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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

#81

Post by jstx1 »

mikaeluman wrote: post #61

The candidates might as well be the world championship. But they need to make sure wins give you e.g. 3 points and draws only 0.5. Even in the candidates this year Ian - having obtained a nice lead - played drawing lines with white to perfection. I don't blame him, it was the right decision. The incentive structure needs to change. Even after a draw, the concept of Armageddon games to give another half point would be…

That's why as a spectator I wouldn't like a change in the format to a multi-player tournament. Changing it would be equivalent to making the candidates the World Championship and removing the WC match - basically getting rid of the most exciting part of following chess and keeping everything else the same.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#82

Post by rollcat »

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 ?

"Good" as in, maybe reach GM? Quite likely, although being in GM already makes you a statistical outlier (200 slots per region in a player base of hundreds of thousands).

Good enough to challenge a pro? You're seriously underestimating how much hard work the pros are putting in to play at their level - on top of the insane mechanical skill, game knowledge, and experience. Part of the skillset is obviously transferrable to other RTS games (big chunk of the AoE4 ladder was dominated by SC2 GMs early after launch), but playing (and staying) at pro level in SC2 requires much more - it requires consistency.

Serral has 7.5K MMR not because he's been taking 20 MMR off a 7.4K player (because there are no 7.4K players), he has 7.5K MMR because he took 1 MMR from 6K players a couple thousand times. 6K is like what, top 50 GM?

My bet in Serral v Magnus would be X:0 in a best of (X*2)+1, for any X the players would be willing to suffer through.

(Sorry if my numbers are a bit inexact, the new season just started and GM is not open yet.)

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#83

Post by piva00 »

adrianN wrote: post #54
nhumrich wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess is still no-hard, so "proving this" will be near impossible. The closest we have is statistics. I remember watching a "bot battle." A chess tournament for bots only, algorithms playing eachother. Nearly 70% of these games ended in draw.

Chess on an infinite board is asymptotically difficult in the worst case. Chess on an 8x8 board can be solved in constant time.

Why hasn't it been done then?

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#84

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

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…

> And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting him again isn't that exciting.

The first half of the match wasn't even close to a steamroll. It's just Ian broke mentally after that famous 6th game. The candidate tournament showed that he had more than recovered from that loss and I think he would be in a much better shape to challenge Carlsen again. Also, with Carlsen's current attitude, it is quite possible that he would be closer to breaking first. (One may assume he already broke since he gives up the title without a fight)

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#85

Post by dmurray »

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…

> It's also almost impossible for a new person to get a chance.

> when [Carlsen] first did he almost didn't win it to be allowed to play the WC match.

These complaints are in opposition to each other! You can have an open process which gives an outsider a chance to qualify, or you can teleport the incumbent best player straight to the final, but you can't have both.

The current Candidates structure balances it pretty well, in my view. Most of the 10 players who have a realistic chance in a match reach the final 8, but it often features one great-but-not-elite grandmaster who had a good tournament, and it's theoretically open to even the worst amateur who shows up to his Continental Championship and performs well in that followed by the World Cup.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#86

Post by dskloet »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #72
adrianN wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess on an infinite board is asymptotically difficult in the worst case. Chess on an 8x8 board can be solved in constant time.

Not sure if this was sarcasm, but that's like saying NP-hardness is no big deal because we only care about finite problems.

Chess on an 8x8 board is not NP-hard. That doesn't mean it's easy but invoking NP-hardness is kind of meaningless.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#87

Post by bluecalm »

sgjohnson wrote: post #73
bluecalm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't anymore, at least not the computers. When you let them start from normal starting position and provide decent hardware and some time it's always a draw and has been for a few years now.

> always Not always. Almost always.

No one is going to waste the CPU time running Stockfish (or GPU with Leela) against each other at classical time controls long enough to see a decisive game which might never happen anyway so we will likely never know. I think current Stockfish on a modern ThreadRipper with classical time control will never be beaten. I am not 100% sure I am right but I don't expect (but would love to!) to be proven wrong.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#88

Post by fairity »

My read on the situation is that Magnus had two goals:

1) remain world champion

2) get to 2900 elo

#1 got in the way of #2 because all the elite grandmasters constantly focus throughout the year on preparing for Magnus, which creates a headwind in the non-world champion tournaments where he must perform well to reach 2900.

My guess is he will focus on 2900. Then, come back as world champion. Then, retire after 7 championships or his performance deteriorates.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#89

Post by aaron695 »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #22
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…

> Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw. While this is highly likely and essentially agreed upon by all experts on the matter, it's not proven yet.

> While this is highly likely and essentially agreed upon by all experts on the matter

Can you cite this?

I can't see anything on this.

It's not something a chess champion would know on their own for instance.

Basically you have to get a good understanding that the advantage of being white can't be leveraged enough to win.

Obviously it can't be proved, but to even get an idea will be very mathematical or computational.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#90

Post by divan »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #20

Funny that they mention Arkady Dvorkovich, I would expect him to quietly retreat from managing current affairs in FIDE because of his high position in Russian civil service. How can one of the closest allies of Putin head an international organisation nowadays?

International sport federations are non-profits and follow own statutes. While many sports federations banned russian and belorussian athletes and officials, they had to do it within the legal boundaries and their statutes. For example, the reasoning ISU (International Skating Union, second oldest sport federation) gave on banning russians is "...we obliged to protect athletes during event, so because of war, russian and Ukrainian athletes can have a fight or situation that endangers them, thus we ban russians from participation or officiating...". During ISU Congress in June 2022 they voted if russians should be allowed to officiate on Congress, take official positions (including potentially heading positions) in ISU and in Congress, and they haven't reached two thirds needed.

So it's simply not easy "just to replace a president". You need to follow organization regulations and rules. Large international organizations normally have a lot of institutional inertia and rarely even have unified vision and position on many aspects, unfortunately.

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