Magnus Carlsen Wins the Freestyle (Chess960) World Championship
fide.com
fide.com
> Hikaru Nakamura, the 2022 Fischer Random World Champion, declined his invitation to the event, citing the changes in the format, rushed arrangement, reduced prize fund, and his focus on the upcoming Candidates Tournament 2026. He said he had been invited to the first leg of the 2026 Freestyle Tour, with the same format and prize fund as the 2025 tour; however, a few days before the announcement of the world championship, he was informed there would be no year-long tour. Instead, only a three-day event with rapid time controls would be held, and it would be called a World Championship. He called it a "hastily arranged tournament with less than 1/3rd the prize fund it originally had", and lamented that the classical length format from the first event in 2025 wasn't continued.
A world championship with rapid timecontrols alone should have been enough reason
Even if he is still capable mentally and physically, I would think the stress of training and competing at that level must get old after a while.
It's hard to say it's cognitive decline for most of the people who just aren't working as hard at 40 as they were at 25.
Caruana (the guy who lost to Magnus), mused in a podcast that chess960 feels strange as a competitor because he doesn’t really prepare (because there are far too many openings to study) and said it feels like he’s getting paid for much less work.
No. Multiple world champions have been older than that.
Generally speaking it's expected that chess players will peak around their late 20s and slowly decline from there, with sharp declines around age 50. It's unusual but not unheard of for players in their 40s to win major tournaments. 42 year old Levon Aronian won several last year, but it was considered a notable example of longevity every time he won.
In terms of raw numbers, there are currently 30 players in their 30s, 15 players in their 40s, 4 players in their 50s, and no players older that in the top 100. The youngest is 14-year old Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus, who is considered the greatest chess prospect of all time.
In chess there’s a concept of strength, and ELO is used as a rough estimate of this. Further there are FIDE rankings like IM and GM that have certain requirements to achieve.
In most sports, there’s never such an age gap. Think of basketball or football. You don’t see 12 year olds hitting the equivalent of GM in those respective sports (going pro?) and being able to compete with the 35 year olds, do you? In most sports, they wouldn’t even be allowed to enter but in chess they could.
And they were right that "a lot of really strong players are 12 years old" doesn't by itself help clarify where they are relative to elite competition at other age bands let alone clarify what age band perform bests at the end of the day. Even now I still don't understand how "a lot of 12 year old are good" is to supposed to answer that even implicitly. If anything the natural reading of that would be an implication that they are among the most competitive, yet your elaboration says the opposite.
Is your point that young kids have an advantage in chess, making it harder to keep up as an adult? They clearly don't. No 12 year old has ever been able to seriously compete with top players, at best they can hold a few draws or win a blitz game here and there. As far as I'm aware Judit Polgar was the only 12 year old to even break into the top 100, and she's an outlier among outliers. Right now the top 3 players in the world are all in their 30s, and there's only one player in the top 50 who's younger than 18.
There's a lot more wrong with your comment that someone capable of making logical inferences can readily see, so I won't go into them.
Suffice to say that 50 points is considered a major edge, and it increases exponentially so 100 points is much more of an edge than 2x a 50 point edge. Here [2] is a rating expectation calculator. If Erdogmus and Carlsen played a best of 10 match, Carlsen would be expected to win 97% of the time, draw 2% of the time, and lose less than 1% of the time.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya%C4%9F%C4%B1z_Kaan_Erdo%C4%9...
[2] - https://wismuth.com/elo/calculator.html#rating1=2669&rating2...
He is currently the youngest GM.
Reading other comments like this one - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031715 - it seems like there isn't enough data for there to be typical expectations, but that it isn't uncharted?
To be clear, I don't mean to take issue with the competitions themselves.
Elite sporting events are absolutely obliged to chase talent, just like any other business is. If they don't, they quickly stop being the elite sporting event. There's a reason why athletes are paid so well...
The stress of elite competition clearly has a shelf life, but Magnus is not overly old. Cognitive performance typically hits a plateau at 35 years old and begins a sustained decline after 45 years old.
