Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in history
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> How do you feel?
> I think I played my best tournament of the year. I think it was a fair tournament in the end. I have no regrets.
> Any message for fans?
> Thank you, I will continue to play, I hope I can show strength like this time.
Gukesh was equally as objective, humble, and gentlemanly in victory.
These attributes are what makes chess and its superstars so appealing.
Nepo and Magnus seem to be cut from a different cloth, although Magnus has never had a moment where he could demonstrate whether or not he can be humble, because he has always just crushed.
Anish Giri kind of took a shot at Magnus (with respect to his retiring from classical chess) in his early commentary with Petr Leko a few days ago. People are funny, and one doesn't usually get to be where Ding and Gukesh are without having a bit of an edge to their personality. That's what makes Ding and Gukesh so special to me.
It was evident to me from the beginning that Ding was struggling physically (he had an occasionally rough-sounding cough throughout) and, perhaps, emotionally. And Gukesh was locked in from go. What a struggle!
Gukesh underperformed massively in comparison to his recent level (at the Candidates and the Olympiad). I am guessing due to nerves. That made the match closer than it should be. At the end of the day much better player won but it was way closer than it would normally be.
EDIT: Just to preempt: This is not say that Gukesh doesn't have a very bright future or couldn't surpass Magnus' top rating. Gukesh could definitely do that... but currently neither Gukesh or Ding are even particularly close to Magnus' (current!) level.
I would say that what you just described is usually called "sportsmanship" and is pretty common in most sports (with exceptions of course, but at least most would agree that it's an ideal worth aspiring to)
I don't see it as unexpected for there to be big egos and boisterous personalities in sports where individuals are hugely rewarded for personal success. From an athlete's point of view, creating a commercial persona is almost as important as performing at their best on the field/track/bike/pool/course/etc.
Never seems to be the best of the best though, more those in 2-3rd place or really narrow 1st place, something about the uncertainty of staying on the top, or never quite reaching it...
For anyone who doesn't know, there was a lot of drama because Gukesh was playing amazingly coming into this (eg winning the gold medal on board 1 at the olympiad in crushing style) and Ding had been playing terribly. Then there were 13 games of back and forth with stalwart defending and imaginative computer preparation by both sides, playing a lot of fresh chess and both of them going for the most critical and challenging moves in each position. Ding was playing a lot better than a lot of people had expected and the previous game had been one of the best games in a world championship for a long time. Everything was tied going into the last game of the classical portion and the "bar room consensus" was that since Gukesh was so young and doesn't focus at all on the faster forms of chess (rapid and blitz) and is therefore much lower rated than Ding in those formats, that if this game was a draw then Ding would be a substantial favourite in the ensuing tiebreaks.
The final game was a complex struggle, with Ding keeping everything in lockdown with the white pieces so as not to give Gukesh a ghost of a chance. Most of the pieces had been traded and it was the most drawish of drawn endgames. Gukesh was up a pawn, but they both had a rook and bishop and all Ding had to do was hang on to his pieces and keep them well away from the enemy king. On the stream I was watching IM David Pruess had just been asked by someone in chat whether Gukesh could win and he said "1% chance".
Then all of a sudden Ding made 3 bad moves in a row. The first two were just poor endgame technique, putting his rook and bishop both on bad squares too close to the enemy king, then the real blunder. Completely inexplicably he traded off the pieces. Now he was in an endgame that was just dead lost. After 14 games of 4+ hours each It had gone from being a dead draw with him a big favourite in tie breaks to all over in a few seconds.
What is crazy is that Gukesh has only been playing chess for a little more than 11 years.
ETA: And Ding fought like a lion!
Do people in the chess community measure players by number of years playing? Are there expectations of how long it takes to get to a certain level? (besides world champion)
The stars really aligned for Gukesh in countless ways, his form and openings hit when and where they needed to, and he was left playing a very out-of-form world champ who wasn't even in the top 20 in the world.
I suspect his record (world champ at 18) will remain intact for many decades yet to come. He attributed much of his success to God, and even as an agnostic - I'm inclined to agree!
Notably he's still nowhere near the strongest player in the world - he's not even the strongest Indian! The world championship in chess can be an odd beast at times.
As to Gukesh's faith, it brings inner peace and happiness, and if you observe the contestants' faces, the difference was evident. Gukesh isn't making a show of being prayerful, he's really doing it. It means he is doing what he is doing for a greater goal, which is always for a worldwide peace and happiness for all human beings, when really performed in harmony with our Creator. If one's religion's purpose is for dominance over others one can never gain inner peace and happiness from it. It must be for personal harmonization with peace and happiness for all human beings, or it is just more mammalian self-righteous warfare.
That's why Rumi says, "You have no idea how little we care for what people say." What he means by this is that a lot of people talk about religion, but what we do and how we feel as a result of our religiosity is the only proof that is accepted by God. Most people do not understand that such proof is evident on people's faces and in the tone of their voice, but you seem to have noticed the reality that Gukesh has it and, sadly, Ding does not.
Gukesh's victory is a way of demonstrating to folks that there are real gains to be had from seeking the peace and happiness of religion for peace and happiness's sake. No religion is superior to others in this respect. No. There are only true seekers and those who merely seek to justify their oppression of others by their religious affiliation.
I extensively explain how this works in my comments over the past week or two.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
A completely unprepared Magnus vs a 100% prepared opponent will go to a better prepared opponent (See Magnus interviews if you don't believe this). 4-6 months spending memorizing lines is not easy. It is too much work. Magnus has already proven he is GOAT, he doesn't have to prove anything.
But - this doesn't take away achievement from other players, if Magnus doesn't want to be bothered doing all the prep.I wonder if we will say the same thing in any other sport.
Ma Long for example - did not participated in Paris Olympic singles, does that mean Fan Zedong or Truls moregard achievement was any less? Nobody would say that.
It's also worth noting that is he is the reigning Rapid World Champion, the reigning Blitz World Champion, and the reigning Chess World Cup Champion.
He chose not to defend his Classical world title, and has been quite clear about the reasons.
Magnus is, by a landslide, the best tournament player (probably ever) but the world championship for classical is very different than a tournament, and his results there have not been anywhere near the level of his tournament performances.
And Magnus has also stated that he believes he has peaked. Basically - he was going to imminently lose, and I think he wanted to go out undefeated. Notably the one player he was willing to play, Alireza, was the only viable contender who he would expect to have been an overwhelming favourite against.
Also in terms of legacy, the max number of world championship victories is 6. He stopped at 5.
The idea of becoming a master, especially as an adult, is far more appealing than the reality of it for most people.
I think you've got to reach 1800 by your mid or maybe late teens to have a chance really.
Do you have any examples of someone who has done it?
While he's the most famous example, many famous older masters also started quite late. And I think one big difference was culture. There's a really great film about chess from 1925 (!!) here [1]. The tournament footage there is real btw - it was the Moscow tournament of 1925, and it even has a cameo by Capablanca!
The image of chess, and chess players, was quite different in the past. It was very much an adult's game. Now a days it has quite a different stereotype, and I think this impacts people's decisions on whether or not to seriously pursue it, with consequent impact on overall outcomes. Because in chess one of the biggest difficulties is when you hit your first serious plateau, which happens to everybody - it even happened to Magnus where his rating only declined for more than a year. If you lose confidence or start working poorly, that plateau will be where your improvement ends. Self belief and confidence is extremely important to keep improving.
