
Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship - CalChris
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=88069&crosstable=1
======
zbik
I whipped up a little demo illustrating Carlsen's decisive rapid game 3. It
transposes the move sequence to show white's 13-move opening (Karjakin)
followed by Carlsen's 13-move response as black, and so on through the game -
using the longest possible sequences consistent with legal positions from the
original game.

[http://transpose.fantasychess.co.uk/](http://transpose.fantasychess.co.uk/)

~~~
logicallee
hey that's incredibly clear! From your description I thought it'd be
practically pointless - but actually you can see each sides strategy
developing quite interestingly.

I actually saw people play out of sequence - some buskers or homeless or
whatever people - just used to playing so many games against each other they'd
get through the openings quickly by each person making several moves. It
seemed too fast for me to see that they kept a correct pace, but maybe. I
believe the games were very rapid. they stopped and started switching turns
normally as soon as they were out of the opening. (so this refers to just a
handful of moves at most.)

so with a bit of sportsmanship it's possible to actually play that way over
the board with somebody who's cooperating with you to get through the opening
quickly.

~~~
zbik
Thank you! I was inspired by something I read about the early history of
chess:

"In order to save time, and to prevent useless exchanges, it was agreed that
the first player should make his (let us say) fifteen moves all at once,
without, however, crossing the middle line of the board; after which the
adversary was entitled to play up at once an equal number of counter moves...
these preliminary maneuvers the Arabs called Ta'biyat, which signifies 'the
drawing up of troops in battle array'."

(quoted from Duncan Forbes "Observations on the Origin and Progress of Chess",
1855 - I first came across the variant in Edward Lasker's "The Adventure of
Chess".)

~~~
logicallee
thanks! that's also really interesting. (though in what I saw, there wasn't
"after which" the other player made their first few moves - instead they moved
over each other, like two people talking over each other. I couldn't figure
out how they kept track of the turn or that they made the correct number of
moves each - it was all much too quick. I even suppose that it's possible they
didn't keep strict track and one player may have made 1 more move than the
other or that sort of thing. Really bizarre!)

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conistonwater
This time around there was an unusual amount of match strategy involved. In
fact, what's interesting is that they always played the Spanish or the
Italian, but in the _one_ game where Karjakin wanted to (had to) win, he
played the Najdorf.

Peter Svidler mentioned a very interesting suggestion that the players should
play the tie-breaks _before_ the match, which should produce more interesting
games (in particular, it should avoid game-12-style games). But in any case, I
think determining the structure of the championship match is a rather neat
test-case of mechanism design.

~~~
tzs
I'd like to see tiebreaks first in soccer.

Yasser Seirawan had an interesting suggestion. Make championship matches 13
games, not 12, with the challenger getting white 7 times and the defending
champion getting white 6 times, and with the championing retaining the title
in the case of a 6.5 - 6.5 tie.

One nice thing about Seirawan's suggestion is that it does not involve rapid
or blitz. Many people don't like the idea that the world championship of
classical chess might be decided by rapid or blitz games. (There are separate
championships for rapid and blitz, held annually).

As computers get better and better at chess, I wonder if it might become
reasonable someday to use computer evaluations to break ties? There has been
work on using computer evaluations to measure how accurate and strong chess
players are. Computer scientist and IM Ken Regan has done a lot in this area,
both in the context of trying to determine how strong past players actually
were, and in the context of trying to determine when someone is using a
computer to cheat.

For instance, in this match Carlsen had winning positions in some of the drawn
games, but was not able to convert. I don't think that in any of the drawn
games Karjakin ever had a winning position. I suspect that if polled, most GMs
would say that Carlsen outplayed Karjakin during the classical portion of the
match. With computers, that could be put on an objective basis.

Svidler is an interesting commentator. He has a quick and sharp wit. During
one of the earlier games, when Eric Hansen was co-commentator [1], they were
talking about IM Lawrence Trent (Fabiano Caruana's manager). I didn't catch
all of it as I was listening while working, but apparently Carlsen was playing
an opening line or something that Trent doesn't think is good. Hansen said
something like "I wouldn't want to be Lawrence Trent, betting against Magnus
Carlsen". Svidler immediately shot back, "That sentence was too long".