The current youth wave of GMs is likely a function of compressed training efficiency. Modern players reach the 10,000 hours threshold much earlier because they had greater access to better training material and had better practice.
And a lot probably comes with environmental rather than physical issues. Staying at the highest level in chess requires never-ending opening preparation and study. This same is about the time that kings of the game have made their dominance clear to the point that there's just nothing more to achieve, start having families, and so on. It's going to be very difficult to maintain motivation.
The rise of freestyle chess could viably see players extending their dominance for much longer, because there's currently believed to be no realistic way to do impactful opening prep in that game.
I think it's nearly universally accepted that his streak ended on a technicality rather than a legitimate decline/defeat.
I think something broke for him while playing Caruana in 2018. The classical games were a snooze fest of defensive plays after defensive plays and everything was settled in the rapid tie break in a fairly unsatisfying manner.
He is not the first to complain about that by the way. Fischer hated the format too.
The freestyle championship was better in pretty much every way.
A lot of it felt like watching engines by proxy. One prepared well on a very complex opening. The other found the best meta counterplay and held until he reached the tie break.
Game 12 is a travesty. It was clear he just wanted to move to rapid.
2. 7. Nd5 line is not boring, it's one of the sharpest things to play against Svehsnikov, with pawns marching on both sides of the board. Mainline Sveshnikov on the other hand can be very drawish, with maneuvering play, where no side has a pawn break in sight.
3. It was the beginning of the Leela era, with many new opening concepts. It was a short-lived golden age, with players excited to try new ideas. After this match Magnus had a second peak, incorporating new knowledge, and won quite a lot of sharp games in Sveshnikov.
4. Well, game 12 was interesting, but EV of extra time to relax and prepare for rapid games with Caruana in 2018 was quite high. Fabi wasn't a very good rapid/blitz player back then.
5. Carlsen-Nepo WCC was a massacre, while the games were quite boring, except a few at the beginning. That match or any of the next matches would be a much better example for a case against classical chess.
I myself quite like chess960, and it's clearly the right direction. Opening prep is absurd now, especially at super GM level.
Without prep Magnus would be vastly less likely to win, and he’s not doing the prep because he’s not competing. How exactly is that different than someone not devoting themselves to the sport 20 years ago?
You're making some pretty bold assumptions about competitive athlete psychology here.
I was pissed I didn’t go to nationals in high school largely because I got no sleep the night before due to a crappy hotel stay. Losing a close game to board 1 while trying to stay awake sucked, but I was hardly the only person off my game, so that’s just how things workout.
The "Jeans" controversy happened during the Rapid championship in December 2024, nearly two years after.
It's universally accepted that his streak Classic Championship ended because of his lack of motivation, not on technicalities.
The motivation issues can stem from poor management :)
He made 5 title defenses. Two were against the previous generation of players, and he did extremely well. 2 were against players of his generation and were anything but compelling victories. He only won a total of 1 classical game in the 24 played, and that was in a must-win scenario because he had just lost for a final record in these matches of +1 -1 =22. And finally there was his match against Nepo which was looking to be another extremely close match until Nepo lost a critical game, and then went on monkey tilt, as is his reputation - proceeding to play horribly for the rest of the match and get wiped.
In an interview with Rogan, Carlsen stated he felt he peaked a bit before his match against Nepo, and so he probably did not view his chances of success in a world championship match as especially high. So he was going to have to spend months preparing for a match he could very well lose which would certainly tarnish his reputation as the GOAT of chess. I think this is why he couldn't find the motivation.
For instance there were new world records just around the corner. The most successful world title defenses is 6 and that was back in the early 20th century. With one more he could have surpassed Kasparov and at least tied the record.
He said like a year before declining that he would only defend against Alireza because he was the younger generation. Nobody believed him, Alireza didn't win the Candidates and he said "no thanks" and then everybody was surprised pikachu.
The Jean thing was way later and in an unrelated event.
