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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

It's hard for some of the very best when they're no longer at their peak.

Don't get me wrong, Magnus is still world #1 for a reason, but he used to be at a level where no-one could even scratch him. Now he has to fight much harder for victories, and he's not enjoying that.

It's hard to determine how much is down to that factor, how much is how he feels over not being world champion anymore, and how much is a financial incentive in attempted break aways from FIDE to promote "freestyle chess" ( random chess ).

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Let's not forget that Magnus didn't lose his world champion title, he gave it up willingly after holding the title from 2013 to 2021. All those years where everyone else is focusing specifically on how to defeat him and still coming short. He's talked about this at length in interviews, mostly it just became incredibly boring.

Only Magnus really knows if it was "incredibly boring" or he feared losing over the board, and even he might not really know himself.

I think it's a shame for the sport that he wasn't willing to risk losing his WC title over the board, but make no mistake, he has lost his WC title regardless.

I'm not really sure this argument makes sense. He held the title for eight years and had numerous serious challengers over that time, so I wouldn't really say he didn't risk it over the board.

Iirc also this new Gukesh champion was only like 15 years old back then, yes he was spotted as an upcoming contender, but at that time there wasn't really any competitor that was close enough, iirc he had soundly beat the same guy twice in a row over in title matches at that point so at that time the competitor pool wasn't really too threatening.

It's pretty obvious that he's genuine for anyone that has been at the top of something for long enough. At some point winning is normalised so you don't feel pleasure but the pain / fear of losing is still here.

It's always about Pleasure / Pain

Wow .. you know how to put a positive spin on him losing

He didn't lose the title by losing. He decided not to defend it and retired from playing WC matches while still being the champion.

> Don't get me wrong, Magnus is still world #1 for a reason, but he used to be at a level where no-one could even scratch him. Now he has to fight much harder for victories, and he's not enjoying that.

I get the sense that it's less he has to fight harder to win, and more he has to grind boring studying just to even play. I don't _think_ he'd care that much if his win rate is going down if just being there didn't require spending all day, every day, memorizing lines.

> Now he has to fight much harder for victories

Did he get worse or did the others get better ?

It's hard to gauge, because ratings between different years (pools) can't really be compared. But I'd say he has declined a bit, but no one else has really stepped up in the meantime. Gukesh and some are on their way, but for the last decade Magnus has been far above everyone else, and now that they're closer to him it's not really any new development from existing players.

Lebron has a saying- "Father Time is undefeated."

https://www.chess.com/blog/LionChessLtd/age-vs-elo---your-ba...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277316182...

Magnus is 34, he's just going to have to deal with it like every exceptional person has.

> but he used to be at a level where no-one could even scratch him.

As another factor could be that he is not doing the same quantity of prep anymore.

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