Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship | Hacker News Reader

Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship

chessgames.com

226 pointsCalChris82 comments

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/

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.

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".)

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!)

Hi zbik - just fyi, Avast gives me a message "This site could have harmed your computer" for your url.

Thanks for the heads up - I contacted Avast and asked to be removed from their blacklist. I'm not a customer of Avast, but it may help if you submit a false positive report to them (based on what I read in some forum posts):

https://www.avast.com/false-positive-file-form.php

Cheers!

That's what I was looking for, thx

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.

> Peter Svidler mentioned a very interesting suggestion that the players should play the tie-breaks before the match, which should produce more interesting games.

This is the first such suggestion I've heard that I actually like.

Since 2003, MLB determines home field advantage in the World Series by the winner of the All–Star Game. Not same but similar.

The MLB system isn't similar at all.

Home field advantage in baseball is small and no certain road to victory and there's no specific series/game situation in which it would come into play in determining the result. To wit, the last World Series featured home team wins in just 2 of 7 games.

And the result of the All-Star Game is determined largely by the performance of players who will not feature in the World Series: at most 1/8th of the rosters are World Series participants, often much less. Further, the AllStar game is not managed with an eye towards maximizing the chances of victory, but instead to maximize the number of players to appear in the game; and pitchers that pitched two days before the game are not included, regardless of their skill level.

HFA in the WS might not be an advantage though. I'd argue it has actually been an advantage for the NL team if the AL team gets HFA in recent history because it helped their hitting. The last WS would be a good example.

Interestingly, in the new CBA which was agreed to last night, they have removed this.

> the players should play the tie-breaks before the match

But then wouldn't the game before the 'tie break', essentially become the tie break in pressure/strategy etc?

Maybe I'm missing something, but I think not: the first point of it is that it will never happen that the match is even, someone will always be leading. So it affects even the very first game, unlike in the current set up, where the first game (Trompowsky?!) is not a real game. At the beginning of the first game, someone would already have to play like they are behind. It also means that a you (I think) don't get situations where a draw is "good enough", a draw always solidifies someone's lead. That said there might be other consequences that I don't see.

As Greg Shahade pointed out[1], Kasparov had to beat Karpov to win the title, as did all the other world champions in the 20th century. He argues bringing back draw odds for the defending champ would lead to more interesting matches.

[1] https://gregshahade.wordpress.com/2016/11/28/how-to-make-the...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I don't like the idea of computer evaluation at all. The measure of whether one has a winning position should be winning.

I agree but here's an anecdote. Chess tournaments have been decided by a third party. I recall the story of a match in Holland between two clubs, during which someone died of a heart attack. The clocks were stopped and never resumed; whether out of respect or distress (or both) the remaining participants did not want to continue the match, so the game positions were recorded, and a GM subsequently called in by the Dutch association to evaluate the positions and decide the result.

(I suspect no violation of the FIDE laws of chess, which concern themselves primarily with the conduct and outcome of individual games and have little to say on the deciding of matches).

Note also that computer evaluations of the strength of a position do not necessarily reflect the ability of a human being to play it. Not merely due to move depth and complexity (like when Stockfish comes back with a hilarious "mate in 24"), but also time: I recall moments in Carlsen vs Karjakin where the engines judged SK to hold a positional advantage despite mere seconds remaining on the clock.

> I don't think that in any of the drawn games Karjakin ever had a winning position.

Karjakin had a winning position in game 9, but did not find the key move Qc4. He analyzed this line, but did not see Bg8 and thought it's not winning.

I fear that the winner of that pre-match tie-break would play as defensive as he could during the match leading to even more defensive matches.

Both of the suggestions "Champion has draw odds" and "tiebreaks before the match" means that one player can just go on the defence for the duration of the match.

The only way to get both players to attack, that I've heard, is the classic "first to 6 wins" or some other number. In that version, no side ever wants to draw.

Unless you're 5-0 down, so you just aim to draw repeatedly until it's declared a stalemate.

