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Comment by kadabra9 | Hacker News Reader

What's really scary about Carlsen is I don't think he's close to reaching his full potential yet. He's rapidly approaching the level of dominance in elite chess not seen since Fischer or Kasparov, and he's only 22. I can't think of anyone in the next Candidate's Tournament that would be a serious threat to take Carlsen's title, aside from maybe Kramnik.

I'm also really interested to see the impact Carlsen winning the World Championship has on the game's popularity worldwide. He's a very marketable champion, young with good looks and modelling contracts. Both of the former champions, Kramnik and Anand, are obviously very popular in chess circles (and Anand is immensely popular in India), but maintained generally lower profiles in the media.

The next couple of years should be really interesting for chess. My hope as an American is that Nakamura can eventually qualify for the Candidate's Tournament and set up a dream title match down the road.

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Allegedly Carlsen has said that he "didn't know anything about chess when I became world #1", reflecting over the amount he had learned since then. I don't understand what that can be, but I'm no chess player..

it may mean he went from being a more calculating type of player(tactical), which you can win many games with, to being a more positional type of player (strategical) which takes a much greater understanding of the game.

I'd agree with this. A few top players have stated that Carlsen is extremely difficult to prepare for, because he's capable of playing a wide range of openings, using obscure variations, and adjusting his play/style towards his opponent.

If you review his games over time, you'll noticed he's become a much more balanced player, capable of playing both extremely dangerous and tactical positions filled with traps, but also more quiet positions that aren't as sharp, but rich with strategic possibilities.

Many players tend to lean towards a specific "style" of play, but Carlsen has a rare gift to be able to adapt a variety of styles depending on his position and opponent.

FWIW, Fischer was also famous for this chameleon-like quality. Maybe it's something to do with reaching that level while still young.

That's true - however, Fischer did play the same openings religiously. To prepare for Carlsen, you don't have the luxury of knowing what opening you will face.

Would you mind to elaborate on what you mean by playing tactical vs. strategical? (part of my yearly "now I'll get started with Chess again")

tactical: calculating the right moves in complex situations. strategical: positional play. making sure the pieces work well together, choosing the right plan and so on

I'm no expert but here's a mid-game example.

strategical: I wonder if I can machinate to end up mostly on white squares by the end-game, then I could let his black bishop take this pawn for free, while I work on getting my pawn structure to become invincible on the other side, effectively nullifying his bishop by the end-game while opening my position for greater pressure.

tactical: how can I protect this pawn, together with the rest of my pieces, so that all lines in the next 15 moves have all pieces protected, so that he can't take anything, and defensive enough that he can't force a 'better position' in any of them, while remaining offensive enough to open up for a future attack.

Tactical: Kasparov. Positional / Strategical: Karpov

Tactics are often associated with winning material through a combination or attack, so you could think of concepts such as trapping an opponents queen or blundering a knight are more tactical in nature. Other ideas, like discovered check, pins, decoys, etc are primarily tactical as well. Many lower level games are decided by tactics simply because players are more apt to fall into traps, not calculate properly, etc.

Strategic play is much more subtle, but becomes more important as you get stronger. Strategic play generally involves more long term planning with the goal of creating a lasting advantage for yourself. Some examples of strategic concepts are creating more space for yourself (and at the same time constricting your opponent), having a better pawn structure (e.g your opponents pawns are isolated and vulnerable to attack), having your minor pieces better positioned(e.g your bishops rake open diagonals while your opponent's are trapped behind pawns)

Not particularly good at chess, but could the difference be likened to the following:

  Tactics - winning pieces or losing fewer than your opponent
  Strategy - putting yourself in a position where the above is more likely to happen or be possible

?

Tactics: knowing what to do when there's something concrete to do, aka calculation.

Strategery: knowing what to do when there's nothing obvious to do, aka vision, planning.

Upvoted for "strategery" :)

all of the examples here are good, specific examples.

this is a good example of both tactics and positional play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEcRQXN2dbg

Strategy refers to overarching objectives that will direct the larger part of your moves throughout the game.

IE - Knowing your opponent is aggressive with their queen and having plans in place to quickly neutralize her, or being good at manipulating your opponents pieces util it gets to a point where you can gain a strong advantage by castling.

All these objectives form the basis of what you're trying to accomplish with the ideal being that successfully executing your major objectives will gain you victory.

Tactics refers to how well one reacts to and overcomes changes on the board.

IE - Based on the current board layout you notice that a certain move(s) will heavily fortify a section of the board that you previously were not focused on, or seeing your opponent set up for a particular pattern of play you feint a reaction only to hit them somewhere else.

As a tactical player he focuses more on evolving his strategy(larger objectives) to fit the board rather than trying to manipulate the board to fit his strategy more so than the average chess player.

