8 ms·

Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship

226 points by CalChris 10y ago

CalChris 10y ago
... in style with a queen sac on the final move, a mate in 8 while under threat of mate. Bravo Magnus!
- slm_HN 10y ago
  The queen sac itself was a mate in two, which is pretty simple even in a rapid game. However he did need to see the mate in 8 before committing to Rc8+. In the end Magnus was much stronger in the rapid games. He was winning in three of the four even though he let one slip to a draw.
  - CalChris 10y ago
    Game two of the rapids playoff was a fine ending by Karjakin, a stalemate after sacking everything. But MC the WC was much stronger at rapid.
    - tbrake 10y ago
      I wonder if either or both players smirked at the end of game 2 as it was stalemate by en passant, which absolutely can't be that common and almost seems a little indulgent. I can only recall one other stalemate in WC play, Korchnoi vs Karpov in 1978.
      - conistonwater 10y ago
        It was a draw the moment White had only h-pawns, which happened earlier, because the remaining bishop was the wrong colour.
        tbrake 10y ago
        I'm aware of all that. I'm speaking about the oddity/uniqueness of forcing a stalemate via en passant.
        conistonwater 10y ago
        Oh okay. I thought you meant it like one of those crazy "suicidal rook"-type stalemates, where stalemate isn't the "fair" outcome.
        sago 10y ago
        I agree, even if it was deliberate. With a clear draw, but that board position, both of them played out the stalemate. Not saying they deliberately drew, but just, in that situation with a certain draw, why not make it a cute one. I like it when top players do that. Like Ernst letting Magnus play out his beautiful epaulette mate in '04.
    - jotvid 10y ago
      Yeah - the endgame stalemate was remarkable https://www.jotvid.com/video/3ecaDYWXoZc?ct=9450 https://www.jotvid.com/video/3ecaDYWXoZc?ct=9450
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  - antaviana 10y ago
    Although it is mate in two, the two mating nets are somewhat unusual. On the contrary, the variant with the mate in 8 is a lot more typical because the light squares are all yours.
zbik 10y ago
I whipped up a little demo illustrating Carlsen's decisive rapid game 3. It transposes the move sequence to show white's 13-move opening (Karjakin) followed by Carlsen's 13-move response as black, and so on through the game - using the longest possible sequences consistent with legal positions from the original game. http://transpose.fantasychess.co.uk/ http://transpose.fantasychess.co.uk/
- logicallee 10y ago
  hey that's incredibly clear! From your description I thought it'd be practically pointless - but actually you can see each sides strategy developing quite interestingly. I actually saw people play out of sequence - some buskers or homeless or whatever people - just used to playing so many games against each other they'd get through the openings quickly by each person making several moves. It seemed too fast for me to see that they kept a correct pace, but maybe. I believe the games were very rapid. they stopped and started switching turns normally as soon as they were out of the opening. (so this refers to just a handful of moves at most.) so with a bit of sportsmanship it's possible to actually play that way over the board with somebody who's cooperating with you to get through the opening quickly.
  - zbik 10y ago
    Thank you! I was inspired by something I read about the early history of chess: "In order to save time, and to prevent useless exchanges, it was agreed that the first player should make his (let us say) fifteen moves all at once, without, however, crossing the middle line of the board; after which the adversary was entitled to play up at once an equal number of counter moves... these preliminary maneuvers the Arabs called Ta'biyat, which signifies 'the drawing up of troops in battle array'." (quoted from Duncan Forbes "Observations on the Origin and Progress of Chess", 1855 - I first came across the variant in Edward Lasker's "The Adventure of Chess".)
    - logicallee 10y ago
      thanks! that's also really interesting. (though in what I saw, there wasn't "after which" the other player made their first few moves - instead they moved over each other, like two people talking over each other. I couldn't figure out how they kept track of the turn or that they made the correct number of moves each - it was all much too quick. I even suppose that it's possible they didn't keep strict track and one player may have made 1 more move than the other or that sort of thing. Really bizarre!)
dswalter 10y ago
After all the draws, it was nice to see some actual wins. For those less familiar with chess, the final game was kind of fun. Carlsen's final play was to sacrifice his queen to draw the king into a trap, when Karjakin was one free move from putting Carlsen into an inextricably losing situation.
- conistonwater 10y ago
  I don't think that's accurate: Carlsen could have gotten a winning advantage just by defending everything with Qg3. On chess24's broadcast, Svidler even thought Carlsen might not go for the mate just because Qg3 was safely good enough.
  - mjhoy 10y ago
    The trick is that he was under time pressure and if he miscalculated faced a mate in one, so it was somewhat risky (and why Svidler was surprised he played it).
conistonwater 10y ago
This time around there was an unusual amount of match strategy involved. In fact, what's interesting is that they always played the Spanish or the Italian, but in the one game where Karjakin wanted to (had to) win, he played the Najdorf. Peter Svidler mentioned a very interesting suggestion that the players should play the tie-breaks before the match, which should produce more interesting games (in particular, it should avoid game-12-style games). But in any case, I think determining the structure of the championship match is a rather neat test-case of mechanism design.
- stouset 10y ago
  > Peter Svidler mentioned a very interesting suggestion that the players should play the tie-breaks before the match, which should produce more interesting games. This is the first such suggestion I've heard that I actually like.
  - CalChris 10y ago
    Since 2003, MLB determines home field advantage in the World Series by the winner of the All–Star Game. Not same but similar.
    - elgenie 10y ago
