He declined to defend it because he disagreed with the way FIDE was organizing and managing the tournament. I believe this is around the time they threw him out of a tournament for wearing jeans, when he was not the only competitor present in jeans.
I think it's nearly universally accepted that his streak ended on a technicality rather than a legitimate decline/defeat.
I think it's more that he wanted to go out undefeated, rather than lacking motivation. Or rather the former driving the latter.
He made 5 title defenses. Two were against the previous generation of players, and he did extremely well. 2 were against players of his generation and were anything but compelling victories. He only won a total of 1 classical game in the 24 played, and that was in a must-win scenario because he had just lost for a final record in these matches of +1 -1 =22. And finally there was his match against Nepo which was looking to be another extremely close match until Nepo lost a critical game, and then went on monkey tilt, as is his reputation - proceeding to play horribly for the rest of the match and get wiped.
In an interview with Rogan, Carlsen stated he felt he peaked a bit before his match against Nepo, and so he probably did not view his chances of success in a world championship match as especially high. So he was going to have to spend months preparing for a match he could very well lose which would certainly tarnish his reputation as the GOAT of chess. I think this is why he couldn't find the motivation.
For instance there were new world records just around the corner. The most successful world title defenses is 6 and that was back in the early 20th century. With one more he could have surpassed Kasparov and at least tied the record.
Magnus has always been unhappy with the format of the WCC cycle. He first skipped it in 2011, when he was already the top-rated player but not yet champion (https://www.chess.com/news/view/carlsen-quits-world-champion...), and very nearly skipped it again in 2013.
Actually he recently stated that he IS still disappointed about that whole incident because nothing changed and is currently backing up hikaru on drama around similar issues.
The motivation issues can stem from poor management :)
From what I recall, he automatically lost that one game but was not thrown out of the tournament. Eventually he just stopped playing the world championship altogether, which is when he lost his title.
I don't really follow human chess, but I wonder what the new nr 1 player thought of themselves after essentially becoming the "best player in the world who doesn't wear jeans." Must be so frustrating to know there is something left to achieve but your league's shenanigans will prevent you from achieving it in an official and prestigious manner.
The jean controversy was a couple of years after Magnus stopped defending the title. It has nothing to do with it. Magnus just doesn't care about the format of the world title.
I think something broke for him while playing Caruana in 2018. The classical games were a snooze fest of defensive plays after defensive plays and everything was settled in the rapid tie break in a fairly unsatisfying manner.
He is not the first to complain about that by the way. Fischer hated the format too.
The freestyle championship was better in pretty much every way.
There was no snooze fest though in 2018 WCC. The games were extremely exciting, with unbalanced pawn structures. They all ended in draws only because of their strong defensive skills and a touch of luck in a few games.
Unbalanced pawn structure is a feature of the Sveshnikov Sicilian but Caruana had done a lot of prep and it was obvious. Carlsen quicky left the main line for the boring 7. Nd5. Plus, Carlsen missed a lot of good moves because he had to play it safe. To me, it was boring chess of the highest level.
A lot of it felt like watching engines by proxy. One prepared well on a very complex opening. The other found the best meta counterplay and held until he reached the tie break.
Game 12 is a travesty. It was clear he just wanted to move to rapid.
But that's it. There was no win because the opportunity to even compete was taken away. Imagine you train your whole life and finally win the Olympic Gold medal, but everyone knows it's only because the true nr 1 ignored to compete in this format.
Winning a title is never about facing the greatest possible opponent. Even the people who show up aren’t at their absolute best, but consider everyone who doesn’t devote their lives to the sport. The greatest potential chess player of all time likely does something else with their lives.
Without prep Magnus would be vastly less likely to win, and he’s not doing the prep because he’s not competing. How exactly is that different than someone not devoting themselves to the sport 20 years ago?
I make no claims about what’s going on in people’s heads here just the underlying reality.
I was pissed I didn’t go to nationals in high school largely because I got no sleep the night before due to a crappy hotel stay. Losing a close game to board 1 while trying to stay awake sucked, but I was hardly the only person off my game, so that’s just how things workout.
This is plain wrong for anybody that has been actually following chess.
He said like a year before declining that he would only defend against Alireza because he was the younger generation. Nobody believed him, Alireza didn't win the Candidates and he said "no thanks" and then everybody was surprised pikachu.
The Jean thing was way later and in an unrelated event.
