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Comment by wadkar | Hacker News Reader

Vishy Sir during the end game commentary said that the engines say it’ll be a draw.

Where/which move did Ian make the mistake?

Anyways, hats off to everyone involved. Magnus, Ian, commenters, and the chess twitterati. What a game! ~8hrs!!!

In the game theoretic sense, it was move 130... Qe6 which moved the endgame from drawing to losing. We knew that under perfect play the game had been drawn since 115... Qxh4, since that's the point at which the pre computed table of endgames has the position (which is also why we know the exact move where the game from drawing to winning under perfect play).

130...Qe6 was the "mistake" (if one dares call it that!) I don't think any commentators expected Nepomniachtchi to actually hold this mathematical draw; it's superhuman. (I was certainly rooting for him though!)

https://syzygy-tables.info/?fen=4k3/8/8/4PR2/5P2/6NK/q7/8%20...

>"From May to August 2018 Bojun Guo generated 7-piece tables. The 7-piece tablebase contains 423,836,835,667,331 unique legal positions in about 18 Terabytes."

https://syzygy-tables.info/

From the post game interview

Q. What was the decisive moment?

“I don’t know,” he [Carlsen] says. “But it felt like at the end when I got [133. e6] and maybe there was still some miracle defense there, but it didn’t really feel that way. At that point I felt very, very good about my chances.”'

The game was drawn for about 30 moves but only Magnus had winning chances with piece overload. Ian had to play very precisely to preserve the draw, and he didn't, because Magnus is elite in exactly these situations.

This is why evaluation bars are misleading. Computer will say it's equal but for one side, every move is equal and for the other side, you have to make the only drawing move each time.

I wouldn't say that Ian made a mistake. That position was winning for white after pawn on h4 was traded. It's not Leela vs Stockfish, it's two humans playing. Defending with solo queen against RNPP w/ connected pawns is extremely hard unless perpetual check is unstoppable.

The computer also does not take time limits into consideration. If the players could take as much time as they wanted, they might have been closer to the perfect match.

Maybe that would be a fun concept. A game where the players would start with 1 year on the clock?

That's kind of how mail chess is, isn't it?

Correspondence chess.

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