[1] This was on chess24.com. Svidler and Hansen were commenting for them, not
for the official broadcast. For the later part of the match, the chess24
commentary was Svidler and German GM Jan Gustafsson. Both the Svidler/Hansen
and the Svidler/Gustafsson pairings were quite good.

~~~
NhanH
Computer evaluation would cut off all the "human" factors involving in a
match, especially championship one. It is part of any sport that being
slightly better is not enough, you have to be able to turn that into concrete
advantage over the scores. To put it another way, "match strategy" is part of
the game.

We know with reasonable certainty that Carlsen is the stronger player, thanks
to the rating system. Championship match has always be about more than being
_just_ the stronger player.

~~~
ktRolster
The point is that Carlsen was ahead, so if enough games had been played, he
eventually would have managed to convert one of those games to victory (by
sheer probability).

Because the number of games played was too short, the game score wasn't
allowed to reflect the true strength of the players.

~~~
mehwoot
Yes but that's a feature of almost every sport (to varying degrees). The aim
of championships are not _necessarily_ to determine who is stronger.

~~~
ktRolster
I think in chess the purpose of the match is to determine who is stronger.

~~~
dagw
If all you want to know is who is the strongest player overall, then we don't
need these special championship matches, we'd just look at the overall
rankings.

Being able to perform "on the day" is an integral part of every sport
championship and the thing that makes them exciting.

~~~
ktRolster
Overall rankings don't tell you that. They also involve things like "who's
been trying really hard lately"

------
lacker
The rapid games are starting to become more interesting than the full-length
games. I would not be surprised if rapid chess starts to become the more
popular form of top-level chess.

If you're just thinking about "playing the best possible game", the computers
are doing that already. If you want to see two individuals intensely competing
in a mental challenge, why not speed things up so that it's actually
watchable? Similar to Twenty20 cricket.

~~~
sgeisenh
Rapid and classical are totally different beasts. Rapid is more fun to watch
in real time, but doesn't usually produce high quality games. On the other
hand, classical can often be miserable to watch, but typically yields games
worth of study for years to come.

Watching computers is valuable to a point, but completely different from
watching humans. The search space that humans can cover is much smaller, so
the games end up being more positional, and easier to understand for a
spectator. I wish that they would build a chess engine that emulated a human
thought process so that it could be used as part of following a game in
progress. The way they used the engine in the official world championship
broadcast was frustrating. I don't care if white has a forced mate in 83
moves, I want to know how the position seems based on a shallower but more
positional analysis.

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slm_HN
The ending of the match in puzzle form on Lichess:

[https://en.lichess.org/training/102787](https://en.lichess.org/training/102787)

~~~
akkartik
I think I might have been the first to get that today. It said "played 0
times". Very humorous :)

~~~
wallace_f
I just played it and it also said it was played 0 times

To anyone that plays chess or would like to: lichess is an all-around
wonderful site, and in my opinion the best place to play chess! It's also
free, and ad free.

~~~
LanceH
What does it have over ICC?

~~~
iends
imho, ICC is the gold standard. You can get at least a simul with a master
almost everyday. The GM commentary is incredible for live tournaments, and
things like ICC's Game of the Week from GM Joel Benjamin are unmatched.

~~~
wallace_f
ICC is also great. To each their own

If you haven't yet taken a look at lichess give it a shot, it's wonderfully
elegant and well-done project and there is a lot of great talent that plays
there as well as wonderful features such as lichess tv, coaching, analysis and
puzzles which are all free -- and there's no ads, the UX design is very click,
too!

Edit: I'm not a Master and don't need that level of competitiveness, but on
lichess TV I am always seeing Masters playing there.

~~~
zem
it really depresses me that we can't do similar things in the tournament
scrabble community :( there's no shortage of programmers and open-source
enthusiasts; it's just the spectre of being sued by hasbro that kills
everything.

------
CalChris
... in style with a queen sac on the final move, a mate in 8 while under
threat of mate. Bravo Magnus!

