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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

Magnus Carlsen with a rating of 2835 is playing against Fabiano Caruana with a rating of 2832.

This is their 7th game. They tied for all the previous 6.

They're called draws. The match will be tied if it's 6-6 after 12 games, then they'll go to tiebreaks - 4 rapid games, then if still no winner, up to 5 mini-matches of 2 blitz games, then ultimately an Armageddon game if needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_2018#...

In the highest form of chess, perhaps all games will be a draw. I wonder if someday we have to modify the rules or use a different variant that prevent draws, like Shogi for example.

Sure, maybe one day. People were speculating on the coming 'draw death' of chess 100 years ago,[1] but it hasn't really been a problem so far. What was a problem, was players agreeing to an early draw without playing the game out (Imagine, say, tennis players 'agreeing to a draw' after 10 minutes) A lot of tournaments nowadays have rules prohibiting draw offers before move 30, or draw offers at all.[0] The best players are just much better at defending than people were 100 years ago, and they're very good at bailing out to a draw when in inferior positions. Also, computers have taught humans a lot about defensive possibilities, which are larger than people had thought.

The situation in matches is different to that in tournaments, where it's no good drawing all your games if you want to win the tournament. In this match, drawing every game, then drawing all the tiebreak grames, then getting black in the Armageddon game and drawing, will make you world champion. And historically, if a world championship match was tied, the champion automatically retained their title. (Tiebreaks are a recent development)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_by_agreement#Steps_taken_...

[1] e.g. Here's Capablanca (world champion 1921-7) writing at length about it in 1925 http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/capablanca7.html

He created a version of chess with 2 new superpowered pieces to avoid the 'draw death' problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capablanca_Chess (that page mentions some other similar variants)

Wow I can’t believe these guys are now the guys playing for the world championship. I remember playing Fabiano in the local chess park when he was like 14 :)

They’ve come a long way indeed!

Did you win any game?

Caruana was a GM at 14. Unless EGreg is a very strong player, I don't think he was able to beat Caruana.

I happen to be pretty strong :)

National ELO of 1896, in case anyone else is curiy. https://chess-db.com/public/pinfo.jsp?id=3012853574

EGreg said it was when Caruana was "like 14" suggesting he isn't sure of the age. If the park was in the US, Caruana was probably actually 12, because that was when he moved from the US to Europe.

At 12, he was "only" around 2150 FIDE.

The curious thing is that Carlsen’s ELO didnt’t get nibbled even after all theese consequent draws. They’re too close.

That's because ELO only gets updated at the end of a tournament, not every game.

At https://2700chess.com/ you can see the live rating with the effect of each game since the last periodic FIDE update. Expanding either Carlsen's or Caruana's rows will show you a list of the seven games since the last update, with a change of 0.0 next to each.

That's interesting. Do you have a source for that?

I always believed it is because either FIDE ratings are only updated once a month (see 7.1[1]) or because their ELO is too close, therefore the prob. of winning is 0.5 for both anyways.

[1] http://www.fide.com/component/handbook/?id=172&view=article

That's not true about Elo being updated particularly at the end of tournaments - either official/FIDE ratings or live ratings.

I heard (possibly from the Chess24 commentators) that if their difference in rating was 4 or more, each draw would bring them closer together in live rating - Magnus would lose rating with each draw; but as it's 3, their ratings don't change. i.e. anacleto was right, thomasahle wrong.

Also, Elo isn't an acronym (ELO) as one might think - it's named after its inventor Arpad Elo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

Interestingly, when I first looked at this page, most of the good/correct comments were voted down, most of the bad ones not, it was weird. (It made me suspect that other HN pages are like that but I don't know it! - I know chess better than most subjects discussed on here) But that has now almost totally been corrected.

Could it just be that the most recent comments were listed first? I think HN does that to give them a chance to get read and voted on.

FIDE also calculates a game-by-game "live" rating. It's not normally published but it is used for some title requirements.

For example the requirements for the most common way to earn the GM title include a requirement that your rating has reached 2500. The live rating is used for that.

7 ties now!

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