A draw is half a point. So with first to 6.5, you win the match if you have one game win and 11 draws.

What if you just have 13 draws? If you award any kind of points for draws, it seems like you're back to people aiming to draw.

I'm talking about first to 6 wins. Like the 1984 Karpov vs. Kasparov: http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=55015

Ah, of course. Sorry for the mistake.

No, that's the point: The game continues until a player reaches 6 wins. If you're 5-0 down, you can either resign or play for 6 wins. Draws don't help you.

But if you keep forcing draws, it doesn't let your opponent reach 6 wins.

Sure, but it can't be your strategy, since then you can never win either.

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.

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.

Agreed

I became a fan of Karjakin when he played http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1751475 in 2014. (Move 64 was his divine move. That link shows with forced analysis deep fritz found it too, after 26 plies... but no one or program saw it during the match.)

Anyway, humans play differently, and it's a different mental challenge when playing fast or slow. If you want a slow match watchable at quick speeds, don't watch live.

I feel like the longer games (in both cricket and chess), because they're often so tactical and slow-paced as to be yawn inducing, have a greater payoff when they do suddenly turn exciting. (See the final day of this past week's New Zealand/Pakistan Test for a great example.) T20/rapid chess is exciting in the moment, but when you step away from any specific match and think of the last, say, year's worth of matches, every high-drama moment looks more or less the same.

I'm not sure. The weird blunder by Karjakin in fame three was a bit anticlimactic.

I also would have liked to see Magnus find the 30 moves forcing line in game 2.

The ending of the match in puzzle form on Lichess:

https://en.lichess.org/training/102787

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

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.

What does it have over ICC?

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.

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.

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.

I'm not nearly good enough to play a master, and I use lichess to play Chess960 (Fischer Random). Can ICC do that?

Edit: The ICC app does seem to have Chess960. However I couldn't tell where my offer went in free mode, and the UI was filled with stuff I couldn't use. Lichess's UX seems slicker. In particular:

a) When you open the app you get a problem. Solve it and you get another, and another and another.

b) You can ask for computer analysis after a game.

ICC, unfortunately, was built around a desktop CLI, BlitzIn, that really suffers from the transition to mobile. BlitzIn can do both of those things but I have no idea how you would accomplish them through the app.

I'll always remember BlitzIn fondly (it was the first CLI I used, before I even knew what that was) but ICC's glory days were the late 90s and early 00s.

The biggest advantage: It's free.

FYI, Lichess code is open source on github.

https://github.com/ornicar/lila

I've referenced it for both Scala (server side) and mithril.js (client side).

Unreal! Honestly I thought it was over for white, what a brilliant finish!

Really? When did you think that? I didn't see any position I'd relish playing with Black needing a win. Let alone with Karjakin's time disadvantage.

It was a cute ending, but it seemed a very comfortable draw for white from well before.

It still says so! I don't think its updated real time.

I tried some of the problems and I am obviously a terrible chess player :) Is it possible to view the correct moves without, for a bad chess player like myself, making an exhaustive search for all possible movements?

You can analyse the game, play against the puzzle player and set your opponent to Stockfish 8.

However, this isn't as fun. I think exhaustive search is sometimes also fun if the legal move is so "hidden" that you don't even realise it's there.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Oh okay. I thought you meant it like one of those crazy "suicidal rook"-type stalemates, where stalemate isn't the "fair" outcome.

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.

Yeah - the endgame stalemate was remarkable https://www.jotvid.com/video/3ecaDYWXoZc?ct=9450

Although it is mate in two, the two mating nets are somewhat unusual. On the contrary, the variant with the mate in 8 is a lot more typical because the light squares are all yours.

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

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...

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.

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.

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).

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

If anyone was disrespectful in that occasion, it was Magnus. He refused to talk in the flash interview, went immediately to the press conference, and had to wait 90 seconds or so before deciding to leave because Karjakin was still in the flash interview Magnus had refused.

Spoiler alert!

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.

Go Magnie Go!

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