Kasparov have talk about this. Older players can play at a world-class level for the first few hours, but their ability to maintain intense concentration declines as the game progresses. Most blunders by older GMs happen in the 5th or 6th hour of play. Older players also can't recover from earlier intense game next morning as well.
According to Kasparov older players get "calculation blackouts" and inability to visualize the board.
For those out of the know like me, the tldr seems to be that it shuffles the positions in the first rank - symmetrically with your opponent, but not the usual rook/knight/bishop/royal both sides. So you can't study openings well because you don't even know the starting position.
I don't know if I would call the positions symmetrical, though, they seem mirrored(I just checked and regular chess is mirrored as well).
Different faculties peak at different times. While MIT/Harvard research shows that raw processing speed peaks early, it highlights that social intelligence and crystallized knowledge don't peak until our 40s or 50s [I]. Specifically, the Whitehall II study identifies age 45 as the inflection point for initial reasoning decline [II], while research from Stony Brook found that changes in brain network stability—the metabolic cost of cognitive maintenance—typically don't begin until age 44 [III].
[I] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761456733...
Karpov is 12 years older than Kasparov.
But Carlsen has been number one for more time than any player for him, safe Kasparov [2]:
- Kasparov 255 months at number 1
- Carlsen 188
- Karpov 102
- Fischer 54
Bonus nuance: Carlsen has the longest unbroken run of 174 consecutive rating lists
[1]: https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-age-related-decline-in-che...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FIDE_chess_world_numbe...
But he lost motivation afterwards, so that was not necessarily his peak, maybe he just yoloed a little after that. In his own words he's way past his peak. In recent interview he said his bullet no increment (most taxing on reflex/fast calculation) peak was around 7 years ago. I would assume his prime physical form came after his rating peak, because classical chess rewards deep study and consistency, and he admits all motivation was gone once there were basically no challengers and he distanced himself too much of the pack after Caruana also peaked hard.
But regardless, safe to assume his peak was 10-7 years ago. Still good enough to surpass current gen easily.
Youngsters like Lazavik during the Speed Chess Championship or Sindarov in Freestyle were the most recent convincing wins against Magnus, but the historical mental edge that Magnus comes into each game after beating the brakes out of everyone is hard to overcome.
Magnus' time will come! But not today.
He's 30 something, not 90.
You might be right, if we were talking about anything except chess.
Chess, unlike everything else, has a clear ranking system and lots of records for people to analyze. And unfortunately, the record is very clear: chess ability decreases after a certain age.
However, the decrease is more likely due to stamina than mental decline. Chess tournaments take a long time, and stamina definitely decreases with age. However, pro athletes demonstrate that you can probably go until around your early 40s before it becomes a real issue.
Having said that, it will be interesting to see how this generation does in the blitz formats as they age. Those will be less dependent upon stamina and a better measure of mental acuity for chess.
I think looking at the data you’d have to conclude that women can’t play chess as well as men, that black men can’t play chess as well as white men, and that Judeo-Christian (and perhaps Hindu Brahmins) beliefs are just as indicative.
If we deny those conclusions as bigotry of immutable characteristics, it naturally leads to the age question.
Actually, chess data suggests that all of them are as good as one another. As soon as you have enough candidates in the pipeline, magically, any specific group suddenly becomes as good as any other.
On the women's side, the Polgar sisters are both exemplar and counterexample. Clearly, given sufficient training, women CAN be rated highly (Judit cracked 2700). The fact that the women's side hasn't exploded just like the men's side can mostly be tracked to the fact that chess isn't considered a "feminine pursuit" worth putting the time into (that finally seems to be changing slowly in recent decades).
> The fact that the women's side hasn't exploded just like the men's side can mostly be tracked to the fact that chess isn't considered a "feminine pursuit" worth putting the time into (that finally seems to be changing slowly in recent decades).
A defence that doesn’t pass for software engineering, amazing. This old canard. The girls just don’t like engineering. It’s not feminine enough. Damore got whacked for this.
I have heard this before, but you need to back that up with more qualifiers.
