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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

#91

Post by kamaal »

zarzavat wrote: post #77
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.

It takes months of preparation to prepare for the world championships, basically rote memorisation with a team of people. If he doesn't do that, he will lose. This is time that could be spent playing tournaments. This would be okay if the world championships was every four years, but it's every two, so a large fraction of Carlsen's time is spent preparing for this one match that everybody knows he's going to win anyw…

>>Carlsen clearly feels that the World Championship is not important enough to sacrifice a large chunk of his career for.

Which other tournaments are considered like the top levels of Chess competition, and what are the criteria for being the top chess player in the world(If not winning the world championship)?

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#92

Post by SeanLuke »

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 his sport or game than Tinsley.

In 1990 Tinsley decided to play Chinook, the best checkers computer program in the world. Chinook had placed second at the US Nationals so it had the right to enter the world championships, but the US and British checkers federations refused to allow it.

So Tinsley resigned his title. Tinsley then played Chinook in an unofficial match (which he won).

This power play really stuck it to the federations: nobody wanted to be named the new world champion knowing Tinsley was fully capable of crushing them. Eventually everyone came to an agreement to let Tinsley be the "champion emeritus".

Tinsley played Chinook four years later, at age 68, still probably the best player in the world. But in the middle of the match he complained of stomach pains and withdrew after only six games (of 20), all drawn. Tinsley's pains were real: he later died of pancreatic cancer.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#93

Post by babarock »

kamaal wrote: post #42
matsemann wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Say a player just rote memorised moves from a chess engine and just played it. Would that be considered cheating?

As long as it's all in memory, that's fair game. Everybody at the high level is using engines for training/preparation.

This is balanced by the fact that the sheer number of possible lines is huge. Too big for any human to "remember" them all.

It's also not enough to memorize "good" moves from an engine perspective. "Good" engine moves and "good" human moves are different things.

An engine might see a move as "good", because it calculated 50 moves down the line and found an advantage. This means that you'd have to play the next 49 moves in a very precise manner to reach this advantage. One way to think about it, is that there are multiple positions that are analyzed as "draw" by en engine, but 9 grandmasters out of 10 will see one side winning. That's because one side would need to play perfectly, while the other side has much higher tolerance for mistakes (engine assume perfect play on both sides).

TLDR: engine is fair game, during preparation. It's a big deal, it transformed high level chess, but it didn't break the game, and is unlikely to do so.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#94

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#95

Post by rocqua »

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 isn't known theoretically whether perfect play is enough for black to force a draw. It is also an infinitesimal probability that white starts off in zugzwang (i.e. all possible moves are bad).

However the consensus guess is that perfect play yields a draw.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#96

Post by sgjohnson »

bluecalm wrote: post #87
sgjohnson wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Stockfish won't solve it. We need a full game tree. Stockfish is not designed to build a full game tree.

Generating a full game tree would be a truly daunting undertaking, and I can't even fathom how much memory would it take.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#97

Post by matsemann »

dmurray wrote: post #85
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…

The candidates being the WC deciding event would solve both of them, though. So while the points are in opposition to each other, a new format could find a better way to solve it than now, in which both things happen.

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#98

Post by AmericanChopper »

jstx1 wrote: post #66
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'…

More like Kasparov because he remained active after the FIDE split. Still a bit different because Magnus isn't running a parallel WC of his own. It's also funny how the only 3 World Champions who have refused to defend a title because of disagreements with FIDE are probably the 3 best chess players ever.

Fischer is clearly the goat in my view. But it’s not so obvious to me that Kasparov and Carlsen are better than say Vishy or Morphy or Botvinnik or Capablanca…

Re: Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

#100

Post by taneq »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #84
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 pos…

Does it count as 'breaking' if you're just tired of the game and don't want to play any more? Surely it's OK to stop and do other things eventually?
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