In chess, tactics are usually shorter term moves that aim to gain material advantage or mate. Pins, skewers, discovered check, forks, double attacks, etc. These are usually in a time frame of around 2-3 moves. This is often described in chess terms as 'concrete' threats.

Strategy concerns more of theoretical ideas, long term possibilities. 10+ moves ahead. This involves pawn structure, where your king is positioned, how your pieces are developed, which side of the board left or right you might launch an attack, end game considerations, etc. How you intend to defend or win the game. This type of play is usually called positional. Whereby the placement of your pieces gives you an overall advantage. In GM level play this is very subtle and 15+ moves ahead. Positional vs. tactical.

As an analogy tactics are like cobra strikes and positional play is like a boa constrictor where tiny shifts strangle the opponent in the end. Both are lethal.

When did he say that? I couldn't find a source.

vg.no quoted him as saying this.

Carlsen is not dominant as Kasparov. He may get there, but right now, there's no comparison.

Sure there's a comparison. Kasparov maxed out at 79 points higher than the second-rated player (Kramnik). Carlsen is currently 70 points higher than the second-rated player (Aronian).

By the way, Fischer at his peak was 125 points ahead of the second-rated player, Spassky.

James Harden is may be the best shooting guard in the NBA right now.

Jordan was the best shooting guard in his time.

I was specifically responding to the claim that there was no comparison of their "dominance": that is, how good they are/were relative to their competition.

I agree that Carlsen isn't quite at Kasparov's level of dominance yet (he's only 22), but the James Harden analogy is a poor one. Harden is a great player (say someone like Aronian in the chess world) but isn't quite a once in a generation talent like, say, Lebron James.

I think it's quite fair to call Carlsen the Lebron James of chess.

So the greatest of all time? It's getting hard to argue LeBron is not...

Except to those who saw Jordan play [1]. LeBron is probably a top 5 - all-time player, but his style is very different from Jordan, which makes comparisons difficult. He seems more like Magic and less like Mike.

People will always gravitate toward recent greatness being greater than those in the past. But, it's frankly impossible to teller cause we don't have enough context and emotional separation. Being able to say that we saw the greatest ever play is appealing because some of that greatness can then pass over to us by association. It's better to enjoy the greatness we see now and leave the comparisons for history. It is fun to think about though.

[1] I never saw Jordan live, which is something I regret.

It's not that hard to argue. Given there are lots of things to take into account, but Jordan averaged 2.5 more ppg than lebron, and 5 ppg if you take out the wizards comeback. Jordan also won 6 out of 8 championships, (and you know, was playing baseball for the other 2 years).

Obviously ppg is not the only metric, and championships are won by teams. LeBron is probably in the argument for best all time, and by the end of his career may have a legitimate argument, but he certainly isn't just obviously way better than everyone else. He's probably top 5 though.

In a specifically chosen 8 year period. There were 7 years before that where he didn't win a championship. LeBron's career is far from over, and titles won by a player is surely the least informative measure of an individual player's skill anyhow.

surely ppg is a relevant measure of a player's skill right? I'm just pointing out that even if you think LeBron is best ever, it's not a landslide by any means as the parent comment seemed to indicate. "hard to argue he's not best ever." It's not really. He's in the argument, but by no means is he "obviously" #1.

Fwiw Lebron didn't win a championship for his first 8 years. Perhaps he will win the next 6 and make Jordan look pedestrian. He's not there yet though.

I'll agree that the analogy is poor. But I think Carlsen is not the Lebron of chess. Not yet at least. Not with his end game.

you can't compare the numbers. you have to look at their games in the era in which they were played.

Ratings and differences of ratings may not be comparable across time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system#Ratings_infla...: "It is commonly believed that, at least at the top level, modern ratings are inflated."

Precisely why he measured difference to next player, rather than absolute rating.

Rating difference should be comparable, elo is designed so that a given rating difference is a given probability of beating your opponent.

yes, i believe that we can agree that it gives us some idea of where the players were relative to each other.

but, at the same time, it's messy. and comparing the top two players only will probably not be as meaningful as looking at their games and their play.

the interesting question is not that you can be dominant against bad competition, but you can dominate over great competition. I think we can agree on that point.

Rating differences at any given point in time are comparable to rating differences at another given point in time. That is, A being 200 points better than B in 2013 means the same thing as C being 200 points better than D in 1963. This is a fundamental underpinning of Arpad Elo's model.

It is absolutely true that the Elo model is a relative one and does not guarantee that a given rating number represents the same ability over time, but the belief that modern ratings are inflated is not unanimous. Ratings have certainly gone up over time, but computer analyses of games have indicated that intrinsic play quality has gone up over time as well. See the work of Ken Regan, for example (search for "ken regan ipr").