There were a lot more female plug technicians because women were trained as phone operators. There were a lot more female keypunch operators because women were trained in typing to be secretaries. However, most people would not refer to those as "programmers" like we would definitely say for someone like Margaret Hamilton.
This is a good book on the topic:
https://www.amazon.com/Programmed-Inequality-Discarded-Techn...
What ageism ignores is that outside of chess, prescience outperforms other measures of productivity.
Besides, the age pool of chess itself confirms it.
There's a single player in his 50s in the top 50 of chess and not a single 60+ in the top 100.
Also, even carlsen himself says he's no longer as good as he was years before and his mind isn't as strong.
Women only categories have been created to give women visibility because they mostly were not able to reach advanced levels in the open format.
Some women choose to compete with men (Judit Polgár being a somewhat recent example) but most go straight to the women only tournaments to have a shot.
The men vs women « bias » is not unproven, they litterally had to create entire categories of competiton to account for it.
The ones that specifically come to mind are Lazavik vs. Carlsen, Speed Chess Championship 2025 Semi-Final, Round 3, and Sindarov vs. Carlsen, Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Finals 2025 in South Africa, Round 1 of the Group Stage Finals.
For instance this is why Carlsen was so crushed by his loss to Niemann in 2022 (that led to the cheating claim controversy). Niemann actively avoided a draw and then systematically outplayed Magnus in a very difficult R+N v R+B ending. This is also why players like Erdogmus seem to have so much potential. It's not the tactics - which is basically a prerequisite to high level play, but his ability to just systematically grind down extremely strong players like MVL.
Carlsen has spent the core of his career mastering two aspects historically underlooked aspects of the game.
The first is the endgame, and there isn't much to say there. He's by far the best end game player by far and it's not even close.
The second are drawish locked positions where most GMs can't but see a draw. Carlsen realized that in order for it to be a draw his opponents still have to play perfect and he focused a lot on accumulating small but convincing advantages in those kind of games.
Another thing that should not be overlook: mental strength, like you point out.
You also can't underestimate physical stamina. Kasparov in his 5-3 result against Karpov in 1984-85 was eventually halted due to Karpov's exhaustion and losing 18kg over the match period.
woah that's crazy, I was not aware of this. That's like 36 weeks of aggressive weight loss.
edit: Looks like it lasted 5 months (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1984%...).
The only top-athlete that I see do the same is Max Verstappen, who is know to play competitive racing-sims online even hours before a real F1 race.
He still wipes the floor with them. Guy is just a beast even compared with normal grandmasters.
I think that should be a normal part of chess competition. It provides some really interesting metadata for spectators. To some degree it also emphasizes the importance of something people don't normally associate with chess - physical conditioning. When your heart is pounding for hours and the cortisol flowing, you literally get physically exhausted.
Not only that, when the body enters flight response the brain makes mistakes.
When I started jiujitsu many years ago someone asked the professor what's the biggest difference between a white belt and black belt. He thought for a second and said something along the lines that everyone loses, even black belts. The difference is that a black belt will be calm and able to think of solutions until the very end, whereas someone who is untrained panics, isn't able to think, and makes mistakes.
Staying calm is a lesson for life really.
Hasn't Magnus' time already come, and isn't it still Magnus' time? He is #1 on all three lists[1] and so long that I have forgotten when he was not.
I'd go further to say I think this is true in many things. For instance if you're into wrestling, you know the name of Alexander Karelin [1] who ended his career with a record of 887 wins and 2 losses (both losses by a single point and both highly controversial). He was winning olympic gold, repeatedly, not only without a single defeat but without his opponents even scoring a single point against him. His ears tell the story - 889 world class matches, and he doesn't even have cauliflower ear.
"to the point of becoming bored"
Preparing for chess tournaments is always hard work. But the point is that he no longer has motivation to do that hard work to participate in the championship, since he's won it so many times and the result is never in doubt.
He said previously that he would defend his title again if his challenger was Alireza Firouzja. In other words there are certain things which would've caused him to be more interested /care more about competing, and thus motivated him to do that hard work. Make any sense?