There are plenty of examples in modern times as well, but the problem we face is you're only going to run into people who publicize themselves unless you just dig through each master level player in the USCF, FIDE or whatever database. For instance I know Rolf Wetzell wrote a book about his journey from class player to becoming a master at the age of 50! Then there was Michael de la Maza who wrote a book about going from 1100 or something to 2000 as an adult, but retired at that point because he didn't want to put in the work to go further. I'm sure if you dig through the databases, you can find far more striking examples than these two - again those two I only know because they both wrote books, and of all people who achieve significant success as adults and write, only a tiny percent will publish books about it!
And in modern times another group you might run into is people like me. I started as an adult, have only played one rated tournament otb, but am around 2500 blitz online and would certainly hit master if I actually bothered to play more rated events, but have never really gotten around to it for a mixture of cost (living outside of major chess events means $$$ for travel + housing + tourney costs) and time, even moreso now a days with children!
[1] - https://www.chess.com/blog/Spektrowski/vladimir-kramnik-from...
What have you focused on in your chess learning to get to where you've gotten? I presume - everything?
This was paired with 'analyzing' games of classical master (Alekhine, Capablanca, and so on) and then comparing my analysis against master analysis in plain English. Older books like Alekhine's best games books, or the various master vs amateur books (Euwe's is amazing) are a great resource here. Chessbase also now has a feature 'replay training' built in that would be really good for this. Load up a game, click on replay training, and you can basically play guess-the-move with automatic feedback in terms of how your move compares to the game as played (without revealing that move), as well as the top computer move.
It's also important to start appreciating typical piece repositioning ideas - for instance the rook lift is something that isn't very intuitive at first but radically reshapes many positions. If that rook on a1 heads to a3 and then on over to g3, a quiet Italian position can go from uninspiring to an unstoppable kingside attack really fast. The same is true of all the other pieces - for instance in the typical Najdorf structure with pawns on e5 and d6, knights on f6/d7, and bishop on e7 - if that bishop can go from e7 to e.g. b6 (so long as d6 remains solid enough), it can suddenly become a monster piece.
A key is to avoid excessive opening study until much later. It's a trap because you can spend an infinite amount of time learning openings, and you will get some wins without ever even leaving book, which feels pretty dang rewarding, but in the longrun it will stunt your growth. I remember at one point, sometime around 1800, delusionally thinking that the main difference between me and Kasparov was his encyclopedic opening knowledge. A quick glance at Hikaru doing puzzle rush will emphasize that's not quite right, of course this was long before GMs streaming was a thing! On the equal but opposite side, I also would recommend avoiding 'system' openings as a means of not having to worry about openings because the ideas and plans you see and learn in classical openings help improve your understanding much more than seeing an e.g. Colle each and every game.
I'm happy reading it. I'd studied and played (in a club, real tournaments, etc) pretty "seriously" for about six months a couple of years ago, before stopping completely, even though it was going quite well, when some unavoidable life things got in the way.
Progress had been steady, climbing up to almost 1600 classical (before the statistical ratings hike last year, putting me on 1750). I was maybe going to at least temporarily settle around there, or slightly higher, it looked like. I'd played for a few years when I was younger, but didn't have serious coaching, unfortunately, so this was not 6 months from scratch at all.
What I'd come up with when studying tracks with some of your main points above. I was focusing very much on tactics, because I love them and because it seemed unavoidable - even the high-rated players who don't consider themselves "tactical players" still have an extremely solid tactical reading of any position, and spot all the usual patterns with ease.
I'd even mostly ignored heavy opening work! Which, I must say, is not a popular approach. A friend who'd seen a bit of your game would come up to you after a match in a tournament and say: "I can't beleve you played that on move six against the French defence, that's not the best move!", and I'd struggle to convince them that openings were not my main area of concern aha.
Anyway, thanks again, and congrats on your chess accomplishments - the tournaments truly are wonderful to be involved in, I find.
Now a days I think the tactics streak offered on Lichess (and probably on chess.com as well) is a really great tactical resource. It's the untimed option, rather than the much more popular tactics rush where you have e.g. 5 minutes to do as many as you can. I think the 'woodpecker' method of tactics is a great idea. Basically you build up on a repeated series of tactical problems, until you're able to complete them all perfectly accurately at an extremely high rate of speed. This seems contradictory, because the sites have massive tactics database, but you will regularly see the same problems due to the birthday paradox. If you're looking for some achievable ballparks, on Lichess I tend to be able to hit around 50 somewhat regularly, with a high of about 90.
I think the fundamental thing with openings is that so long as you make logical moves, even if you make an objectively weak move - you will very rarely reach a losing position because of it. And from that point on both your opponent and you are both out of book, so whoever understands the position better, and plays better, will win. Many people, especially adults, get caught up in obsessive opening study because it's the one form of chess study where results can be immediately felt.
The one very good thing about opening study is seeing ideas and concepts that you may not otherwise be able to come up with on your own. Like in the Najdorf, the pawn structure with d6+e5 and d6 generally firmly blocked and on a semi-open file leaves d6 feeling like a major weakness at first. The fact that it's generally rock solid was a serious eye-opener for me! And that translates strongly to many other positions - backwards pawns are not necessarily dooming one to passive defense, and can even be a great dynamic weapon!
I love the Woodpecker method! I went all in on that during my six-months of study, and had (anecdotal) positive results. I made flashcards of all the positions, and worked through them all 3 or 4 times, trying to go faster and faster. I also looked up a big list of common checkmating patterns, and put them on flashcards, and gave them names and everything to make them memorable, and drilled them.
This culminated in my last tournament, a rapid 12'3'', and me beating my first ever 1800s and 1900s, and performing well above my I think 13 or 1400 rapid rating of the time. It literally happened in two or three of the games that I'd be looking at the exact pattern I'd drilled, and then looking at the 1700 or whatever opponent and going: aha, the method works, here's the pattern.
What you say about openings tracks with what I was doing, except I went a bit mad at one stage and started learning loads of ridiculous gambits and getting smashed by anyone half-decent. I like violent positions. I'd some spectacular wins, but I think it was a silly strategy. At one stage a frind from the club destroyed me after I played some dubious gambit as black, and he said "yeah, gambits are good fun, but maybe for bullet chess online".
At a certain point too, in the process of "getting good", it's my feeling that everyone must eventually accept the quiet positions, and the slow endgames, and working hard for a draw with no story to tell afterwards. I was getting to the level where I had to accept that, but still struggled... I still would be tempted to do things that I literally knew were unsound, and would say: "oh come on, it makes no sense", but I might do it anyway, or a variant of it. Anyway, my thinking would be heavily clouded and biased by this desire for winning in the middlegame, and avoiding the slowness!
That should just about cover everything!
But yeah, one thing you have to do to really start improving alot is to always assume your opponent will play the best move. Hope chess is how you ruin your own position!
Can you provide a single example of someone who started chess in their 20s who became a grandmaster?
Starting in 20s and getting to 2000 FIDE does happen, with an awful lot of work and dedication. GM, I have never found a single example of. By all means, prove me wrong.
We do not have any examples of a grandmaster who learned rules past age 20.
One of the 19th century greats presumably learned at 17, it was Blackburne - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Henry_Blackburne - he was GM strength.
There are a few late bloomer GMs today but what is common with them is that they were already decent just below expert players before 20.
You need 3 things to become a masters and up level player.