~~~
slm_HN
The queen sac itself was a mate in two, which is pretty simple even in a rapid
game. However he did need to see the mate in 8 before committing to Rc8+.

In the end Magnus was much stronger in the rapid games. He was winning in
three of the four even though he let one slip to a draw.

~~~
CalChris
Game two of the rapids playoff was a fine ending by Karjakin, a stalemate
after sacking everything. But MC the WC was much stronger at rapid.

~~~
tbrake
I wonder if either or both players smirked at the end of game 2 as it was
stalemate by en passant, which absolutely can't be that common and almost
seems a little indulgent. I can only recall one other stalemate in WC play,
Korchnoi vs Karpov in 1978.

~~~
conistonwater
It was a draw the moment White had only h-pawns, which happened earlier,
because the remaining bishop was the wrong colour.

~~~
tbrake
I'm aware of all that. I'm speaking about the oddity/uniqueness of forcing a
stalemate via en passant.

~~~
sago
I agree, even if it was deliberate. With a clear draw, but that board
position, both of them played out the stalemate. Not saying they deliberately
drew, but just, in that situation with a certain draw, why not make it a cute
one. I like it when top players do that. Like Ernst letting Magnus play out
his beautiful epaulette mate in '04.

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Ntrails
I'd just like to give a little shout out to the guys streaming this on twitch
last night. I don't play chess beyond the "find legal move and make it" level
- but watching the last game was really really enjoyable and the commentary
was pretty good too, helped me see what was actually going on and why.

I'd never have looked for it, but once I started watching I couldn't stop.
Wish I'd started earlier

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hakanito
A really good documentary about his road to world champion came out a few days
ago [1]. Worth a watch if you have Swedish VPN access (it's in English but
with Swedish subtitles).

[1] [http://www.svt.se/dox/se-program/dox-magnus-schackgeniet-
mag...](http://www.svt.se/dox/se-program/dox-magnus-schackgeniet-
magnus?autostart=true)

------
dswalter
After all the draws, it was nice to see some actual wins.

For those less familiar with chess, the final game was kind of fun. Carlsen's
final play was to sacrifice his queen to draw the king into a trap, when
Karjakin was one free move from putting Carlsen into an inextricably losing
situation.

~~~
conistonwater
I don't think that's accurate: Carlsen could have gotten a winning advantage
just by defending everything with Qg3. On chess24's broadcast, Svidler even
thought Carlsen might not go for the mate just because Qg3 was safely good
enough.

~~~
mjhoy
The trick is that he was under time pressure and if he miscalculated faced a
mate in one, so it was somewhat risky (and why Svidler was surprised he played
it).

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maaaats
20% of Norwegians watched all the games yesterday, even though they lasted way
beyond midnight local time.

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cpg
Could someone ELI5 (but I know chess moves only, not strategy) the reasons why
the ending was described as "sexy" and "incredible" and "classy" and other
superlatives I heard?

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xurukefi
As somebody who has no idea about chess I cannot believe that Carlsen
calculated Bf8 after Rc8 under this time pressure and an easy Qg3 move. Kudos.

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grizzles
A few days ago, Karjakin tried to tilt Magnus by showing up very late for the
press conference as a way to be disrespectful.

Anyone know if there were there any other psych outs that happened?
Historically, there have been some really interesting ones in the chess world.

~~~
chocimir
Karjakin wasn't disrespectful. He just gave a couple of short post-match
interviews that Carslen intentionally skipped, went straight to the conference
room and was waiting there. The post match interviews were standard up to that
point in the match. Carslen decided to skip them after he lost the game.

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lspears
Spoiler alert!

~~~
lasfter
Yeah, seriously... I was looking forward to watching the tiebreaker in
suspense. I suppose it isn't too surprising to find the story on HN though.

------
jgladch
Go Magnie Go!

