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Comment by delecti | Hacker News Reader

I say this as someone with fairly little experience with chess, and even less exposure to competitive chess.

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?

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In a tournament featuring six of the top nine chess players, playing a game heavily geared towards draws, Fabiano Caruana won his first six games and finished 7-0-3. For perspective, current world champion Magnus Carlsen was second with a 2-1-7 record; his only loss was to Caruana.

This just doesn't happen. The last time anyone dominated such a high-level tournament was in 1994 (Anatoly Karpov at Linares).

That was an excellent summary, thanks. Even re-skimming the article that point is thoroughly buried. They barely even mention Caruana until a third of the way into the article.

He actually won 7 on trot until carlsen drew with him : 'Carlsen, employing an unexpected Accelerated Dragon defense, fell behind early but then managed to work a draw. Caruana’s streak of outright victories was over. “It's an amazing result,” said Carlsen in a post-match interview with Sinquefield Cup commentators. “Even if he doesn't turn up for the last two games, it would be one of the greatest of our time.”'

Top player meet fairly often, but about half of their matches end one draws. A simple model of 25% win, 50% draw, 25% lose gives a top player a 1/4^7 change (about 1:16000) of winning seven in a row against another top player.

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.

Are odds like that appropriate for something that is thoroughly non-random?

Maybe not, but I bet one can model the results of chess matches as some random noise over the expected probability distribution of "player P against player Q for every pair of players (P,Q)" fairly well.

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.

The article was a nice piece of long form writing. If you haven't got the patience to persist with it you miss out on the payoff. Sorry, no soup for you.

A nice piece of writing might have an intriguing headline (this did), it then follows up with an opening that gives a brief hint of why the headline was justified (this totally failed), then you get background into the situation that led to the intriguing part (nope), then it ties it all together into a satisfying resolution (nope nope).

The title sure was nice though.

As an amateur chess journalist myself I was really excited to see chess coverage from a mainstream journalist that respected the subject matter and wasn't filled with excrutiating misconceptions and downright mistakes. So that colours my thinking. But I also think the piece was just an example of good magazine style writing. The individual parts of the story were introduced in detail and the whole thing came together in the end. Unlike you I thought the click-baity headline was the worst thing about the article. I excused the author on the basis that he probably had no input on the title Slate chose to run his piece with. My apologies for the unnecessarily snarky tone in my original reply.

Apology more than accepted.

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.

I actually really agree with you, and I even know most of old chess champions since I've been a chess fan for a long time. The article randomly jumped every few paragraphs for no reason to something completely unrelated. I just could not read it, nor understand what the point was.

An article was unexpectingly political: it is about a tournament with all players from top-10 except for those who are Russians, an article starts with bashing Russians and ends with bashing Russians? It even manages to mention Putin several times. Is it what competitive chess about?

I don't see any bashing on "Russians". I do see bashing on FIDE and Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who is fairly widely acknowledged to be Putin's lapdog.

A poorly written article in Slate? I'm shocked, shocked.

I wouldn't say it was poorly written. It was long, yes, but I enjoyed the history.

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