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What are Magnus Carlsen's chances of reaching 2900?
- rurban 4y agoNot by playing on the club level, as pointed out. He'll loose with every draw to such low ranked players. He needs to play a lot of high ranked tournaments, and don't take draws. Excitíng
- herendin 4y agoIt sounds like focusing so hard on the rating might be bad for his quality of life, by preventing him playing 'fun' tournaments. Edit : He can try to game the ratings system by looking for high-rated opponents who he knows will not play as well as their ratings suggest for some reason (like illness or personal issues). But he doesn't seem the sort to enjoy this
- jackdh 4y agoIs it not possible to go to a tournament and have it not affect your rank? Or is every tournament ranked all the time?
- sgjohnson 4y agoIt is. If the tournament is not organized by FIDE, or a national chess federation, it won't affect your FIDE rating. It will also not affect your FIDE rating if the tournament is not organised to the required standard (which is basically nonexistent for under-1800 rated players, and going all the way to the required presence of International Arbiters, metal detectors and blood tests for top level play)
- bongobingo1 4y ago> metal detectors and blood tests What are they looking for? Communicators and ... Adderall? Xanzolam?
- sgjohnson 4y ago> What are they looking for? Communicators and ... Adderall? Xanzolam? Probably not Xanzolam, because there's no way it'd enhance your performance, but yeah, you get the idea.
- bagacrap 4y agohas Adderall been shown to enhance performance or is this a preventative measure to protect player health? what else do they check for? caffeine is probably helpful and not banned. LSD (microdosing)? Galantamine? If there are nootropics that can legitimately enhance high level chess play why aren't we using them on our top scientists and engineers?
- seanhunter 4y agoHere are the official FIDE anti-doping regulations, which include the justification https://old.fide.com/fide/fide-anti-doping-regulations.html https://old.fide.com/fide/fide-anti-doping-regulations.html Tl;dr: They use the world anti-doping agency list.
- mpol 4y agoEven with the hot streak in 2019, his performance rating was 2889, which is not enough. It could have continued for a thousand games and it would not have been enough. He will need more wins against high rated players, even more wins than in 2019. Quote from the article: "...won every tournament he took part in, scored 32 wins, 47 draws and not a single loss, with a rating performance of 2889."
- shmageggy 4y ago> In this simulation. Magnus reached the rating in 1600 simulated trajectories out of 2000. If Magnus Carlsen continues showing the same performance as he did during the 2019 period, he has 80% chance of reaching 2900.
- mpol 4y agoYes, I read that too. There are not many details, like what kind of simulations there have been made. Also, "the same performance" has a different meaning from TPR performance I guess. With a TPR of 2889 you will not reach 2900, afaik. Unless 1 tournament is played with a TPR of 2920 and the next one with a TPR of 2840. But then it's a fleeting 2900 :) I guess that will do for Carlsen :)
- sgjohnson 4y agoHe is fighting an uphill battle though, because nobody has a higher rating than him, and there's only so many points you can gain from winning games against lower rated players.
- gbronner 4y agoThe issue is that he's going to be trying to maximize his chance for a win, and not his expected points. So the model likely underestimates his chance of success
- amenghra 4y ago“The Elo system only measures differences between players, it has nothing to do with absolute player strength.” But it seems ratings have been deflating lately (https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-elo-ratings-inflation-or-deflation https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-elo-ratings-inflation-or-d... is a fun read), so hitting 2900 would be even more impressive!
- Ekaros 4y agoIs the top end deflating? If deflation comes from young high-variance players does that affect the players at very top? As they might be good enough to consistently beat the young players.
- PNT510 4y agoIt's comparing players of the same rating today vs. the past using the chess engine Stockfish to analyze how well players are a certain ELO performed. For example a player with an ELO score of 2000 today is stronger than a player with an ELO score of 2000 back in the 90's.