      The MLB system isn't similar at all. Home field advantage in baseball is small and no certain road to victory and there's no specific series/game situation in which it would come into play in determining the result. To wit, the last World Series featured home team wins in just 2 of 7 games. And the result of the All-Star Game is determined largely by the performance of players who will not feature in the World Series: at most 1/8th of the rosters are World Series participants, often much less. Further, the AllStar game is not managed with an eye towards maximizing the chances of victory, but instead to maximize the number of players to appear in the game; and pitchers that pitched two days before the game are not included, regardless of their skill level.
    - kriro 10y ago
      HFA in the WS might not be an advantage though. I'd argue it has actually been an advantage for the NL team if the AL team gets HFA in recent history because it helped their hitting. The last WS would be a good example.
lacker 10y ago
The rapid games are starting to become more interesting than the full-length games. I would not be surprised if rapid chess starts to become the more popular form of top-level chess. If you're just thinking about "playing the best possible game", the computers are doing that already. If you want to see two individuals intensely competing in a mental challenge, why not speed things up so that it's actually watchable? Similar to Twenty20 cricket.
- sgeisenh 10y ago
  Rapid and classical are totally different beasts. Rapid is more fun to watch in real time, but doesn't usually produce high quality games. On the other hand, classical can often be miserable to watch, but typically yields games worth of study for years to come. Watching computers is valuable to a point, but completely different from watching humans. The search space that humans can cover is much smaller, so the games end up being more positional, and easier to understand for a spectator. I wish that they would build a chess engine that emulated a human thought process so that it could be used as part of following a game in progress. The way they used the engine in the official world championship broadcast was frustrating. I don't care if white has a forced mate in 83 moves, I want to know how the position seems based on a shallower but more positional analysis.
- lspears 10y ago
  Agreed
- Jach 10y ago
  I became a fan of Karjakin when he played http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1751475 http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1751475 in 2014. (Move 64 was his divine move. That link shows with forced analysis deep fritz found it too, after 26 plies... but no one or program saw it during the match.) Anyway, humans play differently, and it's a different mental challenge when playing fast or slow. If you want a slow match watchable at quick speeds, don't watch live.
- jmharvey 10y ago
  I feel like the longer games (in both cricket and chess), because they're often so tactical and slow-paced as to be yawn inducing, have a greater payoff when they do suddenly turn exciting. (See the final day of this past week's New Zealand/Pakistan Test for a great example.) T20/rapid chess is exciting in the moment, but when you step away from any specific match and think of the last, say, year's worth of matches, every high-drama moment looks more or less the same.
slm_HN 10y ago
The ending of the match in puzzle form on Lichess: https://en.lichess.org/training/102787 https://en.lichess.org/training/102787
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- akkartik 10y ago
  I think I might have been the first to get that today. It said "played 0 times". Very humorous :)
  - wallace_f 10y ago
    I just played it and it also said it was played 0 times To anyone that plays chess or would like to: lichess is an all-around wonderful site, and in my opinion the best place to play chess! It's also free, and ad free.
    - LanceH 10y ago
      What does it have over ICC?
      - iends 10y ago
        imho, ICC is the gold standard. You can get at least a simul with a master almost everyday. The GM commentary is incredible for live tournaments, and things like ICC's Game of the Week from GM Joel Benjamin are unmatched.
        wallace_f 10y ago
        ICC is also great. To each their own If you haven't yet taken a look at lichess give it a shot, it's wonderfully elegant and well-done project and there is a lot of great talent that plays there as well as wonderful features such as lichess tv, coaching, analysis and puzzles which are all free -- and there's no ads, the UX design is very click, too! Edit: I'm not a Master and don't need that level of competitiveness, but on lichess TV I am always seeing Masters playing there.
jgladch 10y ago
Go Magnie Go!
lspears 10y ago
Spoiler alert!
- lasfter 10y ago
  Yeah, seriously... I was looking forward to watching the tiebreaker in suspense. I suppose it isn't too surprising to find the story on HN though.
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hakanito 10y ago
A really good documentary about his road to world champion came out a few days ago [1]. Worth a watch if you have Swedish VPN access (it's in English but with Swedish subtitles). [1] http://www.svt.se/dox/se-program/dox-magnus-schackgeniet-magnus?autostart=true http://www.svt.se/dox/se-program/dox-magnus-schackgeniet-mag...
grizzles 10y ago
A few days ago, Karjakin tried to tilt Magnus by showing up very late for the press conference as a way to be disrespectful. Anyone know if there were there any other psych outs that happened? Historically, there have been some really interesting ones in the chess world.
- chocimir 10y ago
  Karjakin wasn't disrespectful. He just gave a couple of short post-match interviews that Carslen intentionally skipped, went straight to the conference room and was waiting there. The post match interviews were standard up to that point in the match. Carslen decided to skip them after he lost the game.
- dfreire 10y ago
  If anyone was disrespectful in that occasion, it was Magnus. He refused to talk in the flash interview, went immediately to the press conference, and had to wait 90 seconds or so before deciding to leave because Karjakin was still in the flash interview Magnus had refused.
xurukefi 10y ago
As somebody who has no idea about chess I cannot believe that Carlsen calculated Bf8 after Rc8 under this time pressure and an easy Qg3 move. Kudos.
Ntrails 10y ago
I'd just like to give a little shout out to the guys streaming this on twitch last night. I don't play chess beyond the "find legal move and make it" level - but watching the last game was really really enjoyable and the commentary was pretty good too, helped me see what was actually going on and why. I'd never have looked for it, but once I started watching I couldn't stop. Wish I'd started earlier
maaaats 10y ago
20% of Norwegians watched all the games yesterday, even though they lasted way beyond midnight local time.
cpg 10y ago
Could someone ELI5 (but I know chess moves only, not strategy) the reasons why the ending was described as "sexy" and "incredible" and "classy" and other superlatives I heard?

