting because the huge edge for winning is probably going to motivate extreme do-not-lose style play, which trends towards draws. But, nonetheless, wins in classical should be weighted well above the tie-breaks.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have to imagine there are only so many 'tricks'/new lines left for him to use to win games at that level. revealing them on center stage for a single win is wasteful of the resources he has. the WCC games get studied by everyone, not only live with the worlds best engines, but after the fact too. much better to use those resources in tournaments where you can actually play a lot of games with it before people reall…

> that he's tapping out against someone he's already beaten. Many observers overplay the importance of one match loss. More than one chess champion title was taken by a challenger who had lost in the previous attempt [1] - and considering there was just a handful of champions, it is a lot. [1]: Spassky and Kasparov have lost in their first attempts against Petrosyan and Karpov.

while true, it is still fair to say Carlsen views nepo as a waste of time. While it would be easy to dismiss this as hubris - i think the bigger point is that he doesnt gain anything from beating him again. It's not that Nepo has no chance of winning.

Magnus specifically mentioned Firouzja as an opponent that he would consider playing the WCC against[1]. So while not the most important factor in his decision, the fact that Nepo won the candidates again and was the last challenger before Magnus made the Firouzja statement seems relevant. Also relevant is that the candidates tournament concluded on July 5th and Magnus released his withdrawal now in the same month.

It seems to me like the challenger being Nepo was the last significant piece of information towards his decision. How specific it is to Nepo or a more general feeling of Nepo being one of many people he doesnt feel any personal benefit from playing against, who knows.

[1] https://chess24.com/en/read/news/magnus-carlsen-unlikely-i-w...

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#354
post #348

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…

> ... it is hard to think of a competitor in all of history more dominant over his sport or game than Tinsley. I've got another one: famous hold 'em poker player Stu Ungar never lost a game of gin rummy. Utterly dominant.

Sounds like an urban legend. Gin rummy has too much luck for someone to have a perfect record.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t very high-level chess kind of dead already? I mean - watching Karpov-Kasparov was watching two best players in the world. But nowadays a match between human players just clarifies which of the second-rate devices is better than another. Or is it just me?

Did the invention of artillery cause javelin throwing to be dead?

I mean ... yes?

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#356
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the point is that his winning position was a 64 move convert and he was correct. Lots of players believe they will end up in a winning position, but overlook something while "not bothering with the details". it's less about how much he calculated in that moment and more about the accuracy of his confidence and the work he had to have put in alongside his talent prior to that moment to achieve that confidence and back…

That sounds a lot like Go Seigan in the Go world. Dude was ahead of his time and developed a style of play that was remarkably similar to AlphaGo. His intuitions on the importance and usefulness of a position fueled his fighting ability.

Maybe his opponents were too confused by his name being Go.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's part of the preparation. But remember that you have around ~16 moves to choose from each time it's your turn. And you have to prepare a response for all the possible choices your opponent can make. This of course gets unwieldy very fast. 16^5 is already over a million different games.

Actually it's so much worse than that. Chess has a branching factor of ~30, not 16, IIRC. A lot of those moves will be nonsensical though.

That is correct. And of course you don't just need to prepare for your own moves, but also consider your opponent's moves. So "just" 6 moves = 30^12 = about 500 quadrillion possibilities.

Though, like you said, the vast majority of those moves will be somewhat nonsensical though.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought for a while that someone should go hard on an esports style lightning tournament. Basically, try to recreate the energy that happens when an aggressive game happens between chess hustlers and everyone crowds around, but done as a stadium audience spectacle like esports. Big stage lighting setup, music, live commentary, crowd roar encouraged, etc. Besides a main event focused on rated pros, have side tour…

Did you watch PogChamps? It had some great moments like this: https://youtu.be/YyG6HtsaF0w

Yeah, exactly. The concept would be to create that sort of energy in the video stream production setting familiar to lan esports where you've got the hype of a couple thousand people behind it in person. I'm absolutely convinced there's an audience for something like this, and if you were reasonably deft in how you messaged it people like Magnus would be falling all over themselves to participate just for the fun of it.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there needs to be work done and intuition developed in order for a human to look any amount of moves ahead. we do not look ahead in the same way a computer algorithm does we look ahead in ways like "doing this leaves this area weak, and the opponent has resources that can take advantage of that, and i cannot intervene on those resources in time" or "if i create a strong threat then the opponent will be forced to reac…

> there needs to be work done and intuition developed in order for a human to look any amount of moves ahead. we do not look ahead in the same way a computer algorithm does I mean, that's just plain wrong on both counts. You need to do work to do a good job at looking ahead. You don't need to do work just to be able to imagine what the board might look like after a particular move is made. > they are not doing things…

you're missing the point of my post. yes the computer prunes, but fundamentally it is attempting to review all possible scenarios indiscriminately as opposed to a human who is trying to make some sort of sense of the position. without work, as in developing an intuition for making sense of the game, a human looking ahead doesnt provide value.

so im not sure why you think i was trying to say humans cant move pieces around in their mind.

you also completely ignored that i was mainly addressing the scope difference of positions analyzed by a human player vs a computer, and that the talking point was someone looking "64 moves ahead" and trying to explain that no this guy did not literally see all variations 64 moves out - but that through (arguably more impressive) reasonable human ability he was able to to be accurate and confident in a decision that he had won while there was still 64 moves of depth left in the game

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A light hearted, unplanned and unadvertised naka-carlsen bullet match can attract a lot of viewers. I'd bet a 20 game rapid series over 4 days between naka-carlsen would attract more viewers than the world championship.

Oh fuck yes it would. I rather have a classical 960 tbh

Yeah, classical 960 would be amazing since it de-emphasises preparation.
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