- Normille 4y agoI still can't understand how chess ratings work --even after 'RTFM' and having people try and explain it to me. Far far below the lofty heights of Carlsen &co., I play a fair bit on Lichess. Sometimes I'll play someone with a similar ranking to myself and beat them and will earn 3 or 4 points. Then we'll have a re-match which I lose and they'll gain 12 or 15 points. I just can't fathom how them beating me earns them more points than I earn from beating them --if we were on the same or similar rankings to start with. But it almost always seems to pan out this way. [And I'm not talking about opponents with a '?' after their ranking, which signifies they've not played enough games for the ranking to be accurate yet. I know that, in those circumstances, the rankings can move hugely in either direction]. I've also noticed that there doesn't seem to be any relation between the circumstances of a win and the points awarded. For example, shouldn't a win or draw when playing black earn more points than when playing white --given that white had the advantage of moving first? And what about the manner of victory? It seems there's no more ranking points to be gained from; snatching a victory where both players ended up down to a single pawn each and the winner just managed to queen one square ahead of the loser... than there are from completely decimating your opponent.
- fileeditview 4y agoIf you have roughly the same rating both of you should be gaining the same amount on a win. However many rating systems have some kind of aging factor. Meaning the more games you play the more stable your rating gets. So it could be that your opponent has played significantly less games than you. However if he loses he also should lose more points than you would. The color you play has no influence on the rating numbers. And also the type of win/draw/loss does not matter at all. Ratings are just statistics of your results.
- qsort 4y ago> Far far below the lofty heights of Carlsen &co., I play a fair bit on Lichess. Sometimes I'll play someone with a similar ranking to myself and beat them and will earn 3 or 4 points. Then we'll have a re-match which I lose and they'll gain 12 or 15 points. I just can't fathom how them beating me earns them more points than I earn from beating them --if we were on the same or similar rankings to start with. But it almost always seems to pan out this way. Lichess works on a different system than professional ratings. It takes into account the RD (sort of a standard deviation on your rating). Playing against a player with a more stable rating will cause the rating to change more and vice-versa. Professional ratings are always assumed to be stable. > I've also noticed that there doesn't seem to be any relation between the circumstances of a win and the points awarded. For example, shouldn't a win or draw when playing black earn more points than when playing white --given that white had the advantage of moving first? This is something that is sometimes used as a tiebreaker in tournaments. Sort of an away goals rule, if you're familiar with soccer. But as far as ratings go, in the long run you're bound to play ~50% of the games with white and ~50% with black, so it smooths out itself. > And what about the manner of victory? It seems there's no more ranking points to be gained from; snatching a victory where both players ended up down to a single pawn each and the winner just managed to queen one square ahead of the loser... than there are from completely decimating your opponent. I'm sorry but this makes absolutely no sense. There are three results: Win - Loss - Draw, everything else is just discourse around the game. Endgames are something players trade into, reducing to a won endgame is part of the skill involved in the game. Why would that count as less of a win? Also, material is a pretty stupid way to determine how close a game was. Should I get less rating points because I won with a queen sac?
- epups 4y agoI think the 5% odds are an underestimation, because Carlsen will change his focus now and won't spend time preparing for the World Championship. He will likely also prioritize risky wins vs safer draws.
- Asraelite 4y ago> He will likely also prioritize risky wins vs safer draws. It seems kind of unfair that this is the strategy needed to increase ELO. If the safest strategy to guarantee a win in a tournament is winning a single game and drawing the rest, then you shouldn't be penalized for that in your ELO, versus playing risky and winning more but also losing some.
- ht85 4y agoYou aren't penalized, playing safely will maximize your chance of winning and having a higher rating. Maximizing your rating on the other hand will require you to play more and more risky games.
- vikingerik 4y agoIt's not the strategy needed to increase your rating on average. It's the strategy needed to target high variance in search of reaching a far-outlying value.
- mda 4y agoConsidering there are quite a few players from young generation who reached 2700+ recently I don't see him reaching his goal and even 5% looks optimistic.
- shmageggy 4y ago> ...assuming... the mix of opponents are the same in the two periods (2019 and 2020-2022) This seems like a big issue. There are currently a bunch of really promising young players coming up the ranks who will likely be continuing to improve and be underrated for a while. That's going to make it even harder.
- shawabawa3 4y agoHow much would get gain for a win vs a say 1800 rated player? Could he game the system by doing 1000 rated matches against poor players until he hits 2900?