My understanding is that this is purely a strategic choice by the bigger labs. When OpenAI released Whisper, it was by far best-in-class, and they haven't released any major upgrades since then. It's been 3.5 years... Whisper is older than ChatGPT.
Gemini 3 Pro Preview has superlative audio listening comprehension. If I send it a recording of myself in a car, with me talking, and another passenger talking to the driver, and the radio playing, me in English, the radio in Portuguese, and the driver+passenger in Spanish, Gemini can parse all 4 audio streams as well as other background noises and give a translation for each one, including figuring out which voice belongs to which person, and what everyone's names are (if it's possible to figure that out from the conversation).
I'm sure it would have superlative audio generation capabilities too, if such a feature were enabled.
Yes modern AIs have an entire opening database and generally have cached the first 20+ moves of the game (for most common openings) from a database of very deep searches identifying the best move. This is absolutely a form of opening prep for AIs.
That said, even without that database a modern AI will completely topple the best human at every common chess variant. Humans cannot defeat modern AIs in chess like games.
Like my answer below, that's wrong. Even I have achieved a few draws or even wins against Stockfish in training games, and I am FM strength. From time to time you are happy to reach a simple rook endgame which happens to be won and the engine doesn't anticipate that (horizon effect). You still draw or lose 90% of those but you win 10%.
Either the engine was misconfigured, the hardware you were playing on was glitching or you are omitting something. There is no chance in the world that you can beat stockfish in standard time control.
Just because you can not do it it does not mean that others can not do it. If you search for Lichess games where strong players play against (edit: strongest!) Stockfish (which, admittedly is not the full throttle Stockfish) you will find that Stockfish by far does not win all the time. Such is a claim which only inexperienced chess beginners and Stockfish fanboys make. Stronger players know that Stockfish is relatively better, and by a far margin, but – obviously – does not win all the time due to the huge drawing range in chess. Admittedly, winning a game gets more and more difficult with every year. And, to make you happy, I have never beaten Lc0.
> If you search for Lichess games where strong players play against Stockfish ([..]) you will find that Stockfish by far does not win all the time.
I'm sure some of those games are actually stockfish v stockfish or something similar. Its pretty easy to run stockfish or lichess locally and copy the moves from each engine back and forth.
@josephg (for reasons I do not know there is no reply link below your post)
Sure, some people are cheaters. Some are not. There is no personal win in cheating against Stockfish. Usually strong players do it for training purposes, or to entertain their watchers when they stream. I actually remember having seen one who did that, and he drew. That was a party.
Yes. I hear this claim from above: "Some humans can beat stockfish."
Evidence given: "There exist some small number of games on lichess.org played against stockfish where the user won."
My counter argument is that games on lichess against stockfish don't imply a human beat stockfish. It could just be that stockfish (or other bots) can sometimes beat stockfish. And some humans surely use bots to play on their behalf in order to cheat in online games.
I don't know if any humans can beat stockfish. But I don't consider that to be strong evidence.
> My counter argument is that games on lichess against stockfish don't imply a human beat stockfish. It could just be that stockfish (or other bots) can sometimes beat stockfish. And some humans surely use bots to play on their behalf in order to cheat in online games.
Also, Lichess' Stockfish runs in the browser (with all the slowdown that entails), plus is limited to one second of thinking time even on the highest level. It also has no tablebases and AFAIK no opening book. Even if you _can_ consistently beat Lichess Stockfish level 8, there's still a very long way from there to saying you can beat Stockfish at its maximum strength, which is generally what people would assume the best humans would be up against in such a duel.
People generally don't play unencumbered engines anymore because the result isn't interesting.
Well, there is nothing I can do to prove to you that I did, as I can not travel into the past taking you with me. I know, I did win two or three games and drew approximately 25 out of approximately 500 training games. But I can not prove it. You have to believe or not.
I believe you. I just suspect stockfish was misconfigured, it wasn’t playing at its highest skill level or something similar was going on. That seems more likely. (I’d love to know for sure though).
Yeah his claim is quite absurd really. If it was a weaker stockfish (bad hardware, older version etc.) then maybe. Modern stockfish pretty much crushes any and everyone. A draw alone would be extremely impressive, and maybe doable with enough luck from a top player. But even that is very far fetched nowadays. Let alone actually winning.
Elsewhere in the thread he revealed that he achieved these results around the year 2015, which means we was playing against Stockfish 6 or earlier, estimated to have about 400 less ELO than today's Stockfish 18. Stockfish 6 didn't even have NNUE, so the real issue seems to be that he thinks his results from 2015 hold any relevance to the chess engines of today.
