14 ms·

If anyone doesn't know, "Armageddon" is a type of chess game that guarantees a victor; it's not just a click-bait title. It's the last tiebreaker after a serie

If anyone doesn't know, "Armageddon" is a type of chess game that guarantees a victor; it's not just a click-bait title. It's the last tiebreaker after a series of other Rapid and Blitz games. (all this is covered, just way at the end of the article) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_chess#Armageddon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_chess#Armageddon fivethirtyeight has been covering the tournament and their rough calculation gives it a 1:5000 chance of making it to the Armageddon game, based on Carlesen's superior Rapid and Blitz rankings. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/carlsens-bizarre-decision-has-sent-the-world-chess-championship-to-overtime/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/carlsens-bizarre-decisi...

z92 8y ago
Armageddon : "the players proceed to a single game of Armageddon, where the parameters are set to so far as possible give each side a 50-percent chance of winning—White gets 5 minutes, Black gets 4 minutes, and a draw will make Black the World Champion."
- tux1968 8y ago
  That really seems to favor black by a rather large margin. Wonder if there are any stats on the win ratios for each color in this format. And how do they decide who get's each color?
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    It doesn't though, because black has 20% less time than white.
    - tux1968 8y ago
      Yeah, but these guys blitz out great moves like crazy, I just don't think an extra minute is enough time to capitalize on any slight inaccuracies induced by the time pressure black is under. I could be wrong of course, which is why I was interested to know if there are any win ratios for the format around.
      - rtkwe 8y ago
        Black has two disadvantages starting though, second and additional time pressure. As for the win rates I can't imagine they'd be very good data because armageddon is the format of last result for tournaments so there's likely fewer games played. On top of that there's a lot of player variation under time pressure. Some (like Carlsen who has a rapid elo of 2880 and a blitz rating of 2939) have their ELO improve as you move to faster formats while others get worse (like, unfortunately for him, Caruana who goes from rapid 2789 to blitz 2767). The rating differences alone mean Carlsen is the heavy favorite to win going into these tie breakers well before we get to the armageddon round. [1] I think given the probabilities in the 538 model Carlsen's decision makes a lot of sense. Why slug it out to a probable draw with the chance to lose out of nowhere when you can move to another format that drastically favors you? [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/carlsens-bizarre-decision-has-sent-the-world-chess-championship-to-overtime/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/carlsens-bizarre-decisi...
      - mindgam3 8y ago
        Speaking as a former world ranked competitive player who specializes in fast time controls (blitz and bullet) — you guys are severely underestimating how important the time factor is in blitz. Blitz is almost an entirely different game from classical chance. Yes, technically the rules are the same, but tactical ability and ability to think under pressure plays a massively more important role than positional ability, which tends to be the deciding factor in top level classical chess. A 5m to 4m time advantage is the equivalent of a 100-200 point handicap. Think about it... if both players are evenly matched for 30 moves taking the same amount of time, say 3m, then you end up with an interesting middlegame position where White has 2m and Black has 1m. Now you are playing bullet chess with a 2 to 1 time advantage, which is more of like a 300-400 point handicap. All that to say - blitz chess, even at the world championship level, is characterized not by "slight inaccuracies" but by major mistakes if not outright blunders. You can even have wild swings in the final minute as each player makes critical mistakes. To get a feel for chess at this speed, I highly recommend watching some bullet chess streaming videos from chess.com or lichess. It is both highly entertaining and very instructive about the time aspect of chess.
  - necubi 8y ago
