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Comment by CalChris | Hacker News Reader

Game 6 was pretty tight and pretty good. You have to realize they were playing the last moves after midnight and they were playing them on increment, 30 seconds a move, basically rapid. Nepo's 'blunder' is an extremely natural looking move, 130. .. Qe6 and it only loses in 49 moves. But as was predicted before the match, if Nepo lost one it'd be an avalanche.

Nepo only squeezed in because the Candidates tournament was so weird with Covid and all. Caruana again, Ding Liren or Firouzja would have been much stronger opponents. I think the 18 year old Iranian phenom and world #2 Alireza Firouzja is the champion in waiting. But Magnus is still king and even Magnus would take another 10 years of dominance to claim GOAT from Kasparov.

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Wow, I hadn't heard that Firouzja is now world #2 in classical. Good for him. Magnus answered a question about him in the post-match press conference, saying that Firouzja's impressive performances "motivated him more than anything else" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6FLv6lj0-0).

So, for anybody else who wasn't familiar with the term GOAT, and don't want to spend minutes fighting search engines all too eager to tell them about goat cheese, it apparently means to Greatest of All Time.

Please explain obscure or very domain specific acronyms.

GOAT isn't obscure or domain specific and is a very common acronym used online for almost anything competitive and doesn't need any more explanation.

My apologies. I'd never seen it, and since it was in the context of chess, I included that in my searches. There was lots of information about cheese, and lots of questions about who the GOAT was, but not what it meant.

Interestingly, my comment got a handful of upvotes before it was modded to oblivion, so apparently I wasn't alone in not knowing this very common acronym.

I'll try to be more American next time I'm on the Internet.

That is actually an amusing but interesting failure mode for search, linking "GOAT" to "goat" and "chess" to "cheese" is pretty natural, but totally misleading in this case. I wonder if there's a good solution (for google/ddg/etc users) for that beyond just putting everything in quotation marks, as that doesn't seem to help much anymore.

We could point it out and pester Google employees with how dumb it has become in every discussion where it is brought up.

I've been doing this for a while and it now seems I'm getting some support.

The last few years however I have given up Google and after using DDG for a few years I'm now testing out Kagi and I am happy to say that not only is the business model much better aligned with me as a user, but the results also seems to be significantly better than both Google and DDG now.

I hadn’t heard of the term before but since it was in all caps I searched for ‘GOAT acronym’ and the first match was on the money. Obviously searching for goat is going to find lots of stuff about goats.

Obviously it did in this case. I think the use of GOAT is common in the U.S. but not elsewhere, and HN draws an international community.

It’s common in esports, internationally.

It’s common in all sports internationally.

>GOAT isn't obscure or domain specific and is a very common acronym used online for almost anything competitive and doesn't need any more explanation.

I learned this only a month ago, I am wondering if this is a new thing? I am not from US so maybe this term is used a lot on TV/radio/speech but not used as much in writing(blogs,news not sure about social media/memes) so it could explain why I never known about this until recently.

I think it's been popularized by the NBA fandom and the incessant Lebron James vs Michael Jordan debates.

So I only had 1 contact with this and it was indeed about sport , something like "football player X is the GOAT" and I had to have this explained to me. so it might be a sports only term, since I am not watching or reading sports then it makes sense I do not see it used.

My experience using Google:

"goat meaning" -> first result

"goat acronym" -> first result

"goat definition" -> first result

Same on DuckDuckGo too. Which is how I found out about the, before-unheard, term. Only saw it being used in Chess articles during the World Championships.

If you are in iOS, it does a good job of finding acronyms for you. Long press “GOAT”, then select “Look up”. The answer is the second item listed.

I'd recommend searching terms like "GOAT abbreviation" or "GOAT acronym" in such cases, both of which have explanations as first result for me. Otherwise, searching GOAT on wikipedia and going to disambiguation also has it under "other uses". wikipedia's disambiguation can be a bit overwhelming with long lists of other possible meanings, but it's usually helpful enough.

Google "goat acronym" and don't leave this comment next time and you'll save many minutes.

It is neither obscure nor domain specific. Unless you consider all of sports to be domain specific.

This isn’t really obscure or domain-specific, though.

> But Magnus is still king and even Magnus would take another 10 years of dominance to claim GOAT from Kasparov.

Some big opinions here. Magnus has 5 undisputed titles. Only Lasker is ahead of him on 6, and Botvinnik ties him on 5. Vishy also ties him on 5, but one of those was from when the title split in the 90s. Karpov and Kasparov each have 6 titles, but two of Kasparov’s and 3 of Karpov’s come from when the title was split (and they were each playing on different sides of it). One more title make a good case for GOAT Magnus, two more seals it.

Kasparov has the longest tenure as world #1 from 1984 to 2005, 21 years. Magnus is currently at 12. Kasparov has the most consecutive tournament victories at 15 and 9 years of winning every super tournament.

Comparing Magnus to Kasparov is kind of like comparing Steph Curry to MJ. Could it happen? Yes. But Magnus has to go out and do it. I think if he can beat Firouzja he makes a better case but tying Caruana and Karjack at classical wasn't all that impressive. Beating the great Anand was.

(Actually, MJ is probably a bridge too far for even Curry. Maybe LeBron is a better comparison.)

Comparing ELO like that is silly. Kasparov had his final championship victory in 1995, and it was during the period in which he had left FIDE. Karpov won the FIDE championships (which of course Kasparov didn’t compete in), in ‘93, ‘96 and ‘98.

You could pick a similarly silly way to compare their careers by comparing their peak ELO. Which for Kasparov was 2851, and for Magnus 2882 (highest in history incidentally). Which is a rather large difference given the ELO system gets so wonky at that level that you can drop in ELO after winning an event (as I believe happened to Magnus after he won the Norway tournament this year).

It's just "Elo", not "ELO" - it's not an acronym, but rather named after the guy who created it.

Dropping Elo after winning an event isn't really that 'wonky' - it's just a Bayesian update for underperforming your statistical expectations. The same thing happened when Carlsen won the Candidates in 2013, he went +5=7-2, but he was 2872 rating against a field of 2774, so 8.5/14 would mean he loses ~6 rating.

curry is easily the greatest shooter, but yah, no way he's gonna pass mj (or lebron) for the goat title. lebron is definitely the better comparison there.

Game 6 was thrilling for someone like me who plays only blitz. I could never calculate all those rook moves without blundering, so the game looks more wild to me than it probably was haha. It sure was hard fought! The games after that were a let-down, but that's because Carlssen is just so damn consistent.

> Nepo only squeezed in because ..

He "squeezed in" because he won the pretenders tournament, beating all other challengers who played on exact same schedule as him.

He also played incredibly well until that loss in Game 6 demoralised him, unfortunately.

> Nepo only squeezed in because the Candidates tournament was so weird with Covid and all. Caruana again, Ding Liren or Firouzja would have been much stronger opponents.

Of those four, Nepo is the one with the best record against Carlsen even after this match.

Nepo (before this match): 4W 1L 8D (2/0/5 as black, 2/1/3 as white).

Nepo (after this match): 4W 5L 14D

Ding Liren: 0W 1L 8D

Caruana: 5W 11L 38D

Firouzja: 0W 4L 2D

Eh, Nepo's good record against Magnus comes mostly from when they were both playing in youth tournaments. He hasn't beaten Magnus in many years.

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