Would you be willing to bet money that you can beat a properly setup stockfish, no piece odds and even time controls? I'll give you literally any odds you name and let you try an unlimited number of times until you give up. 100% serious.
P.S: You should not take this bet. You will lose. You are mistaken if you think you beat stockfish.
If you're betting against modern stockfish, respectively, that's a terrible bet.
There are some games of knight odds Leela playing superGM's.
For example, Hikaru Nakamura went 1 win, 2 draws, and 13 losses against LeelaKnightOdds at 3 minutes + 2 sec increment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYO9w3tQU4Q
So that's a score of 2 out of 16. Which is apparently actually very good. I know Fabi played a lot of games too, and also lost almost all of them.
And that is with knight odds lol. And stockfish is ever better than Leela, but generally less aggressive and more methodical.
You clarified in another post that you had won back in 2015. I have no clue the strength of engines back then (I imagine still very strong of course), but a decade of growth is a lot. They're completely insane nowadays.
I doubt that. Stockfish 11 years ago as you claim (which around then was rated approximately 2800), maybe. Stockfish today? Stockfish on Lichess is 3000 and that's not even running at full capacity. A fully supported Stockfish running on top hardware is currently 3650ish. It can avoid known draw lines and stalemate lines, and could absolutely crush the likes of Magnus.
Further, if the engine does not use an opening database and the thinking time per game is the same, then the engine will usually make the same moves, so you can learn from your errors. There are just a few chess engines which "learn" per default and therefore change their moves, like BrainLearn.
I have achieved these results around 2015, sitting at home, relaxed. I was not in a match situation observed by millions. Such a situation can knowingly lead to blunders like Kramniks overlook of mate in 2.
I also sometimes "cheated" by aborting the game when I was tired and continuing it the next day (if at all). That's what the player in a match can not do.
I also sometimes restarted a game at a specific position. Can also not be done in a match. Finally, they used better hardware in these matches. I had eight threads on my old Laptop and I used four of them. The Laptop itself was bought around 2005. Between 2000 and approximately 2020 I trained every day and I was on my peak. I am still around 2400 on Lichess today, without training.
So, I hope it does not sound that extraordinary any more. It isn't. Maybe it is now, but not then.
2015 stockfish is quite a different beast from 2026 stockfish. Stockfish didn't even add NNUE until 2020.
Based on what data I can find, it's estimated that the difference between the 2025 stockfish (stockfish 6) and today's stockfish (stockfish 18) is nearly 400 points.
That's the difference between Magnus Carlson at his peak and someone who doesn't even have enough rating to qualify for the grandmaster title.
So yes, the fact that you beat stockfish in 2015 doesn't sound extraordinary, because AI today is vastly stronger than it was when you achieved those results. What sounds extraordinary to people is your belief that you could repeat those results against today's top chess engines.
Out of sheer curiosity, I did a bunch of research to understand just how dramatic a 350 point rating gap is in real word chess. Magnus Carlson, for example, has a 98% win rate against players >350 rating points lower than his own, with zero recorded losses.
In fact, there is only one game I could find in all of Chess history (Anand vs Touzane, 2001) where a super GM (rating >2700) dropped a classical game to someone more than 350 points below theirs (gap: 402 points). (it's estimated that there are between 2000 and 3000 classical games in history played between Super GMs and players >350 points below them) And it could easily be that Anand was ill, or suffering some other human condition which made his play significantly worse than his typical play for that game - which you would not see from a computer engine.
In other words, the Stockfish that you beat in 2015 would itself be expected to get 3-5 points (that is, 6-10 draws and 0 wins) in 500 matches against the best chess engine of today. The delta in strength is immense, and it is reasonable for everyone else in this comment thread to assert that you would have zero chance at all of picking up a draw against Stockfish 18 in a fair game of any time control, regardless of how many matches you played.
I do not know the time controls anymore, but I always use the latest Stockfish with all available threads. No opening book, but I do not repeat lines to take advantage of that, because I play to train calculation. I guess hash was the (for my setup) normal 4096 MB.
Latest Stockfish with all available threads and no opening book is still well beyond any human. Elo ratings get a bit silly with computers, but we're talking an Elo of well north of 3000.