1. Grit - conscious mastery everyone agrees on that
2. Some natural talent - certainly to become super GM
3. Start early enough - 6,7 is norm, 10 probably okay, 15 is already almost late.
There is something special going on in the brains of young teenagers learning certain skills - violin, chess, some others. As Fischer said - he "just became good" in one year from around 13 to 14. Of course he was already pretty good at 13 but the magic happens around that time.
Basically, you train hard, maybe you take a little bit of time off and then you gain this amazing "unconscious mastery". This happens around ages 11-16 or so, depending how early you start.
Every good chess player has this "unconscious mastery" - that is they can play pretty well (2200+) even if drunk, dead tired, 1-min blitz, playing simul, etc etc - in other words without "thinking".
For some reason adult starters are unable to develop this unconscious mastery.
Apparently there are certain limits to neuroplasticity in adults. Of course I'd love to be proven wrong.
Disclaimer: I am an aging Fide Master who needed 1 point in 2 games(ie 2 draws) to become IM some years ago. I went out swinging but failed.
I also know many people who took up chess late in life and did not break 1800.
Also I know many people who are full time trainers and live chess full time, but they themselves can not go above 2200.
If pure grit was sufficient at later stages in life, we'd see a lot more progress, but we do not.
In April 2004 Magnus was 2552. 15 months and 162 classical games later he was 2528. When a 'normal' adult plays 162 classical games, which is often only done over a period of many years, and only loses rating points, they assume they've hit their peak and their spirit breaks, or they try to 'fix' their training routine and just end up completely breaking it. This is one reason it's so much easier for children to improve - they [usually] don't really think about such things in the same way and just keep grinding away.
Chess improvement is brutal. You don't put in 'x' effort and get some proportional reward back. Chess improvement is very stair-step, you wake up one day and you're suddenly much stronger than you were the day before. But until you hit that next stair-step, you see little to nothing.
In my own case I only learned how the pieces move as an adult, at least in so much as 18 counts as an adult, and feel I've gained at least a moderate level of unconscious mastery - around 2600 bullet and 2500 blitz, with the overwhelming majority of that improvement coming well after 30, and I'm still improving!
The whole time, Ding had failed to seize advantages and been low on time — something criticized by GM Hikaru Nakamura. In this final game, those two things caused him to blunder in a complex endgame seeking a tie against Gukesh who had nearly an hour of advantage on the clock and been relentlessly pressing the whole match (and continued that pressure, into the endgame).
That’s a strategy, not mere misfortune. And personally, I’m glad it was decided in the match rather than tie-breaks.
Are people training AIs to play in the style of the people they're going to play against so they can practice?
We may have an opportunity to cut out the middleman here (no pun intended).
Million times a day ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparo...
the players have "seconds" who are doing things like finding and picking prep for the players to memorize. currently, theyre GMs/super GMs who are somewhat playing against each other, but i think you could train an AI look at lines for ones that the opponent might miss, or that would trip them up
At first glance, charting the future possible moves of a chess game is just a huge branching tree, but humans (and engines that don't have the power to fully brute force the game) use filters to trim the tree. Some lines are dead ends, even though they may play out for a while (sacrifice both rooks and the game is over, no need to follow those branches). There is also a sort of heat map and gravity to some of the lines, in that there are likely directions that players will travel in (paths where you don't give away too many pieces, where the king isn't exposed, etc).
Machines can help highlight specific areas where there are branching points that lead in many viable directions (these are the critical decision-making points in a game of chess), that are deceivingly hidden behind lines that look dead for a while.
It would output a sort of heat map, and the search could even be tweaked for certain variables, such as for number crunching complexity (if the opponent is a bit weak there) or pathways into brutal end-game scenarios (if the opponent is weak there).
This is a microcosm for the real world as well. Lines through time have reflexivity and can reinforce each other. A geopolitical situation can reinforce an economic situation which then feeds back into the political situation. Take something like inflation which tends to do that. But when humans normally look at the world, they see in a sort of normal distribution that is oversimplified. It's commonly understood that humans downplay the left and right tail risks (as explained by Taleb), but it's more nuanced than that. It's more like the chess game, in that there are these hot spots of complexity and interesting situations throughout the forward probability distribution.
Some of these hotspots are deceivingly hidden, because only one multiple possible situations unfold do they feed back into each other and create something emergent.
Back to an arena like trading, participants tend to track each possibility line independently of one another, which makes sense because humans are siloed and specialized to some degree. Technology like machine learning has the ability to synthesize this data and spit back out hot spots, just like in the chess example.
The short-sighted conclusion that most will have is to say "Great! Let it give me a list of trades, and then we can back-test it." when I'm pointing out is that there is a lot of value when it comes to idea generation and efficiently mentally traversing the future probability space. Spending your time focusing on interesting places. Maybe a traitor would look at an implied outcome distribution and realize "Hey, I think that this little part of the curve is underpriced. Maybe I should hedge this specific outcome, because I have exposure to the inputs that feed into this underpriced emergent possibility."
Of course, the trading example is also an abstraction from the raw real world, but it's a bit more close to reality than the chess example. Really, I think that this approach to using machine learning as a tool could be applied to many areas. Even more creative areas could potentially benefit from it.
Right now you can visit https://www.chess.com/play/computer and play a Hikaru-themed chess engine - or a MrBeast-themed chess engine.
I don't know how deep the simulation goes, though - they might all just be the same engine with a different difficulty setting and a different icon.
The best finale's are often when two players at their best duke it out, and one comes out on top. This was simply not Ding's best.
And I say that as 100% someone who wanted Gukesh to win from the beginning, which is a result I think is great for chess and I think is “objectively correct” in the sense that he has played better chess and has been (apart from Magnus Carlsen and his compatriot Arjun Erigaisi who is also a complete monster) the story of the chess world for the last year.
[1] With the intention of trying to as honestly as possible replicate the situation for the players where obviously they have to think for themselves and don’t have access to an engine while playing.
he streamed watching most of the openings, and kept his own eval bar on the side, occassionally checking his lines against strong engines
Most of the more sophisticated people I know are completely disinterested in sports. Not that they dislike sports, it just never occupies their mind. Sports is a purposeless activity for kids
Chess is different from sports in only one way: the loss of very intelligent capable people who could be helping to create the future.
Chess is even more tragic than the olympics.
Focus is crucial. To be great at chess you need to focus on it. To be great at creating the future you need to focus on it. By definition you can’t focus on both
If you aren’t sacrificing, you aren’t focusing. I’m not saying you need to sacrifice everything else. But definitely you need to choose very carefully.
ps. Creating the future is easy to define. Look at OpenAI, Starship, Optimus, mass scale photovoltaic manufacturing in China. Someone had to make those happen and it took focus
I'd love it if they put their talents to work by going into medical research, chemistry / materials science, or even political science and try to take meaningful steps towards making the world a better place. That route seems to be a lot less popular these days and obviously compensation has a lot to do with it.
That most of the society thinks so is a failure of our systems.
Social norms can change this -- the Netherlands has a very similar culture to the US, But one thing people asked me while I was doing my M.Sc. there was just, "what is your sport?" ... and I got asked it enough that I eventually got one, and then for a good period of time I managed to completely kick my obesity, until I moved back to the American Midwest.
The introvert/extrovert axis also plays a role in what sort of "sport" is right for you, of course, and many of your sophisticated friends still hit the gym or jog etc. -- those are just sports for introverts in my view.
