Sinquefield Cup: One of the most amazing feats in chess history
slate.com
slate.com
tl;dr '[Fabiano] Caruana did show up, drawing his final two games to win the tournament (and its $100,000 top prize) with a record of 7-0-3, getting 8.5 points out of a possible 10. His victory at the Sinquefield Cup earned Caruana the highest tournament performance rating of all time, crushing even Karpov’s legendary result at Linares. Earth’s finest chess players couldn’t manage to pin Caruana with a single loss.'
Just a bothersome sensational headline that really isn't needed on such a good article.
Fabiano's performance rating was more than 200 Elo points higher than the top-rated player. Karpov's 1997 performance was less than 200 points better than the then top-rated.
The article doesn't take into account ratings inflation because it's more interesting to present your article about the best performance in the strongest tournament ever rather than a very, very good performance in a very strong event.
It's called "gonzo" and most writers are bad at it, but it fills pages.
It's not that I have a short attention span. I have multiple options and delving into an unknown article which has the only merit of being linked from hn just isn't good enough if they don't want me to know what it's about either.
At least if I have an idea what they're aiming for I can read it critically, but no luck there either. I despair that people can write so well and yet write such crap.
And all of his videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/kingscrusher/videos
I know they're pretty long (often 45 mins or more), but if you're a big chess fan they're pretty awesome.
The level that these super GMs play at is astounding.
https://www.youtube.com/user/ChessNetwork
I stumbled across one of his videos, not being much of a chess person, and have watched probably a hundred since and love chess now. he's a US Master.
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Just as my brain is hopelessly puny next to Magnus Carlsen’s, so is Carlsen’s compared to that of a modern chess-playing machine.
I don't like these rhetorical techniques that debase one thing to show how great another thing is. There's a certain dishonesty in them, as if the author were qualified to make these observations.
My brain is to Carlsen's as Carlsen's is to the best computer's.
It's pretty obvious he isn't talking about his brain qua a biological organ. He's referring specifically to chess skills.
In that regard, the best computer chess engine in the world absolutely dominates the best humans. Even with a pawn or two removed as handicap, the best humans struggle to get draws.
There was a recent match played between the world #5 human (Nakamura) and the world #1 computer (Stockfish). Even when Stockfish played black, used a handicap of removing the b-pawn before beginning, and didn't use any opening books, Nakamura was still beaten.
The age of Human vs. Computer competition ended pretty conclusively in the mid 2000s, and the gulf has just widened.
The basic rules of poker and chess are pretty simple. The deeper strategy is nonobvious in both of them, too.
Both do require up-front study and memorization. But in chess, the amount of up-front study and memorization is orders of magnitude higher; the sheer number of openings, variations on openings, variations on variations, etc., followed by tactical/positional situations to study in midgame play... just dwarfs poker.
And both do require sustained concentration and high mental performance. But in poker there is a certain amount of forgiveness -- you can make a mistake and you just lose that hand and some chips, and still salvage the game with good play from that point. You can even make multiple such mistakes and still frequently be able to come back. But in high-level chess, even a single tiny slip is absolutely fatal.
"Caruana is earning a reputation as the most prepared player of his era—a man who studies everything and forgets nothing."
"If there’s a rap on Carlsen, it’s that he’s the anti-Caruana: He doesn’t prepare as diligently as he could."
"It’s as though he [Carlsen] serves underhand to just get the point started because he knows he can beat you in the rally. But Caruana has the booming serve."
Caruana has been in the top 10 for 2.5 years though [1], and hopefully he can breakthrough and firmly be someone who can give Carlsen a challenge. As a data point [2], it took Kasparov 2 years to get in the top 10, another 2 years to become #2, and another 2 years to become the best.
[1] http://ratings.fide.com/top_files.phtml?id=2020009 [2] http://www.olimpbase.org/Elo/player/Kasparov,%20Garry.html
This article did a poor job at quickly explaining enough of what feat was amazing and why to keep me interested.
After skimming the rest of the article (past where it lost my attention), it seems to jump randomly through both the biographies of the players in the tournament and of historical players who weren't even present at the tournament.
Was this amazing because of the high overall ranking of the players? Because that would strike me as profoundly un-amazing. Pitting the world's best in a sport against each other is fairly common, is that not the case in chess?
The title sure was nice though.
I agree that it was a slightly clickbait title, but my bigger problem is that I don't feel the article delivered on the promise. The event referenced in the title is an amazing upset, and the article addressed that only very obliquely. I want to read an article about that upset, not about the sociopolitical environment of this tournament, coupled with the tournament's history.
Alternatively, if the sociopolitical environment is worth reading, then have the title let me know that's what I'm getting in for, and organize the article in such a way that it's clearly the focus, rather than a distraction from the main story.
This just doesn't happen. The last time anyone dominated such a high-level tournament was in 1994 (Anatoly Karpov at Linares).
http://www.64to1.com/2014/09/04/expected-wins-in-top-level-c... has more info, but, surprisingly, doesn't do this simple calculation, which I think is a better model.
So, you would have to play about 2500 of these tournaments to get one such result where one player wins the first seven games.
Cases where one player scores seven points or more in ten games are way less rare, as there are 10 over 7 or 120 ways to get seven wins in ten games.
It is surprisingly hard to show that any sports time series is not random. 'Streaks' in baseball, for example, do not really exist according to some statisticians.
Whether this is true or not I cannot say, but it is a great line.
>> Starting to realize that I am the only person who is going to be able to stop Sauron in the context of chess history. - @GMHikaru
Mythological necromancer my ass.
Tolkien wrote lord of the rings before the modern (silly) understanding of the word necromancer had been established, and sauron does't match that description let alone the more anthropologically accurate version (what today would be called a medium). Did sauron EVER commune with the dead?
Now Sauron was known as "the Necromancer", but that's a name, not a description. A serial killer known as "The Butcher" would not be a butcher (necessarily).
All we really know about Sauron is he was really good at making jewelry which had weird effects on people, that half his power was invested in "the ring" (which was also a ring), but his powers never really get displayed. He can make bad weather and mutate elves into orcs or something. But his awesome bad weather power was nullified by Gandalf, so that's not terribly impressive. And Saruman was better at making orcs than Sauron, so again not so impressive.
There's really no evidence in Lord of the Rings that Sauron is a bad guy at all. The Nazgul smell bad and their horses are scary looking, but the only real war crimes we see are committed by the Riders of Rohan and Saruman. So, it's quite possible that Sauron was simply a victim of bad PR, much as we might refer to Sarah Palin as "The Moron" whereas she's merely of average intelligence.
There is quite a bit of circumstantial evidence against Sauron in Silmarillion. (E.g. the dwarf kings all meeting sticky ends, and of course the human kings becoming Nazgul -- but maybe that was because they wanted immortality and thought he was awesome. Which he kind of was. It's not like he went around telling people that dying of old age was a "gift".) But again, no necromancy that I can recall. (It's been a long time, and Silmarillion is mostly very, very boring.)
That Carlsen-Caruana game, Round 3.1, is very interesting. After 15 Bxf7+, for sure! Most players don't handle kingside pressure so well.