226 points by CalChris 10y ago

CalChris 10y ago

... in style with a queen sac on the final move, a mate in 8 while under threat of mate. Bravo Magnus!

slm_HN 10y ago
The queen sac itself was a mate in two, which is pretty simple even in a rapid game. However he did need to see the mate in 8 before committing to Rc8+. In the end Magnus was much stronger in the rapid games. He was winning in three of the four even though he let one slip to a draw.
- CalChris 10y ago
  Game two of the rapids playoff was a fine ending by Karjakin, a stalemate after sacking everything. But MC the WC was much stronger at rapid.
  - tbrake 10y ago
    I wonder if either or both players smirked at the end of game 2 as it was stalemate by en passant, which absolutely can't be that common and almost seems a little indulgent. I can only recall one other stalemate in WC play, Korchnoi vs Karpov in 1978.
    - conistonwater 10y ago
      It was a draw the moment White had only h-pawns, which happened earlier, because the remaining bishop was the wrong colour.
      - tbrake 10y ago
        I'm aware of all that. I'm speaking about the oddity/uniqueness of forcing a stalemate via en passant.
        conistonwater 10y ago
        Oh okay. I thought you meant it like one of those crazy "suicidal rook"-type stalemates, where stalemate isn't the "fair" outcome.
        sago 10y ago
        I agree, even if it was deliberate. With a clear draw, but that board position, both of them played out the stalemate. Not saying they deliberately drew, but just, in that situation with a certain draw, why not make it a cute one. I like it when top players do that. Like Ernst letting Magnus play out his beautiful epaulette mate in '04.
  - jotvid 10y ago
    Yeah - the endgame stalemate was remarkable https://www.jotvid.com/video/3ecaDYWXoZc?ct=9450 https://www.jotvid.com/video/3ecaDYWXoZc?ct=9450
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- deleted 10y ago
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- antaviana 10y ago
  Although it is mate in two, the two mating nets are somewhat unusual. On the contrary, the variant with the mate in 8 is a lot more typical because the light squares are all yours.