Sport time is not, time that could have been better spent elsewhere. It's like how cleaning the sink isn't time that could have been better spent elsewhere -- if you don't have a clean sink, you'll pay the interest in terms of "ugh what's that smell [...] oh it was the standing water in this bowl" and "crap I don't have a clean glass, hm, I wonder if I can just buy compostable cups on Amazon so that I don't have that problem..." etc. So as an extrovert, I can go once a week to play soccer with friends in a small league, or, just hear me out, I can get lonely and then do what I do when I get lonely, which is pop on Physics Stack Exchange and answer physics questions so that I can feel Of Use. You pay the interest either way.
Chess-time also is no great loss for the world. The top-level world chess community is something we have numbers for -- 17k titled players, 2k grandmasters, 4k international masters beneath that. They are pursuing something that exactly fits the nerdy way that their brain works -- memorize openings out to 20 moves deep, obsessively study and re-study their failed games to understand why the computer thinks they lost and how they might make better mistakes in the future, and for them it HAS to be competitive and they HAVE to have that immediate feedback of trying a new idea in the same narrow niche of ideas that they became a super-expert-in, against another top player who can punish their new mistakes.
It's just not a set of transferable world-changing skills. It's like, my brother became single-mindedly obsessed with pool in High School. This persists even though he now runs a small company operating a strip mall. This was just his thing, he loves that there is no upper bound to how much control he can have over the cue and the balls, using the spins of each to control the layout, and precisely planning a course through a 9-ball break and setting himself up for a clean sweep through the game. There was no world in which some "world-changing create-the-future" lifestyle, would have felt as much of a glove fitting his hand to him, as this did. And it is no great loss for the world that he found the glove that fits his hand. It's not like the strip mall would have become an American retail empire rivaling Amazon, if only he had spent his nighttime hours working on the mall instead of on his life passion.
For comparison, probably most of the people in the bottom 10% performance bracket at Google are being told and pressured "you need to do more, more, more, you're gonna get fired if you keep those low numbers up" and at 180k employees, that amounts to 18k people that, unlike top chess players, probably _could_ flourish and do better in some smaller scrappier company, but because America doesn't have a social safety net to speak of, they feel like "well I got the dream 6-figure job, I better hold onto that until my knuckles are white because if I got fired, Bay Area rent and cost-of-living could bankrupt me in 3 months." And that's literally just one megatech company, not even talking about the world of people Graeber argues are doing "bullshit jobs" etc. etc.
My university's top Dota player was a 2.x GPA slacker who did nothing but play games all day. Guy was going to continue wasting-away by going to a mediocre foreign grad school, but he got his admit revoked because of stupid visa reasons.
Life hits him in the face and for 1 year, he quits dota and studies. Goes in, bags 99.99 percentile score in exam with 300k applicants and ends up at my country's HBS. That's the power level dota was holding back.
To be fair, a team of chess grand-masters tried to form a dota team once, and got destroyed. So maybe dota is harder. Speaking from personal experience, I haven't done anything in life that's as all consuming, rewarding or as destructive as dota.
Don't do Dota kids. Try drugs.
Wow. Who knows what amazing stuff that guy could have done if he'd escaped to a new place, with new people, in an exciting new culture, rather than the very close-minded one you describe here!
Being good at chess does not mean you're "very intelligent". Most of the top players are good at chess because they are very good at memorization & pattern recognition, those are the actual abilities of a high level chess player. Does that translate into other intellectual pursuits like theoretical physics or math? Not really.
Grandmasters aren't going to be dumb by any stretch of the imagination, but they aren't super-intelligent geniuses, either.
It's also worth noting that very few people make a living from playing chess, so they're probably still available for your future plans.
Ding had a perfectly safe position where he could try to squeeze Gukesh pretty much endlessly with basically 0 risk. He then, completely inexplicably, went down a forced line which led to the final phase of the game.
In this phase the position was drawn with perfect play, but that is completely irrelevant because it is really tough to play. And more importantly in this phase, Gukesh was the side pressing to win with all sorts of interesting ideas. Ding, by contrast, left himself in a position where he's now going to be tortured for hours, has 0 chance of winning, and a single lapse of concentration means you lose. And that's exactly what happened.
Engine evals are really misleading in these sort of positions because it says it's completely equal, which it objectively is, but white/Ding will lose that position with some degree of regularity, while black/Gukesh had 0 losing chances. So in practical terms equality is not really correct.
I've always been interested in understanding situations where this is the case (and the opposite, where the engine favours one side but it seems to require a long, hard-to-find sequence of moves.
Playing out the top lines helps if equality requires perfect play from one side.
To give a trivial example, if I take your queen, then recapturing my queen is almost always the single playable move. But it's also a line that you will easily find!
Conversely, in a complex tactical position, (even) multiple saving moves could all be very tricky for a human to calculate.
But the position Ding was in was neither sharp nor complex. A good analog to the position there is the rook + bishop v rook endgame. With perfect play that is, in most cases, a draw - and there are even formalized drawing techniques in any endgame text. But in practice it's really quite difficult, to the point that even grandmasters regularly lose it.
In those positions, on most of every move - any move is a draw. But the side with the bishop does have ways to inch up the pressure, and so the difficulty is making sure you recognize when you finally enter one of those moves where you actually need to deal with a concrete threat. The position Ding forced was very similar.
Most of every move, on every move, led to a draw - until it didn't. Gukesh had all sorts of ways to try to prod at Ding's position and make progress - prodding Ding's bishop, penetrating with his king, maneuvering his bishop to a stronger diagonal, cutting off Ding's king, and of course eventually pushing one of the pawns. He was going to be able to play for hours just constantly prodding where Ding would have stay 100% alert to when a critical threat emerges.
And this is all why Ding lost. His final mistake looks (and was) elementary, and he noticed it immediately after moving - but the reason he made that mistake is that he was thinking about how to parry the other countless dangerous threats, and he simply missed one. This is why most of everybody was shocked about Ding going for this endgame. It's just so dangerous in practical play, even if the computer can easily show you a zillion ways to draw it.
In the WCC match between Caruana and Carlsen, they were at one difficult endgame where Carlsen (the champion) moved and engines calculated it was a "blunder" because there was a theoretical checkmate in like 36(!) moves, but no commentator took it seriously as there was "no way" a human would be able to spot the chance and calculate it correctly under the clock.
I think the chess model would be successful at producing the desired outcome but it's not as interesting. There's something to be said for being able to write down in precise terms how to play imperfectly in a manner that feels like a single cohesive intelligence strategizing against you.
Despite decades of research, nobody has found a good way to make computers play like humans.
This means that the LLM does not actually have a lot of training data available to learn how a 1300 would play, and subsequently does a poor job at imitating it. There is a bunch of papers available online if you want more info.
Making a computer have a 50% score against a 1300-rated human is way easier than making it play like a 1300-rated human.
For the former, you can take a top-of-the-line program and have it flip a coin in every game whether to make a random move every move or not.
Making one that realistically plays like a human is an unsolved problem.
Now that i think about it, i remember the people in the alphago documentary talking about the bot giving its moves percentage scores in both how high winning % the move had and how high % chance that a human would have made the same move that it just played. I wonder why they never showed what a full game of the most human-like moves from alphago would look like. Maybe it actually worked, by feeding it all the pro games in existence, and training it to play the high human % instead of the higest win probability moves like they did in the end.
What evidence lead you to think that, and how surprised would you be to be wrong?