Is there a mathematical proof that the Elo ratings have interval properties (so that "Rating differences at any given point in time are comparable to rating differences at another given point in time" is a surely true statement) and not just ordinal properties? I ask, because this is a hot issue in psychology, which I study, and it appears that almost all psychological "measurements" have, at best, merely ordinal properties ("A is smarter than B") and not interval properties ("A is as much smarter than B as B is smarter than C"). Constructing interval measurements properly is HARD, and yet assuming numbers have interval properties when they have only rank-order properties is easy, so I wonder if there is really a rigorous proof on this issue as to chess ratings.

The Elo rating system is based on the model that a rating difference gives x an expected result as a function of x. Therefore, the Elo ratings "have interval properties". For example, the Elo rating model states that if A's rating is 200 points higher than B's, A will get in average 0.76 points against B.

However, of course the Elo model might not be perfect, and thus a lot of other things contribute into the rating difference of players A and B, not only the expected result of the players playing only against each other.

It's built into the definition of the rating. A 200 point difference in rating always means that there's a 75% expected chance of the higher ELO winning. In less fluid arenas, the actual ratings can diverge from ideal ratings but there's enough matchups in chess that this isn't a huge concern.

It is mathemtatically proven that the Elo Rating system converges to the Bradley Terry interval rating system over time.

The difference between Elo and Bradley-Terry is that Bradley-Terry assumes to have "all" the data. So Bradley Terry is used in Psychology studies for that reason. (Eventually, you stop taking data).

Elo on the other hand, is mathematically equivalent to Bradley-Terry except with infinite data. Elo allows you to incrementally "add data" to an existing Bradley-Terry-esque model and make it more accurate.

BTW: Elo has been superceeded by superior models today, but all (good) ranking models are "interval properties" that have been derived from the Bradley Terry model from Psychology research.

See TrueSkill (which is based on Gaussian Curves, so they aren't technically Bradley-Terry but instead the Thurstone scale), Glicko, and Glicko2.

In addition to the other comments, I'd add that in the context of Chess, we have a contest in which there is a winner or a loser or a draw, and we can relatively easily verify that the system is functioning as designed with simple statistics. We also have a system that broadly speaking produces a fairly uniform ordering. Yes, at the very top of chess there's some question of who might win or whether styles have an effect, but broadly speaking in the population at large, a 50 point difference will have a certain meaning; at the macro level, we're measuring something with one dimension.

I would imagine many psychology studies are measuring something a great deal less well defined and more multidimensional in practice than "A will beat B at chess."

dfan, you make good points. But also we need to keep in mind that today's top players on an absolute level, really probably are better than previous era's top players. They simply have access to the past, and technology.

More databases, more games played, internet giving opportunity to play many, many more games. Programs to analyze their play, coaching in the modern era, etc.

That is something that Anand didn't really benefit from when he was young.

Yes, exactly! It is no insult to players from earlier eras that today's players have surpassed them, just as it is no insult to track and field athletes from earlier eras that their records don't still stand. Today's athletes have better equipment, better training, and better medicine, just as today's chess players have 24-hour access to computers better than any human and databases with millions of games. It would be surprising if today's top players weren't better than they used to be.

Also at chess, new players can learn from the previous top players.

Given today's level of obsession required to become #1 in any professional sport, I wonder what kind will be needed to be #1 in, say, 25 years. Have we reached some sort of pinnacle? I doubt it, but we probably thought these kind of athletes 30 years ago were already as perfectionists as they could be. P.S. I mean obsession in regards to hours devoted to training, practicing, building etc, not as a description of their personality, although it probably is present there in varying quantities.

Well, I think the main reason we can't yet compare him to Kasparov is that Garry become world champion at a similar age, but then held the title for many years (a decade and a half depending on which title you count after the Fide/PCA thing). Carlsen will win the title, but let's see how long he holds it for. If, for some unfortunate reason (I hope not of course) he feels too much pressure, gets tired, has some breakdown, and loses the title in 2 or 4 years, then no one will compare him to Kasparov, except as being in very early 20s when winning the World Title.

There is a comparison, even if Kasparov wins it. IMO the best place to start would be the highest tournament performance ratings[1]. Kasparov had five of the top ten at the time the list was compiled, over a ten year span. That's pretty dominant. OTOH, Carlsen's later 8/10 at Pearl Springs 2009 (Category XXI) got him a new record PR of 3002[2]. If we include matches, his current performance against Anand might also rate pretty high.

I'm not saying Carlsen is the greatest ever. I'm just saying comparisons are totally valid.

[1] http://en.chessbase.com/post/the-greatest-che-player-of-all-... [2] http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=52948

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