zbik 10y ago

I whipped up a little demo illustrating Carlsen's decisive rapid game 3. It transposes the move sequence to show white's 13-move opening (Karjakin) followed by Carlsen's 13-move response as black, and so on through the game - using the longest possible sequences consistent with legal positions from the original game. http://transpose.fantasychess.co.uk/ http://transpose.fantasychess.co.uk/

logicallee 10y ago
hey that's incredibly clear! From your description I thought it'd be practically pointless - but actually you can see each sides strategy developing quite interestingly. I actually saw people play out of sequence - some buskers or homeless or whatever people - just used to playing so many games against each other they'd get through the openings quickly by each person making several moves. It seemed too fast for me to see that they kept a correct pace, but maybe. I believe the games were very rapid. they stopped and started switching turns normally as soon as they were out of the opening. (so this refers to just a handful of moves at most.) so with a bit of sportsmanship it's possible to actually play that way over the board with somebody who's cooperating with you to get through the opening quickly.
- zbik 10y ago
  Thank you! I was inspired by something I read about the early history of chess: "In order to save time, and to prevent useless exchanges, it was agreed that the first player should make his (let us say) fifteen moves all at once, without, however, crossing the middle line of the board; after which the adversary was entitled to play up at once an equal number of counter moves... these preliminary maneuvers the Arabs called Ta'biyat, which signifies 'the drawing up of troops in battle array'." (quoted from Duncan Forbes "Observations on the Origin and Progress of Chess", 1855 - I first came across the variant in Edward Lasker's "The Adventure of Chess".)
  - logicallee 10y ago
    thanks! that's also really interesting. (though in what I saw, there wasn't "after which" the other player made their first few moves - instead they moved over each other, like two people talking over each other. I couldn't figure out how they kept track of the turn or that they made the correct number of moves each - it was all much too quick. I even suppose that it's possible they didn't keep strict track and one player may have made 1 more move than the other or that sort of thing. Really bizarre!)

dswalter 10y ago

After all the draws, it was nice to see some actual wins. For those less familiar with chess, the final game was kind of fun. Carlsen's final play was to sacrifice his queen to draw the king into a trap, when Karjakin was one free move from putting Carlsen into an inextricably losing situation.

conistonwater 10y ago
I don't think that's accurate: Carlsen could have gotten a winning advantage just by defending everything with Qg3. On chess24's broadcast, Svidler even thought Carlsen might not go for the mate just because Qg3 was safely good enough.
- mjhoy 10y ago
  The trick is that he was under time pressure and if he miscalculated faced a mate in one, so it was somewhat risky (and why Svidler was surprised he played it).

conistonwater 10y ago

This time around there was an unusual amount of match strategy involved. In fact, what's interesting is that they always played the Spanish or the Italian, but in the one game where Karjakin wanted to (had to) win, he played the Najdorf. Peter Svidler mentioned a very interesting suggestion that the players should play the tie-breaks before the match, which should produce more interesting games (in particular, it should avoid game-12-style games). But in any case, I think determining the structure of the championship match is a rather neat test-case of mechanism design.

stouset 10y ago
> Peter Svidler mentioned a very interesting suggestion that the players should play the tie-breaks before the match, which should produce more interesting games. This is the first such suggestion I've heard that I actually like.
- CalChris 10y ago
  Since 2003, MLB determines home field advantage in the World Series by the winner of the All–Star Game. Not same but similar.
  - elgenie 10y ago
    The MLB system isn't similar at all. Home field advantage in baseball is small and no certain road to victory and there's no specific series/game situation in which it would come into play in determining the result. To wit, the last World Series featured home team wins in just 2 of 7 games. And the result of the All-Star Game is determined largely by the performance of players who will not feature in the World Series: at most 1/8th of the rosters are World Series participants, often much less. Further, the AllStar game is not managed with an eye towards maximizing the chances of victory, but instead to maximize the number of players to appear in the game; and pitchers that pitched two days before the game are not included, regardless of their skill level.
  - kriro 10y ago
    HFA in the WS might not be an advantage though. I'd argue it has actually been an advantage for the NL team if the AL team gets HFA in recent history because it helped their hitting. The last WS would be a good example.

lacker 10y ago

The rapid games are starting to become more interesting than the full-length games. I would not be surprised if rapid chess starts to become the more popular form of top-level chess. If you're just thinking about "playing the best possible game", the computers are doing that already. If you want to see two individuals intensely competing in a mental challenge, why not speed things up so that it's actually watchable? Similar to Twenty20 cricket.