"a level" and "if given enough depth" are both underselling it. Stockfish running on a cheap phone with equal time for each side will beat Magnus 100 games in a row.
By this I mean, you can give me a winning position against Magnus and I’ll still lose. Give a winning position to Magnus vs Stockfish and he might draw or even win.
I wish top players like Magnus would do more exhibition games against top computers. They don’t have to all start with equal material or an equal position.
But even that isn't a good proxy.
Humans cannot out-FLOP a computer, so they need to use patterns (like an LLM). To get the human perspective, the engine would need to something similar.
Even Stockfish uses a neural network these days by default for its positional evaluation, but it's relatively simple/lightweight in comparison to these, and it gains its strength from being used as part of deep search, rather than using a powerful/heavy neural network in a shallow tree search.
I don't think the patterns are very human, but they are very cool.
Thank you.
https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/pull/1791#issuecomment... https://lczero.org/blog/2023/07/the-lc0-v0.30.0-wdl-rescale/...
Bots playing like humans is done by training them to play like humans: https://lichess.org/@/lichess/blog/introducing-maia-a-human-...
While I was really happy to see Ding's fighting spirit in this match, and to have recovered much of his former strength, I've been rooting for Gukesh since around the half-way point just because Ding has not been playing superior positions for a win. I just don't think thats how a champion plays, even if its a sound strategy to try to win in tie-breaks.
In reality, chess is a fighting contest between two flesh-and-blood humans. And that's what we see throughout this exciting match, and in this final game.
Gukesh won because of his greater fighting spirit throughout the match, which is as it should be. (Similar to how Ding played the daring move ...Rg6 in the final game of his match against Nepo.)
I think maybe "that was a absolutely horrible finish" got interpreted as saying that the win wasn't well earned. That's not how I saw it at all.
Complete strawman. You are one of very few people who think this match was "relatively boring."
>In reality, chess is a fighting contest between two flesh-and-blood humans
And they weren't suggesting that the match was boring so far as I can tell, but more generally, they were responding to your idea that high level play is intellectualized in a way that loses the human touch.
They were using that as an example to illustrate that this distinction, between intellectualized high level play on the one hand, in a human touch on the other, is not something that shows up in the context of the NBA. They were not suggesting this was a description of the chess match between Gukesh and Liren.
It was relatively boring on the level of the momentum shifting back and forth. That is, if you sampled the game every hour, you would find more excitement in the median on some other chess championships. That doesn't make it less impressive or the outcome less inspiring, or the story of the players. Momentum shifting a lot makes for an exciting championship. The 2018 championships between Carlsen & Caruana were much more exciting IMO, despite having a more predictable outcome also IMO.
Now, really none of these championships are boring, unless you start comparing them and introduce the term relatively boring. All the players are playing with spirit, or else they wouldn't be playing at this level. Any perceived methodicalness doesn't make some player too much like an AI.
Of course, not everyone is going to agree with me, and I accept that. I also think that it’s totally fine that Magnus Carlsen stopped participating, but another commenter thinks it’s a travesty. I agree to disagree.
I'm not sure how "hope" plays into it but few of the sports I follow allow for contenders to be at the top of their game towards the end of the championship. People are tired or playing injured, and it never occurred to me to believe that this made their performances less amazing.
Off the top of my head the recent Milwaukee Bucks championship was noted as happening in a context where their strongest competitor, the Brooklyn Nets, were catastrophically compromised by injuries. The Cleveland Cavaliers were almost laughably compromised by the loss of Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love against the Golden State Warriors in 2015 due to injuries. And then in 2019 it was the Golden State Warriors turn to suffer terrible injuries as they lost in the finals to an improbable underdog in the Toronto Raptors, which spilled over into a lost season for Golden State the following year which created an opening for the Lakers to win it all in the covid shortened 2020 season.
Meanwhile in baseball injuries are so pervasive it's almost a question of which team doesn't suffer injuries.
So I think it's a broadly accurate characterization of sports fandom at least in North America, and it's bizarre to venture into a conversation like this to talk broadly about sports fandom excluding such major examples that speak to this point.
On the contrary, the NBA was one of the sports I had in mind when I made my comment. (frankly I'm not clear which part of that comment you found factually incorrect, such that you would write something like this)
> One of the major narratives of the most recent NBA postseason was how unfortunate it was that the Eastern Conference was so plagued with injuries that it limited the quality of competition, and it frequently has been a major narrative.
I am sure that is a thing a human, or sports journalist, might believe, so, point taken. One certainly could view the "quality of competition" as being "compromised" if the athletes and teams are not functioning tip-top at the end of the season. A person could enjoy watching the competition less as a result. I think my original comment makes it clear that I don't view things that way. I find the fact that someone else might view the matter differently as being... not especially noteworthy?
> Meanwhile in baseball injuries are so pervasive it's almost a question of which team doesn't suffer injuries.
What part of few of the sports I follow allow for contenders to be at the top of their game towards the end of the championship. People are tired or playing injured made you believe I needed to be reminded that people get injured playing baseball? Not upset, just baffled.
There was almost no preparation from Ding side. It was very weak.
_Very_ casual chess follower here. Why was Ding a big favorite in the tie breaks? My takeaway from the match was that Ding seemed to always be worse on time, so wouldn't a shorter time control favor Gukesh?
I'm not a grandmaster though, so I can only vaguely speculate since that's how I would have lost :)
Only started following chess due to the covid shutdowns, much for fun from a fans point of view than I had imagined it would be. Having the computer evaluation at the side really helps novices like me to know what's going on, interestingly a case of superior computer players helping as mere mortals to appreciate the game.
But I never saw anything like the crowd hype from the clip you posted, lol. This was next level in terms of the energy in the room. Very fun, thanks for sharing!
Two thoughts:
1) Gukesh took Ding into the deep water the entire time. Few people realize how draining chess is, especially at that level for this time control. It's beyond gruelling. Only programming is more difficult ;-)
2) Gukesh had an extraordinary advantage. His mental health and resilience over the course of the match were a testament to it. And, then, his graciousness, thankfulness, and humble joy demonstrated the Way. It was That which Gukesh first thanked in his post-match interview with GM Mo. It was how he first began each game.
And That was the difference. That said, being 18 didn't hurt either :-)
Chess is a closed book exam where your opponent is another human and you have a fixed amount of time to answer questions and managing that is as as important as asking and answering questions. The question asked is who prepared better and who understands the game better and playing the man is a better strategy typically than playing reality (ie they often make suboptimal moves to try to screw up preparation ideas).
Different kinds of taxation but programming would generally be easier because there’s not as much pressure.
That's hilarious. I wish you had been my manager :-)
It reminds me of that quote by the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, about the wooshing sound deadlines make as they fly by him, or somesuch.
Nicely said, friend.
Personally, I'm on the side which thinks that this format is a total stagnation. Maybe the new no-increment under 40 moves is an improvement, but overall it does not count. I agree with Carlsen that the format has to be drastically changed to determine who is the better player. Much more games, shorter games. Fischer said a long time ago that chess is dead. Considering how deep some of the variations go into theoretical territory, I can surely relate. Magnus has also expressed that it's very hard to find novelties. I'm also totally on the side that Fischer Random (chess 960) has to be included in this tournament. I believe that ultimately it will happen - sooner or later. Magnus also said that he thinks that his match with Caruana was of extremely high quality - those 14 games were all draws. I totally understand why Magnus didn't want to defend his title. On the other hand I can't comprehend how FIDE let this happen because a lot of people don't think of current tournament as high as they maybe should be, just because Magnus is not participating. That's a shame. Not on Carlsen, not on chess. On FIDE.
