Reposting this from a comment thread below which mentions the chess.com "what would have happened" computer playoff, as I think the HN community (who are far mo

Reposting this from a comment thread below which mentions the chess.com "what would have happened" computer playoff, as I think the HN community (who are far more well versed in computer chess than I) would benefit from a better understanding of how high-level competitive chess between humans actually works. tl;dr: In order to fully appreciate how bizarre Carlsen's draw offer was at that moment, you need to take into account the time factor, which (to my knowledge) the chess.com computer analysis ignores completely. --- The major problem with using the chess.com data is they don't take into account the time factor. When Magnus offered, the draw, Fabi had exactly 15min 42sec time remaining to play the next 10 moves. That's less than 2 minutes per move, versus Magnus having between 2x-3x that amount. It is hard to understand just how significant of a handicap this is unless you've ever played competitive chess at a national or international level. The human mind starts to break down and freeze up when it is forced to make critical decisions in limited time. This was already starting to happen in the game leading up to the draw offer, as Caruana took more and more time as his positioning was worsening. The end result of this is one player being forced to make a rapid series of moves in a "time scramble" while the other player has the luxury of checking and rechecking his calculations. This gives the player with more time a massive advantage in practice. We're talking at least 100-200 rating points. If chess.com wanted to do a fair analysis, they should have handicapped the White computer with 3-4x less compute time. I guarantee the results would have been significantly more favorable for Black then they already were.