    Color is determined by random draw. I think most people feel that black has the advantage, but because there's no standardized timing it's hard to find relevant statistics. Armageddon is pretty much a thin chess-like veneer on top of a coin flip.
    - cortesoft 8y ago
      Most sports that have these 'last ditch tiebreaker' rules end up being coin flips in practice, or at least end up testing a completely different skillset than the normal game. Hockey and soccer shootouts are pretty much coin flips, and American pro football overtime is a completely different game. College football overtime is even more of a diversion from the actual game. Whenever you try to force an outcome in a sport, you get further and further away from the original game.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - gojomo 8y ago
    It could make sense to instead let the players bid for black (ie, winning draws), in units of time-differential, similar to this idea for auctioning off 1st possession in a USA-Football overtime by starting yard-line: https://slate.com/culture/2009/01/why-the-nfl-should-replace-the-overtime-coin-toss-with-an-auction-system.html https://slate.com/culture/2009/01/why-the-nfl-should-replace...
    - dfan 8y ago
      This has been tried (I think for some US Championship tiebreaks), and I like it a lot. If memory serves, the winning time bids for Black were quite low; people really value draw odds.
  - Jach 8y ago
    A fairer approach might be to auction the time. i.e. each player bids on number of minutes (or perhaps 10 second intervals?), the highest bid takes black with the win-on-draw condition and that many minutes taken from the 5 minute time.
    - colanderman 8y ago
      Or similarly, employ "I cut you choose": one player chooses the time limit for black, the other then selects which color they want.
  - laxatives 8y ago
    Its pretty unlikely to end in draw with blitz clocks, one player can usually gain a minuscule advantage and win on time if necessary.
gojomo 8y ago
It might spice-up the whole match to have this final-someone's-gotta-win tiebreaker before other tiebreaker matches, and then hold the result "in case it's needed". That'd be in the same spirit as this recommendation to have Soccer penalty-kick shootouts before overtime. https://slate.com/culture/2016/06/how-to-fix-the-penalty-shootout-play-it-before-extra-time.html https://slate.com/culture/2016/06/how-to-fix-the-penalty-sho... That is: you know who will win if all other tiebreakers draw, giving the side which didn't earn this final-tiebreaker the knowledge they have to be more aggressive, much earlier. (In the extreme, you could play this before every other match.)
- jammygit 8y ago
  It would also encourage the winner of that game to play extra slow and defensively for a draw, but still - the tradeoff might be neat
- colmvp 8y ago
  It still irks me that something as rare and prestigious as the World Cup (and Olympic Hockey) can get decided by shootouts. I mean, I get it, football has a huge pitch and it'd probably be ridiculous to have guys exhausted, barely able to jog at the 150th minute. That said, one of the things I love about NHL playoff hockey is that without compromise, it's first goal wins overtime, where players are willing to do everything and anything to get that win. Block every shot, hustle when they're exhausted... it's truly amazing. One of my favorite quotes about the quintuple overtime game between the Penguins and Flyers in 2000: > LeClair: After the third overtime … our locker room became a lot more loose. It was pretty comical in the locker room between guys searching for food, some guys getting IVs. It was a little bit of survival mode. > Primeau: Usually on the road the team orders pizza for the locker room. There's pizza for the guys, power gels, power bars, they were really popular. The trunk of those was gone, the pizza was gone. Trainers are going up to concession stands to see if there's anything there. [The] coaches' popcorn was eaten.
  - yodsanklai 8y ago
    > It still irks me that something as rare and prestigious as the World Cup (and Olympic Hockey) can get decided by shootouts. Even without the shoutouts, football is a very random game (compare with something like Tennis). And this is amplified by the tournament format. I like how experts take this game so seriously and come up with deep analysis when there's so much randomness in the result.