Nepo Magnus game 6, Nepo Ding many many games, Nepo Caruana draw on round 14 of candidates. ALL OF THEM WERE TERRIFIC GAMES.
I don't understand what people mean by stagnation
prep memorization remains a bit of a cheat where its your memorization and prep picking thats playing the game, rather than actually playing the game.
i think a randomly chosen "start from x position, with y time, and z increment after move c" for some 30 games over two weeks would do pretty well. Steal the formats from engine chess.
I was with you until this WCC.
In almost every game, Gukesh took Ding out of prep extremely early. It wasn't always a success for him either! Leaving the opening book typically means you accept an objectively-worse position, but one that your opponent has to spend a significant amount of time finding the right ideas in. Even in the cases where Ding found the right idea, Gukesh put him in serous time-trouble as a result.
Yes, many of the games resulted in draws. But they were extremely sharp and imbalanced, and in virtually every game one side of the board (typically Gukesh) had a serious advantage and very strong attacking opportunities. The resulting draws were due to not finding the right ideas in time (and very likely both players psyching themselves out of the "obvious" correct move) rather than inherently boring and drawn positions.
Overall it seemed to be an extremely effective strategy for Gukesh. But it was also actually exciting to watch unlike some previous WCCs where almost every game was likely in prep through the first 20+ moves and where the resulting positions had ample drawing chances for both sides.
The same technique is used in ameture level chess too, although these are more likely to be piece gambits than merely positional ones.
Ding was inconsistent at times but had moments of brilliance where he played like an engine, unfortunately he also exhibited poor time management throughout the match and failed to capitalize on his chances where he instead seemed content to play for draws whereas Gukesh would take every opportunity to play on, even when it would require taking a slight disadvantage.
Unfortunately the last game was lost more than it was won, as Ding was looking for every chance to draw where he gave up a pawn in order to trade queens and a pair of rooks to go into an equal pawn down end game, which he eventually blundered under time pressure. It's a common sentiment in chess that to get a draw you have to play for a win, ultimately Gukesh's tenacity to keep games going and applying constant pressure eventually rewarded him as history's youngest Chess World Champion.
Fischer lived in New York, and therefore could play in the Manhattan Chess Club.
One other factor is that 3500-level chess engines are freely available for anyone with the net to analyze every situation, every move.
And then there are the streamers like Hikaru who teach chess so brilliantly. He is a true one-off, to be that top-level and able to live-comment his own blitz games. It is an underappreciated and completely unique talent, and enlightening for the chess afficianado.
But still, chess is a game that favours young people that have more energy and can calculate more, and that peak is achieved in one's late teens.
In Tamil Nadu, an initial is often used in the surname due to the Periyar/Dravidian movement in the 20th century. Furthermore, plenty of people in Tamil Nadu historically didn't even use surnames.
Gukesh is Telugu, but his family are Chennai natives. Chennai becoming part of TN instead of Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh was very politically charged in the early days of India.
States in India are basically different countries, and the existing state borders for most states don't make sense.
> States in India are basically different countries, and the existing state borders for most states don't make sense.
No. Huge oversimplification there. It's not definitely like oblasts of Russian Federation. Although they are not close like OR and ID.
I mean culturally and administratively.
Heck, in my ancestral state, non-natives cannot purchase land.
> It's not definitely like oblasts of Russian Federation
It absolutely is.
Heck, my ancestral state (HP) is a merger of 3 entirely distinct ethnic communities (Lower Himachalis who are the same community as in Jammu division, Upper Himachalis who are closer to Garwhalis and Kumaounis in Uttarakhand, and Changtang Tibetans in Lahaul/Spiti/Kinnaur who should be merged with Ladakh) with no rhyme or reason because it was a bunch of Himalayan hill states that where conquered by the Sikhs, Nepalis, and later British in the 19th century and merged into Punjab, and this has caused political deadlock.
This is a common situation all over India. There's no reason that Purvanchal is lumped with Awadh, that Rayalseema is lumped with Kosta Andhra, or Barak Valley is lumped with Assam.
My Pahari family has no traditional culture in common with a Gujarati from Saurashtra or a Bihari from Bhojpur.
These ethnic (and linguistic) differences do impact internal mobility outside of Tier 1 cities.
India has been very successful thanks to it's diversity, but most states still hold colonial era borders which exacerbate regional inequalities by giving regional interests an ethnic or even religious tinge (eg. Seemanchal and Bihar).
There are many all-India services and people are transferred all across India. Many work in different states than those of their home state. Same Constitution, same legal framework. Same religion.
I think if you go deeper you will notice the unifying characteristics rather than superficial differences among states of India.
And while I differ with you on Indian states being very far aways from different Russian states in terms of similarity/differences, I definitely agree with your opinion that Indian state borders don't make much sense.
True! It was a rhetorical point, but similar examples abound in the Tier 3/4 cities and small towns that represent the majority of India.
You're still at the mercy of the DC's office and the associated State PSC to let the transaction go through, and local bias will abound. And in these kinds of places, if you get into a land dispute, the entire apparatus will rally behind the local even if they are in the wrong, because the local can leverage their local family/social network.
> Same Constitution, same legal framework
Absolutely, yet dependent on state PSC to implement. And local customary laws can often take precedence over central rules and regulations due to Article 13(1).
> There are many all-India services and people are transferred all across India. Many work in different states than those of their home state
There are, yet at the end of the day, Home Bias remains, as IAS officers posted outside their home state are significantly less likely to climb up the ladder and tend to get hamstrung [0].
Anecdotally, in the early 2000s, my ancestral district got an ethnic Tamil DC/ADC, but they were completely frozen out by the local panchayat, MLAs, and MP because they were viewed as an "Outsider", and the man was quietly transferred within 2 years and an ethnic Punjabi officer was brought it (still an "outsider" but viewed as "closer").
> Same religion
At a broad level Hinduism sounds unifying, but in action, the regional variations are massive.
It doesn't matter as much to sharyi/city folk, but local deities and practices vary massively and what one regions treats as "Hindu" can appear entirely alien to another region.
Tamil society doesn't bat an eye at cousin marriage while that would be grounds for a honor killing in HP/PB/HR. Meanwhile, in my region we revere a number of Muslim mystics like Lakhdata and in some cases even practice Muharram (Hussaini Brahmin), but to a Hindu from Gujarat or Karnataka, that would appear Muslim.
> I think if you go deeper you will notice the unifying characteristics
There absolutely are unifying characteristics, but I think these are much more prominent in Tier 1/1.5/2 cities which are melting pots.
Most Indian urbanization is being driven by Tier 3/4 cities which tend to be much more insular.
-----------
Big picture, I think differences are significant when outside the Tier 1/2 cities, but this is part of the power of Indian federalism.
The loosely coupled nature of Indian federalism allows regional ethnic identity to continue to exist with a unified "Indian" identity and act as an outlet to ethnic insurgency.
This is how ethnic insurgents in NE India were able to merge into the BJP in the 2010s, and regionalist and linguistic parties such as Shiv Sena, DMK, TDP, TMC, etc are able to create loose political alliances and coalitions with "national parties".