For reference: The last serious match between the top human player and an engine was Brains in Bahrain, Kramnik–Fritz 7, in 2002 (already that should tell you something). Well, actually a broken and buggy version of Fritz 7, but that's another story. It was a 4–4 tie. On the latest CCRL list, Stockfish 18 outranks Fritz 8 (the oldest Fritz version on the list) by 947 Elo points _on the same hardware_. (For comparison, Magnus Carlsen's peak rating is 65 points higher than Kramnik's peak rating.)
Add to that 24 years of hardware development, and you can imagine why no human player is particularly interested in playing full-strength engines in a non-odds match anymore. Even more so in FRC/Chess960 where you have absolutely zero chance of leading the game into some sort of super-drawish opening to try to hold on to half a point now and then.
I'm late to this thread but I've manufactured about a dozen SKUs and I think you could have saved an enormous amount of grief with one simple step:
If you are American, and you are manufacturing 500 units, do it in America. Yes, it's more expensive per-unit, but at 500 units you don't need a tiny per-unit cost.
American manufacturing is more flexible, higher agency, and people tend to adapt to underspecified instructions better. The communication loops are stronger.
That said, America has enormous tradeoffs. If you need 10,000 of a part in 4 hours because something weird happened, China can make it happen. America... might take months. But if your batch size is 500, it's better for an American living in America to cut their teeth on American manufacturing and go to China when you need 10,000+ units per run.
Wow, this article is a tour de force in menu and icon design, I learned a lot. For anyone who wants to understand the design world better, or wants a glimpse into the brain of a design-minded person, this is a great article. Incredibly accessible, incredibly insightful, and just overall a gem.
Childhood is only half of subjective life if you stagnate as an adult. If you keep changing your routine, you'll find each year has just as much subjective experience as the previous.
Start a company in an industry where you have no experience. Move to a country where nobody speaks a language you understand. Find a new sport and commit to being a top 0.1% participant (for most sports that don't air regularly on national television, this can be done in a year).
If subjective life is speeding up, throw yourself some curve balls.
If life is moving too fast, then make specific choices to slow down. Take up hiking or camping. Do things with your family if that's a valid option for you. Turn your phone off. Be mindful of your body and emotions.
Lots of small things that can help you slow down a little.
My life has had a 5 year event horizon since I left my family home. I.e. every 5 years has seen major changes I could not have predicted.
For much of that there have been critical pressures making most days important. Which makes them memorable.
Subjectively and objectively, things have changed so much, and so many times, I feel like I have had several lives, so far.
Right now I am in a “make” or “break” situation going three productive years. I solved some very difficult problems that I put myself in a “must solve” position. Each problem solved had significant life impact.
The indicators for “make” are going up month-to-month now, making it a tough but intense and wonderful time. Feels a lot like my early 20’s when I started a dream business (for me) while in school.
Definitely don’t experience time as indicated by those graphs.
my best friend had kids before me and told me something before I had kids that changed my life forever - “I was here first and I have my life, the kids need to adapt to my life just as much as I have to adapt to theirs.” I have followed this mantra for the past 12 years and I think both my life and my kids life is much better for it. I see too many parents turning their lives upside down after they became parents, I have not much at all. I am definitely more risk averse which is probably the biggest personal change I made but otherwise I do everything I’ve done before I became a parent and my kid has experienced extreme levels of boredom while waiting for me to finish what I am doing
In the US, unless you have a few million saved up, children will probably make most people more conservative.
Wake up, drop kid off at school, go to job allowing one to afford health insurance for kids, come home, take kids to after school activity, eat, sleep, repeat.
A child is from the parents perspective a lot of repetitive motion over a very long time, and, I think, a main contributor to speeding up your relative passage of time.
Which you might find super rewarding! But I am fairly confused by the claim that children are interesting and wonder how people spent their pre-children time to arrive at that conclusion – or how much they actually are involved in all the parts of taking care of their kid.
Right its a weird take for me too. Childhood was fun sure, but you were stuck in a time/place not of your choosing, with others making many/most decisions for you.
As an adult, especially a well paid SWE like many on HN.. you can create the life, make the decisions and have the experiences that you want. Your life is as vibrant as you choose it to be.
Much of the stuff I used to read about or watch on TV as a precocious child.. I can just go buy/see/do with the agency & money I have as an adult.
Sure you have a 9-5 (or 8-6, or 7-7) job but you used to go to school and after school activities all day as a kid probably too. It’s your choice to do something or nothing with your hours of free time after work and weekends.
Small children in the picture adds additional time constraints, but should also bring additional vividness/subjective time experience to your life.
I think it's nearly universally accepted that his streak ended on a technicality rather than a legitimate decline/defeat.
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