z92 8y ago

Armageddon : "the players proceed to a single game of Armageddon, where the parameters are set to so far as possible give each side a 50-percent chance of winning—White gets 5 minutes, Black gets 4 minutes, and a draw will make Black the World Champion."

tux1968 8y ago
That really seems to favor black by a rather large margin. Wonder if there are any stats on the win ratios for each color in this format. And how do they decide who get's each color?
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  It doesn't though, because black has 20% less time than white.
  - tux1968 8y ago
    Yeah, but these guys blitz out great moves like crazy, I just don't think an extra minute is enough time to capitalize on any slight inaccuracies induced by the time pressure black is under. I could be wrong of course, which is why I was interested to know if there are any win ratios for the format around.
    - rtkwe 8y ago
      Black has two disadvantages starting though, second and additional time pressure. As for the win rates I can't imagine they'd be very good data because armageddon is the format of last result for tournaments so there's likely fewer games played. On top of that there's a lot of player variation under time pressure. Some (like Carlsen who has a rapid elo of 2880 and a blitz rating of 2939) have their ELO improve as you move to faster formats while others get worse (like, unfortunately for him, Caruana who goes from rapid 2789 to blitz 2767). The rating differences alone mean Carlsen is the heavy favorite to win going into these tie breakers well before we get to the armageddon round. [1] I think given the probabilities in the 538 model Carlsen's decision makes a lot of sense. Why slug it out to a probable draw with the chance to lose out of nowhere when you can move to another format that drastically favors you? [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/carlsens-bizarre-decision-has-sent-the-world-chess-championship-to-overtime/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/carlsens-bizarre-decisi...
    - mindgam3 8y ago
      Speaking as a former world ranked competitive player who specializes in fast time controls (blitz and bullet) — you guys are severely underestimating how important the time factor is in blitz. Blitz is almost an entirely different game from classical chance. Yes, technically the rules are the same, but tactical ability and ability to think under pressure plays a massively more important role than positional ability, which tends to be the deciding factor in top level classical chess. A 5m to 4m time advantage is the equivalent of a 100-200 point handicap. Think about it... if both players are evenly matched for 30 moves taking the same amount of time, say 3m, then you end up with an interesting middlegame position where White has 2m and Black has 1m. Now you are playing bullet chess with a 2 to 1 time advantage, which is more of like a 300-400 point handicap. All that to say - blitz chess, even at the world championship level, is characterized not by "slight inaccuracies" but by major mistakes if not outright blunders. You can even have wild swings in the final minute as each player makes critical mistakes. To get a feel for chess at this speed, I highly recommend watching some bullet chess streaming videos from chess.com or lichess. It is both highly entertaining and very instructive about the time aspect of chess.
- necubi 8y ago
  Color is determined by random draw. I think most people feel that black has the advantage, but because there's no standardized timing it's hard to find relevant statistics. Armageddon is pretty much a thin chess-like veneer on top of a coin flip.
  - cortesoft 8y ago
    Most sports that have these 'last ditch tiebreaker' rules end up being coin flips in practice, or at least end up testing a completely different skillset than the normal game. Hockey and soccer shootouts are pretty much coin flips, and American pro football overtime is a completely different game. College football overtime is even more of a diversion from the actual game. Whenever you try to force an outcome in a sport, you get further and further away from the original game.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- gojomo 8y ago
  It could make sense to instead let the players bid for black (ie, winning draws), in units of time-differential, similar to this idea for auctioning off 1st possession in a USA-Football overtime by starting yard-line: https://slate.com/culture/2009/01/why-the-nfl-should-replace-the-overtime-coin-toss-with-an-auction-system.html https://slate.com/culture/2009/01/why-the-nfl-should-replace...
  - dfan 8y ago
    This has been tried (I think for some US Championship tiebreaks), and I like it a lot. If memory serves, the winning time bids for Black were quite low; people really value draw odds.
- Jach 8y ago
  A fairer approach might be to auction the time. i.e. each player bids on number of minutes (or perhaps 10 second intervals?), the highest bid takes black with the win-on-draw condition and that many minutes taken from the 5 minute time.
  - colanderman 8y ago
    Or similarly, employ "I cut you choose": one player chooses the time limit for black, the other then selects which color they want.
- laxatives 8y ago
  Its pretty unlikely to end in draw with blitz clocks, one player can usually gain a minuscule advantage and win on time if necessary.

gojomo 8y ago

It might spice-up the whole match to have this final-someone's-gotta-win tiebreaker before other tiebreaker matches, and then hold the result "in case it's needed". That'd be in the same spirit as this recommendation to have Soccer penalty-kick shootouts before overtime. https://slate.com/culture/2016/06/how-to-fix-the-penalty-shootout-play-it-before-extra-time.html https://slate.com/culture/2016/06/how-to-fix-the-penalty-sho... That is: you know who will win if all other tiebreakers draw, giving the side which didn't earn this final-tiebreaker the knowledge they have to be more aggressive, much earlier. (In the extreme, you could play this before every other match.)

jammygit 8y ago
It would also encourage the winner of that game to play extra slow and defensively for a draw, but still - the tradeoff might be neat
colmvp 8y ago
It still irks me that something as rare and prestigious as the World Cup (and Olympic Hockey) can get decided by shootouts. I mean, I get it, football has a huge pitch and it'd probably be ridiculous to have guys exhausted, barely able to jog at the 150th minute. That said, one of the things I love about NHL playoff hockey is that without compromise, it's first goal wins overtime, where players are willing to do everything and anything to get that win. Block every shot, hustle when they're exhausted... it's truly amazing. One of my favorite quotes about the quintuple overtime game between the Penguins and Flyers in 2000: > LeClair: After the third overtime … our locker room became a lot more loose. It was pretty comical in the locker room between guys searching for food, some guys getting IVs. It was a little bit of survival mode. > Primeau: Usually on the road the team orders pizza for the locker room. There's pizza for the guys, power gels, power bars, they were really popular. The trunk of those was gone, the pizza was gone. Trainers are going up to concession stands to see if there's anything there. [The] coaches' popcorn was eaten.
- yodsanklai 8y ago
  > It still irks me that something as rare and prestigious as the World Cup (and Olympic Hockey) can get decided by shootouts. Even without the shoutouts, football is a very random game (compare with something like Tennis). And this is amplified by the tournament format. I like how experts take this game so seriously and come up with deep analysis when there's so much randomness in the result.