Also, this imo is a major reason why BJP has been so dominant over the past decade - they are able to co-opt localist movements into the state branch of their party.
The INC used to be able to do this, but these local leaders split off to create their own parties by the 1990s.
They share a common language ?
Coastal Andhra had been under direct British rule since 1823 and before that largely under the Northern Circars, but Rayalseema was a frontier land between Mysore, the British, the Hyderabad Sultanate, and plenty of local kings and factions.
All over India, the British administration largely just co-opted the preexisting administration and governance, which wasn't professionalized until the early 20th Century. This meant that functionaries of the pre-existing states were co-opted into local administration.
Ofc, in princely states the difference was even more significant.
But my argument is that it makes sense for Rayalseema to be split off from Coastal Andhra, as the administrative history is distinct, and even the history is distinct.
The most plausible and likely explanation is that it is just shortened initials of surname for convenience.
Typically indian teachers have a habit of turning surname to initials to deal with multiple students having same names. Those names tend to be sticky and students just refer themselves with initials in such contexts.
I'd be very much surprised if his official government IDs have initials and not surname.
Not necessarily. He's from TN. Initials are fairly common.
A social movement throughout TN, has made people give up their surnames and instead only mention their initial, so that no one can tell your caste easily. And everyone just follows that convention now. A remarkable example of a societal wide movement making real progress on societal issues without requiring the force of government.
As Gukesh grew up in Chennai, he used his last name like that. His parents also use one name only.
Anecdote: my distant cousin, a Bengali, also grew up in TN. His parents also Tamilized his name. His name was, say, Rama Dass, and he went by and put his name as D. Rama, or Rama D.
When their family moved back to Bengal, his name was Rama Dass again.
Srinivasa Ramanujan's given name was Ramanujan, and Srinivasa was his father's name.
I was forced to pick the last name for passport purposes and typically i either have the option of attaching my dad's name or my dad's town name.
My wife, didn't even do that and when she migrated to US, she was <name> LNU (short for Last Name Unknown). While applying for greencard we decided it was too much of a hassle for her and she attached her father's name
Interesting!
The loser of the previous World Chess Championship match was Russia's Ian Nepomniachtchi. His last name means "one who doesn't remember [his last name]" -when asked by the Czar's census taker!
I guess this kind of thing happens in many countries.
Generally speaking, someone is born and at some point days/months later, their parents start calling them by some name, while the rest of the world might also doing so at some point, possibly different people using different names. For purposes of interacting with administrative systems yet another name may be adopted. Only when it has been necessary to distinguish between multiple people with the same name do secondary names start getting used, either occupational descriptions (John the Baker vs John the Carpenter vs John the Smith) or places where they came from or were noted for (Jesus of Nazareth, William of Orange, Leonardo from Vinci), or disambiguating with parents' names (Mohammed bin [son of] Salman, Björk Guðmundsdóttir [daughter of Guðmund]) — these are all conventions still existing today, with occasional funny consequences when someone imagines one of these to be a "family name" that persists from father to child across generations. (See "what would Of Nazareth do" about people—even otherwise educated ones—treating “da Vinci” as such.)
Coming to India: there are different conventions. Typically just a name and an initial letter (placed either before or after the name) to distinguish between multiple people (in the same classroom say) with that name. When a boy was named "Anand" by his parents, because his father was "K. Viswanathan", he became "V. Anand" in school records, and this is the name I remember reading articles about this chess prodigy in Indian newspapers. At some point the international press started spelling out his first name and called him "Viswanathan Anand", putting his father's name first, and even started calling him "Viswanathan" or "Vishy" — he used to object and point out that they were calling him by his father's name, but eventually he just got used to it and even began to like it. In this generation, this boy was named "Gukesh" by his parents, and was "D. Gukesh" in school records and news reports, but somewhat wisely they decided for international sources to put the initial after the name, so "Gukesh D", and for those who cannot handle just an initial, spell it out to "Gukesh Dommaraju".
(You have had other replies claiming this to have something to do with Tamil Nadu anti-caste politics. While no doubt that movement discouraged the use of caste names as surnames, the initial convention pre-exists any of those political movements and exists in parallel in other states too. E.g. "S. Ramanujan" was the name on his early papers before the movement being spoken of. Some families/communities use surnames (in the sense you're thinking of) and some don't; that's all there is to it.)
Now hope that Magnus comes back into Candidates and we we have a Gukesh vs Magnus match in 2026.
B7/8/4b3/4kp2/5Rp1/6P1/1r6/6K1 w - - 16 55
Give yourself 10 minutes and 30 seconds increment as White and see if you can hold against Stockfish on maximum difficulty.
I was quite sad at the way some very top players spoke of him.
But the way he came back and almost took the game to tie breaks was unbelievable as a Ding fan.
At the end of the day, it's generational shift that chess is witnessing.
Almost written in destiny that it all started with candidates about how Alireza played against Gukesh and where it is now!
Why didn't Fischer chess ever take off? A lot of comments in here amount to "he went slightly off book and it was amazing!".
Wouldn't Fischer chess take the game to a whole new level, making it so that all the opening books are useless and the midgame requires much more improv?
For instance, Magnus Carlsen, the world number one by rating, is a fan of Fischer chess aka Chess960.
1. The biggest one is probably that there is already so much interest and depth in regular chess. "Everyone" focuses on it, so that's what your friends know and where you can find competitions and community. This leads to a chicken-egg problem where it hard to kick it off. It's basically like another board game.
2. Some opening positions in Fischer chess are quite awkward: The pieces are on squares where it takes a while for them to come into proper play. This can make the opening phase quite unsatisfying to play. You need to make a lot of extra moves before you actually get into the interesting parts. It's not necessarily more "fun" to play this way than regular chess. There's also some positions which are much better for white (although it's on average more balanced I believe)
3. IMO, regular chess is easier for lower-rated players. The choice of openings don't matter so much (either way the game is decided by someone hanging a piece), and it's a lot easier to follow existing games. In Fischer chess it can be even harder to know "okay, what do I do?", while in regular chess there's both general principles and systems to follow. This means that most newer players keep being exposed to regular chess instead of Fischer chess.
> Wouldn't Fischer chess take the game to a whole new level, making it so that all the opening books are useless and the midgame requires much more improv?
Magnus Carlsen is promoting and advocating for Freestyle Chess (same game as Fischer chess, but with different name): https://www.freestyle-chess.com/. Maybe it'll take off.
So he really is just trying to build a tournament format around Fischer chess. That's pretty cool. I hope it takes off.
> Hence, on average, a Chess960 starting position is actually 18.2% more balanced than the standard starting position.
I'm also interested in the underlying distribution (not just the average). For each of the 960 starting positions, what is known about the first-player advantage? (I'm pretty sure these would just be estimates because a full solution is still infeasible.)
> On average. Some starting positions are much less balanced than regular chess.
Yes, I expect variation, which I why I asked. :confused-face: At the risk of over-explaining, when I said "distribution" I meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_distribution
What does "much less" mean, quantitatively? For each position, what is the white-winning probability if you used e.g. Stockfish or some suitably adapted tool?
I would love to see e.g. a histogram where the x-axis buckets the estimated-advantage-to-white and the y-axis counts how many of the 960 starting positions fall into the bucket. What shape might it take? Lacking any particular insight, I would guess normal.