sgeisenh 10y ago
Rapid and classical are totally different beasts. Rapid is more fun to watch in real time, but doesn't usually produce high quality games. On the other hand, classical can often be miserable to watch, but typically yields games worth of study for years to come. Watching computers is valuable to a point, but completely different from watching humans. The search space that humans can cover is much smaller, so the games end up being more positional, and easier to understand for a spectator. I wish that they would build a chess engine that emulated a human thought process so that it could be used as part of following a game in progress. The way they used the engine in the official world championship broadcast was frustrating. I don't care if white has a forced mate in 83 moves, I want to know how the position seems based on a shallower but more positional analysis.
lspears 10y ago
Agreed
Jach 10y ago
I became a fan of Karjakin when he played http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1751475 http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1751475 in 2014. (Move 64 was his divine move. That link shows with forced analysis deep fritz found it too, after 26 plies... but no one or program saw it during the match.) Anyway, humans play differently, and it's a different mental challenge when playing fast or slow. If you want a slow match watchable at quick speeds, don't watch live.
jmharvey 10y ago
I feel like the longer games (in both cricket and chess), because they're often so tactical and slow-paced as to be yawn inducing, have a greater payoff when they do suddenly turn exciting. (See the final day of this past week's New Zealand/Pakistan Test for a great example.) T20/rapid chess is exciting in the moment, but when you step away from any specific match and think of the last, say, year's worth of matches, every high-drama moment looks more or less the same.

slm_HN 10y ago

The ending of the match in puzzle form on Lichess: https://en.lichess.org/training/102787 https://en.lichess.org/training/102787

deleted 10y ago
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akkartik 10y ago
I think I might have been the first to get that today. It said "played 0 times". Very humorous :)
- wallace_f 10y ago
  I just played it and it also said it was played 0 times To anyone that plays chess or would like to: lichess is an all-around wonderful site, and in my opinion the best place to play chess! It's also free, and ad free.
  - LanceH 10y ago
    What does it have over ICC?
    - iends 10y ago
      imho, ICC is the gold standard. You can get at least a simul with a master almost everyday. The GM commentary is incredible for live tournaments, and things like ICC's Game of the Week from GM Joel Benjamin are unmatched.
      - wallace_f 10y ago
        ICC is also great. To each their own If you haven't yet taken a look at lichess give it a shot, it's wonderfully elegant and well-done project and there is a lot of great talent that plays there as well as wonderful features such as lichess tv, coaching, analysis and puzzles which are all free -- and there's no ads, the UX design is very click, too! Edit: I'm not a Master and don't need that level of competitiveness, but on lichess TV I am always seeing Masters playing there.

jgladch 10y ago

Go Magnie Go!

lspears 10y ago

Spoiler alert!

lasfter 10y ago
Yeah, seriously... I was looking forward to watching the tiebreaker in suspense. I suppose it isn't too surprising to find the story on HN though.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hakanito 10y ago

A really good documentary about his road to world champion came out a few days ago [1]. Worth a watch if you have Swedish VPN access (it's in English but with Swedish subtitles). [1] http://www.svt.se/dox/se-program/dox-magnus-schackgeniet-magnus?autostart=true http://www.svt.se/dox/se-program/dox-magnus-schackgeniet-mag...

grizzles 10y ago

A few days ago, Karjakin tried to tilt Magnus by showing up very late for the press conference as a way to be disrespectful. Anyone know if there were there any other psych outs that happened? Historically, there have been some really interesting ones in the chess world.

chocimir 10y ago
Karjakin wasn't disrespectful. He just gave a couple of short post-match interviews that Carslen intentionally skipped, went straight to the conference room and was waiting there. The post match interviews were standard up to that point in the match. Carslen decided to skip them after he lost the game.
dfreire 10y ago
If anyone was disrespectful in that occasion, it was Magnus. He refused to talk in the flash interview, went immediately to the press conference, and had to wait 90 seconds or so before deciding to leave because Karjakin was still in the flash interview Magnus had refused.

xurukefi 10y ago

As somebody who has no idea about chess I cannot believe that Carlsen calculated Bf8 after Rc8 under this time pressure and an easy Qg3 move. Kudos.

Ntrails 10y ago

I'd just like to give a little shout out to the guys streaming this on twitch last night. I don't play chess beyond the "find legal move and make it" level - but watching the last game was really really enjoyable and the commentary was pretty good too, helped me see what was actually going on and why. I'd never have looked for it, but once I started watching I couldn't stop. Wish I'd started earlier

maaaats 10y ago

20% of Norwegians watched all the games yesterday, even though they lasted way beyond midnight local time.

cpg 10y ago

Could someone ELI5 (but I know chess moves only, not strategy) the reasons why the ending was described as "sexy" and "incredible" and "classy" and other superlatives I heard?