Separate rooms, arbiters make the moves for the opponent.
I think we’d see some interesting results.
I somewhat remeber reading that this format is about playing against book opening, and I thought there is no castling.
Magnus does a castling from king d1 rook h1 which I didn't even know its an allowed move! https://lichess.org/broadcast/fide-freestyle-chess-world-cha...
source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960#Castling_rules
That game they're in at 5:00:00 was great.
The world champion (which is determined for classical chess) isn't even remotely the best player. He's barely even in the top 10 and may soon fall out of that too. In terms of strength he's the weakest player to win in half a century even in absolute terms. And I can't think of any time in modern history of chess when such a low ranked player won.
We really need to do something to reinvigorate the game. Chess world championships used to be front page events. The winners would be stars and everyone knew their name. Now, even I don't bother to follow anymore.
Online chess is huge, streaming is huge. You do have these big personalities in the game, and an often unfortunate amount of drama.
People wrote chess off after Deep Blue, but the game is really going from strength to strength right now. It's just that classical isn't the focus.
I think it was F1 auto racing that recently (10 or so) years ago went through a revolution that changed the rules (for fans, in that case) that dramatically increased the viewership of the sport, mainly because the previous owner was so out of touch with the times.
The stability of a 100+ year old international organization that's led by serious politicians with connections in every major country is hard to contend with. FIDE's current president was Russia's Deputy Prime Minister for 6 years.
Gukesh is arguably stronger than either of Khalifman, Kasimdzhanov and Ponomariov, who won the FIDE title before it was re-unified. Also his current rating is higher than either Karpov’s or Kasparov’s were when they first won the title. His rating when he first won was about the same as Fischer’s when Fischer first won. Neither Kramnik or Anand were clearly the best player throughout the entirety of their reigns and both of their ranks fluctuated amongst the top ten positions.
This doesn't really mean anything. Rating is a purely relative system, as in the other thing that matters when performing Elo calculations is the difference in Elo between the two players. The absolute value of an Elo rating carries no real meaning and drifts over time based on the volume, skill level, and initial rating of lower level players. Since these change frequently, it's pretty much useless to compare ratings separated in time by more than a decade or so, maybe less. 50+ years is certainly far too long.
You say that ratings drift over time to such an extent that to use them in comparisons across long time spans is meaningless yet their analysis determined that chess ratings as a measure of intrinsic quality of move choice (which must be highly correlated with playing strength) is stable over several decades with only some indications that a small amount of deflation has occurred.
Your argument in comparison amounts to informal speculation. If I were to share my own I would say that those potentially error-inducting considerations, are statistically insignificant compared to the sheer number of games, that is to say corrective and informative exchanges of points, that occur. Further, I would add that the absolute values of ratings were defined by the playing strengths of the original players and that this definition has been well preserved even as the player pool has evolved.
I have heard many such arguments in my time yet not a single proponent cares to demonstrate them. What I find amusing is that those same proponents will often readily accept a comparison across time of a single player (often themselves) across similar time spans without controversy, as evidence of their progress as a player, for instance using Carlsen’s rating today and comparing it with one from early in his career, say from 2003 or 2004, which at this point was more than 20 years ago.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freestyle_Chess_Grand_Slam_Tou...
A few months ago I was invited to the first leg of the 2026 Freestyle Tour with the same format and prize fund. I let everyone know that I'd be playing there.
Just a few days ago I received news that there will be no year-long tour for Freestyle. The format for the only event to be held will be only three days and only rapid formats. Instead of the tour that was planned, Freestyle has joined forces with FIDE and are now calling it a World Championship. I think it might hold the record for most rushed arrangement for a World Championship title in history.
I truly enjoyed the first event in Weissenhaus in 2025, and it's a shame that the classical length format wasn't continued. Furthermore, this all feels like a hastily arranged tournament with less than 1/3rd the prize fund it originally had, and now it's attached to FIDE, which isn't a positive development in my opinion.