Any other solution would face the same issue that chess faces now. For example let us say, we imbalance the sides a bit more so that white has a more definitive advantage. That just means that players will alternate winning and you’ll have to play a lot of games before anything definitive happens. In a technical sense there may not be draws, but if it just alternates 1-0, 0-1 and so on, is it better than 0.5-0.5 and so?
Shogi allows early momentum to snowball (since a captured piece is your piece). This means white has a much more definitive advantage in Shogi as white has the tempo, so I don’t think Shogi will fix anything, it will just cause see-saws. In fact I think fixing this chess issue, is far harder than it looks, and may require coordination to move all chess players to a new tactical game that magnifies differences in playing capability far more than chess which already magnifies it quite a bit.
As such, Ding went for draws in multiple games with clearly superior positions that someone like e.g. Magnus Carlsen would have played out and won. I'm sure they regret that strategy now.
i was so sure it was going to go into tiebreaks.
In the end, Ding deservedly lost. He was constantly low on time; managed to play excellent in losing positions for the whole match but it took only a single mistake to lose the crown. One can do miracles only a few times before it fails.
Before the match, the expectation was that Gukesh would take an early lead and never look back, with the match ending before game 14. This morning, the expectation would be that Ding would make an easy draw with white (as he has done in 5 of his games as white already, winning the other), and it would go to tiebreaks.
Having the championship decided by a decisive final classical game is pretty rare. The last time it happened was 2010.
wrt the time, this is kind of a bread and butter endgame. Ding shouldn't have blundered here with 10 minutes on the clock. Highly unlikely he would have blundered this two years ago.
ding may have lost for a blunder late in the game, but i think he lost the game and match early, when he traded down to try to play for a draw.
gukesh played every game for a win
(And no, we shouldn't go arguing that Ponomaryov wasn't a real champion because the indisputably best player chose not to play sometimes earlier and created all that mess, because currently we're in exactly same situation.)
But honestly both players lack an end game killer instinct.
To me that looks like a power move designed to intimidate the opposition. Is there a story behind it or do they just get to choose their own chairs?
Everybody, even chess amateurs knew that the rook trade was a blunder instantly, yet pressure can play such terrible jokes.
All said, tho, it was definitely Gukesh's time, and being 18 has some serious benefits in terms of recovery and stamina.
I still think Ding was physically and/or emotionally compromised to some extent. That's why I still consider his effort lionine, because his game 12 game was masterful and he was in it until the end. I hope he holds his head high.
I suspect, the results would have been different if he had.
He had concerns over the format and FIDE was unwilling to make changes.
We're in a bit of a weird spot in chess right now because Magnus is still the consensus best player even though he's not the official champion.
It's a weird thing to say to someone who overcame so much while still young. He wasn't given anything "out of the gate".
Let's convert that chess knowledge to deep learning for more $
Not at the opening paragraph nor end of the article, nor photo captions near the top or bottom.
cmd+f "years" 0 results
cmd+f "age" 0 results
And scanning for numbers is useless since most of the article is chess moves written out.
The only people who consider 18 year olds fully grown adults are 18 year olds.
I'm impressed but this isn't the same as coming from another era -- this feels like technology pushing the learning rate for younger people.
Does that make his achievement suitably impressive for you?
It's normal for the champion to get his first win in his early 30s. Getting it in your early 20s is how you become famous beyond the chess world. Doing it with 18 is seriously impressive.
Youngest champion ever beats current best chess player.
Instead it's new champion crowned after legendary chess play does not partake in said competition
He got bored. Won the thing 10 years in a row and just didn't fancy it anymore. That's really it - he's so much better than, well, everyone that he just didn't want to go through the stress of prepping for such an event.
I think he's not a huge fan of classical chess, prefers more dynamic, creative and faster games. He's effectively mastered classical chess and wants a new challenge.
Have you heard of Stockfish? Makes Magnus look like a child. Stockfish and the other engines arguably keep getting better too, and in the engine tournaments like TCEC they continue to discover crazy new lines. E.g.
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=4HQZSMZz_MY
That's Stockfish playing black in the Ruy Lopez, and the game is effectively over after 18 moves, against an engine rated 3692. Magnus' highest rating was 2882. Ratings aren't really sensibly comparable like that between humans and engines, but I'm trying to put it in a way that chess bros will understand.
The point being - neither Magnus nor the top engines who are leagues above him have "mastered classical chess". So your comment is very ignorant of the realities of chess.
Magnus is incredible, and dominated human chess, and I have immensely enjoyed following his games, for the record. Human chess and engine chess are both wonderful in their own ways.
If for argument's sake we entertain the point you were making, there'd still be no motivation for Magnus to continue in the WCC because it'd still be against humans and not engines.
Carlsen won the WCC 5 times. Where you get 10 from, I don't know. Perhaps your opinion on these matters is just another ill-informed hot take, but we'll never know for sure.
No, that is a totally nonsensical definition for anyone who's serious about games. I presume Carlsen would agree, to be honest, as someone who takes games seriously.
Dominating human chess =/= "mastering" chess. Mastering implies "completing", "finishing", "solving". Sure, he's arguably the greatest human chess "master" who ever lived, and I love his games (as I said), but the man isn't infallible, and in fact is roughly as far from Stockfish as I am from him.
Which is nuts, how good Stockfish is, when Carlsen is so good. But he's not undefeatable - the top players have beaten him (on occasion). Even the mighty Stockfish suffers the occasional defeat from lc0!
So this sort of youtube-chess-bro level of discussion is garbage, and I frankly couldn't care less what sorts of "votes" come in. The fact you bring that up says more about you than me, dear netizen.
You complained that I'm presenting my opinions as facts, and then you proceed to do exactly the same with your opinions ;) We're just having a discussion! Chill :)
OK, I meant 5 in a row, but I stand by my point. Your tone suggests I'm wasting my breath though, but that's fine.
"ill-informed hot take", "this sort of youtube-chess-bro level of discussion is garbage", questioning whether I'm "serious about games". Whatever your opinion is about "poor form", I imagine attacking someone's character or intelligence would also fit into that category :)
5 times, yes. 10 from is the fact that he held the title of "undisputed world champion" for a decade.
The article itself is written assuming everyone knows who Gukesh is and says nothing about him, just his most recent matches that got him the title.
Definitely written for a bubble.
That said, click either name in the article and you'll land on their respective Lichess profile, which prominently features their age.
While this is no defense, clicking Gukesh's name when it was hyperlinked from the article led here: https://lichess.org/fide/46616543/Gukesh_D
Age and other info present.
"World champion" currently means "some lucky Top GM" and not "the undisputed number one".
We could just use the rating or ranking list.
But I disagree with other comments that are describing the overall championship in a favorable light.
To me, this was some of the most boring chess I've watched. Ding was certainly trying to force draws in every game, which makes for some very unexciting lines. It's been suggested that Ding felt he had better chances in rapid formats, so forcing draws makes sense in that light. But it led to some extremely uncreative chess imo.
Reminds me of many of the Magnus vs Fabi games in 2018.
And yeah. People saying this was exciting chess are lemmings. It was absolutely not. It was yet another boring draw-fest. The format incentivizes prep and penalizes creativity and risk-taking. If my child got very good at that it would be hard to be proud. What a waste of human spirit! Why would I want to watch two extremely smart young men waste months of their lives on this for the sake of boring us? It's perverse. Let's move on to Chess960 already. THAT would be exciting.
ding played a fanstastic prep game in one round, but it was very creative prep overall, that ding played very creative defenses for to hold to a draw