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Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

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Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#391

Post by noirbot »

BobbyJo wrote: post #203
Accacin wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's the intent at the time a decision was made.

What intent constitutes 'breaking'?

It's a temporal question. If you decide in the middle of a competition that you don't care any more and want to quit/forfeit/throw the match, then you broke. You committed to playing an event, presumably because you thought you could win or at least compete, and instead your mental stamina broke and you gave up.

IMO, it's less the intent that you have when you quit - the intent is almost always at that point that you don't want to be there any more doing the thing. The more important part is the intent that led up to the moment where you quit.

In some ways, it's similar to quitting any job. If you just have a bad day or week at work and put in your resignation with no other plan because you just can't stand coming in to work again, you "broke". If you're still working, but interviewing elsewhere, get another job, put in your notice and walk away with something else lined up, it's a bit different.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#392

Post by faeriechangling »

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'…

>I've always found it fascinating the level of commitment required to play Chess at this level.

There's several intellectuals I could name which were headed towards world class status like Demis Habbasis & Aleister Crowley decided to give up the game and later became remarkable men in their own right. I think of Paul Morphy who is probably the player furthest above his peers in history who decided to quit and be a lawyer and got annoyed whenever people would try to bring up the game.

I find it interesting to think of these men who are great enough to become the worlds best at chess, and some decide it's not worth it, some achieve that greatness and then require, and some seemingly are in it for life.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#393

Post by jodrellblank »

PeterisP wrote: post #106
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'…

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."

The Wikipedia page on Paul Morphy says he gave up chess age 22, tried to establish a law firm, all his clients wanted to talk to him about chess instead of legal matters, and he ended up living a life of idleness on his family's fortune.

That seems to put the quote in a different context.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#394

Post by pclmulqdq »

fijiaarone wrote: post #388
treis wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not nearly as much luck as poker, especially Texas hold ‘em which is almost pure luck with very little room for strategy or calculation.

Hold em has a lot more of a skill factor than the losers of a game want to admit, bit a lot more of a luck factor than the winners do.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#395

Post by Barrin92 »

8note wrote: post #379
Barrin92 wrote: post #372

It's his choice of course but I think some of the argumentation is in bad taste. Suggesting to only play against Firouzja is bad sportsmanship, a player should not attempt to handpick their opponent. It's also disrespectful to announce this after the candidates tournament finished, in particular towards Nepomniachtchi but also the other players who expected to face the world champion.

Why not handpick his opponent? The tournament hasn't been great at choosing opponents, and the format of the championship sucks

because if a title defender can handpick an opponent that creates glaringly atrocious incentives, the most obvious one being that they can pick whoever they think they're most likely to beat, turn down candidates they personally dislike, and so on. Basis of fair competition is that the process of selecting opponents is impartial and based on merit.

Other two claims are hard to substantiate either. Why has the tournamnet not been great at choosing opponents? They've all won fairly and they've all been among the strongest players in the world.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#396

Post by jhbadger »

OskarS wrote: post #191
SeanLuke wrote: post #92

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…

I love this story so much. This The Atlantic article telling the full tale is a favorite of mine [1] It's hard to overstate how incredibly dominant Tinsley was. In his entire career, he never lost a match, and only ever lost 7 games (two to Chinook). That is out of maybe tens of thousands of games. He was a mathematician by training and taught at a historically black university. He was also deeply religious and a lay…

If you like that you might like Jonathan Schaeffer's (the creator of Chinook) book "One Jump Ahead" in which he discusses Chinook and Tinsley in great detail.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#397

Post by PebblesRox »

JacobThreeThree wrote: post #375
epolanski wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's my point: elo distribution has nothing to do with how good players are, it merely tracks your win/lose status against opponents with a different elo. If you take, e.g. two unranked players that are very bad at chess or two unranked masters they are still going to end up with a +16 and -16 elo change. And you can keep adding great or bad players to the pool, and elo is still going to only look at the outcom…

>elo distribution has nothing to do with how good players are Nothing to do with it? That's a bit much. It's not a perfect system, nor is it a trivial problem to solve, but elo definitely highly correlates to how good the player is.

I think the point is it's a relative rather than an absolute measurement and you can't compare across time because the number of players in the system influences the scores.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#398

Post by wfme »

treis wrote: post #354
gralx wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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.

> Ungar destroyed anyone who challenged him in a gin match, including a professional widely regarded as the best gin player of Ungar's generation, Harry "Yonkie" Stein. Ungar beat Stein 86 games to none in a high-stakes game of Hollywood Gin, after which Stein dropped out of sight in gin circles and eventually stopped playing professionally.[0]

86 wins in a row against one of the best opponents at the time has to indicate that skill can overcome much of the luck involved.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stu_Ungar

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#399

Post by SargeZT »

franknstein wrote: post #223
YawningAngel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can play e.g. 1. e3 e5 2. e4 whatever And you effectively have a king's pawn opening with colours reversed

Can black refuse this 'color switch'? It seems like he can, for a while, by mimicking moves. 1. e3 e6 for example. Does this strategy necessarily leads to provably losing position?

Provably there's little that can be said about chess at large when it comes from opening to endgame. Heuristically speaking though matching moves against even a beginner is a very bad strategy for play, as a recent speedrun being done by GM Aman Hambleton on youtube has been showing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUfF6l4A6Ks

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#400

Post by xiaodai »

panda-giddiness wrote: post #192
SeanLuke wrote: post #92

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…

You skipped the best part of the story! > We [Chinook and the lead programmer] played an exhibition match against Marion Tinsley in 1991. And the computer told me to make this one particular move. When I made it, Tinsley immediately said, "You're going to regret that." > Not being a checkers player, I thought, "what does he know, my computer is looking 20 moves ahead." But a few moves later, the computer said that Ti…

that's one hell of a story!
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