Despite many phone calls and messages from the organizer, I have decided to decline my slot in this event. I have an important tournament in the end of March/April to focus on, and that is where my attention will be.
[0] https://www.chess.com/news/view/freestyle-chess-fide-world-c...
Hikaru is getting older too, and it shows: I don't think he has a freestyle edge at all.
We'll see how well he does in Candidates this year to see if he's still a top contender. Although I do believe this is his last chance to fight for the world title.
- Has won Freestyle WC
- Has won SCC
- Has won 2x Titled Tuesday's
- Has won a Freestyle Friday
Hikaru can snipe a win off Magnus here and there, but I don't think there's any time control or format where he could win a long series of chess matches against Magnus.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikaru_Nakamura#Personal_life
Is practicing chess at an adult age beneficial for the brain, or is it already too late?
(chess, music, languages, programming, etc)
(edit - also physical hobbies benefit the brain in the same way: lifting, skating, karate, whatever)
Yo give the most benefit, you should mix in hobbies like chess with things that stimulate your whole body and cause your brain to coordinate multiple systems at once. Something like dance is highly beneficial because you're not only listening to music, you're coordinating your movements, balance, emotions. If it's a social dance even better. You're coordinating your social skills as well.
I don't practice what I preach but I think social dance is the number one way to keep your brain healthy as well as your body if you're trying to be efficient.
I feel sorry for Fabi not winning it, but of course there can be only one winner.
Many male domianted spaces are pretty antagonistic to women, making separate prize pools, tournaments and events allows for women to play in spaces where they are the mayority. Normalise their participation and open the door to better performance on the mixed queue.
Spatial reasoning?
If you did not have the "Women" category, then you would see only men play in these events as there are no active women in the top 100.
That said, even without that database a modern AI will completely topple the best human at every common chess variant. Humans cannot defeat modern AIs in chess like games.
I'm sure some of those games are actually stockfish v stockfish or something similar. Its pretty easy to run stockfish or lichess locally and copy the moves from each engine back and forth.
Sure, some people are cheaters. Some are not. There is no personal win in cheating against Stockfish. Usually strong players do it for training purposes, or to entertain their watchers when they stream. I actually remember having seen one who did that, and he drew. That was a party.
Evidence given: "There exist some small number of games on lichess.org played against stockfish where the user won."
My counter argument is that games on lichess against stockfish don't imply a human beat stockfish. It could just be that stockfish (or other bots) can sometimes beat stockfish. And some humans surely use bots to play on their behalf in order to cheat in online games.
I don't know if any humans can beat stockfish. But I don't consider that to be strong evidence.
To assume that a human can beat that is just delusional.
Especially pre-NNUE, chess engines were often not fully well-rounded, and therefore a human with specific knowledge of the chess engine's weaknesses could take it down with enough attempts.
Also, Lichess' Stockfish runs in the browser (with all the slowdown that entails), plus is limited to one second of thinking time even on the highest level. It also has no tablebases and AFAIK no opening book. Even if you _can_ consistently beat Lichess Stockfish level 8, there's still a very long way from there to saying you can beat Stockfish at its maximum strength, which is generally what people would assume the best humans would be up against in such a duel.
People generally don't play unencumbered engines anymore because the result isn't interesting.
Add to that 24 years of hardware development, and you can imagine why no human player is particularly interested in playing full-strength engines in a non-odds match anymore. Even more so in FRC/Chess960 where you have absolutely zero chance of leading the game into some sort of super-drawish opening to try to hold on to half a point now and then.
I have achieved these results around 2015, sitting at home, relaxed. I was not in a match situation observed by millions. Such a situation can knowingly lead to blunders like Kramniks overlook of mate in 2.
I also sometimes "cheated" by aborting the game when I was tired and continuing it the next day (if at all). That's what the player in a match can not do.
I also sometimes restarted a game at a specific position. Can also not be done in a match. Finally, they used better hardware in these matches. I had eight threads on my old Laptop and I used four of them. The Laptop itself was bought around 2005. Between 2000 and approximately 2020 I trained every day and I was on my peak. I am still around 2400 on Lichess today, without training.
So, I hope it does not sound that extraordinary any more. It isn't. Maybe it is now, but not then.
Based on what data I can find, it's estimated that the difference between the 2025 stockfish (stockfish 6) and today's stockfish (stockfish 18) is nearly 400 points.
That's the difference between Magnus Carlson at his peak and someone who doesn't even have enough rating to qualify for the grandmaster title.
So yes, the fact that you beat stockfish in 2015 doesn't sound extraordinary, because AI today is vastly stronger than it was when you achieved those results. What sounds extraordinary to people is your belief that you could repeat those results against today's top chess engines.
In fact, there is only one game I could find in all of Chess history (Anand vs Touzane, 2001) where a super GM (rating >2700) dropped a classical game to someone more than 350 points below theirs (gap: 402 points). (it's estimated that there are between 2000 and 3000 classical games in history played between Super GMs and players >350 points below them) And it could easily be that Anand was ill, or suffering some other human condition which made his play significantly worse than his typical play for that game - which you would not see from a computer engine.
In other words, the Stockfish that you beat in 2015 would itself be expected to get 3-5 points (that is, 6-10 draws and 0 wins) in 500 matches against the best chess engine of today. The delta in strength is immense, and it is reasonable for everyone else in this comment thread to assert that you would have zero chance at all of picking up a draw against Stockfish 18 in a fair game of any time control, regardless of how many matches you played.
P.S: You should not take this bet. You will lose. You are mistaken if you think you beat stockfish.
There are some games of knight odds Leela playing superGM's. For example, Hikaru Nakamura went 1 win, 2 draws, and 13 losses against LeelaKnightOdds at 3 minutes + 2 sec increment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYO9w3tQU4Q So that's a score of 2 out of 16. Which is apparently actually very good. I know Fabi played a lot of games too, and also lost almost all of them.
And that is with knight odds lol. And stockfish is ever better than Leela, but generally less aggressive and more methodical.
You clarified in another post that you had won back in 2015. I have no clue the strength of engines back then (I imagine still very strong of course), but a decade of growth is a lot. They're completely insane nowadays.
You would lose every time, not even close.
* 100 games, to have some statistical relevance.
* One move per day, so that being tired is no disadvantage (engine can ponder all day).
* Human has access to endgame tablebases and opening databases, like the engine.
* Human can make notes and has a software like Chess Position Trainer, which can min max, like the engine.
> Rating Stockfish against a human scale, such as FIDE Elo, has become virtually impossible. The gap in strength is so large that a human player cannot secure the necessary draws or wins for an accurate Elo measurement.
There are many examples of top players playing Leela Knight Odds. And none of them even got remotely close to a decent record. Usually a few draws, and maybe a win. But almost entirely losses.
And that is with knight odds. Without that, zero chance.
I will inject my own opinion: it’s exhausting to watch this format at a high level. You need to be working as hard as the players to understand their plans and it’s not cozy vs standard chess
You were allowed to use engines, opening books and tablebases. You were allowed to play in teams (GMs were part of some). You were even allowed to bribe your opponents into losing! But it died out fairly quickly and now the name has been reused to mean Chess960.
As far as I know no tournament ever used this rule.
A key part seems to be alternating turns placing pieces. I wonder if this would result in top level gameplay converging on certain opening placements? If so, I wonder how not taking turns but deciding on placement privately beforehand might affect gameplay.
Anyway, maybe when the pros get sick of Chess960 they'll give this a shot :)
With being able to place your own pieces, you can much easily dictate your opening beforehand. And I have little to no doubt top players would converge towards certain optimal placements. And then you'd be back to playing the same positions over and over, just like standard chess. Which is what Fischer Random attempts to stray from.
Also, on a more subjective note, quite the crazy opinion to call this format "boring". I haven't looked at these games yet, but the 2022 World Championship had some absolute crazy games. With crazy openings and positions that you just never get in standard chess.