- WJW 4y agoNo, because he wouldn't get any points for beating opponents that much lower than him. There is no such thing as a fractional rating point, so if the points gain gets below 0.5 it just rounds down to zero.
- dmurray 4y agoThis is wrong. The FIDE rating system calculates in tenths of a rating point, but rounds to the nearest 1 every month.
- MauranKilom 4y agoOnly if he never actually loses one. Which he really shouldn't, but at high numbers the probability of slipping up becomes non-negligible.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ritchiea 4y agoTechnically he could, I believe FIDE has a minimum rating increase of 1 point for the winner of a game with > 400 ELO advantage on their opponent. But if he broke 2900 by playing in minor tournaments against low rated amateur opponents no one would take it seriously that he broke 2900. Realistically many, maybe even all of the top players could push for record ELOs by only playing against players well below their level. But not only are the optics bad and the records would be looked at as illegitimate, it would take a lot of time playing long classical chess games against inferior opponents. Which is a major opportunity cost since their time would normally be spent playing in and studying for professional tournaments.
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- epolanski 4y agoI think one major piece is consistently missed in those articles. Yes, the chances of him hitting 2900 do not depend only on his performance against other players, but from their elo as well. If the following 25 players in the world where all 2800+ Carlsen would already be 2900+. Thus, Carlsen's best chances largely depend on elo inflation to widen the elo distribution itself. One example of this: Louis de Bourdonnais which was #1 in the world in the 1800s skyrocketed his elo rating from 2600 to 2650 mostly as a result of the following 10 players moving their average elo from 2350 to 2450. His winrate against them never changed. And what is required for 2350 players to go higher? That the players below they skill also raise their elos giving the top 10 more points when beating them. The more players will be fide rated the more Carslen's chances will increase but without a sufficient supply of 2700s, those at 2750 won't raise in elo, etc, etc
- trashtester 4y agoI would also argue that there is a source of ELO deflation going on. As the top level players all get better, theory evolves, people generally play better chess. A player with a rating of 2750 today might have beat Kasparov in his prime, simply because chess has evolved. In a way, it's similar to sports. Plenty of people today might have beat Carl Lewis at 100m 30 years ago, but they would probably not be considered greater athletes. So in order to beat 2900, it would help if several other players got rankings of 2800-2850, but only if they did so without actually playing much better chess. Or he could just have a temporary lucky/confident streak, and gain 40 rating points in a few tournaments.
- soperj 4y ago> In a way, it's similar to sports. Plenty of people today might have beat Carl Lewis at 100m 30 years ago, but they would probably not be considered greater athletes. Same with Lance Armstrong...
- trashtester 4y agoI did remember Lance's drug use, but had forgotten about Carl's :)
- pxeger1 4y agoKnowing very little about chess, what is the current state of the best chess AI compared to human players like Magnus Carlsen?
- andrepd 4y agoNo humans have won against a top engine in over a decade, and they almost surely never will.
- somenameforme 4y agoThis is somewhat misleading because there have also been no classical time control human-computer matches since 2006 when Kramnik played against Fritz. That match more or less ended interest in these matches. Every game was drawn until Kramnik randomly blundered a trivial mate-in-1 in a simple position. That mistake was undoubtedly driven by psychological reasons. Playing against an engine is nothing like playing against a human and it's difficult if not impossible to put oneself in the proper mindset to play well. The following games were then also drawn until Kramnik decided to do the chess equivalent (when playing against a computer) of going for a hail mary, with black, in the final game to try to even the match score. Suffice to say, that failed and the match ended as a generally disappointing, for everybody, 4-2. There have been a variety of gimmicky matches since (fast time controls, various odds matches, etc), but nothing serious.
- franknstein 4y agoMagnus Carlsen: 2864 Elo Stockfish: 3585 Elo "Elo suggested scaling ratings so that a difference of 200 rating points in chess would mean that the stronger player has an expected score (which basically is an expected average score) of approximately 0.75, and the USCF initially aimed for an average club player to have a rating of 1500." I guess that means that Magnus has expected score of roughly 0.25^((3585 - 2864)/200) = 0.00675 against Stockfish 15, which is basically 1 in 200 games?
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoMachine and human ELO ratings are decorrelated. No games are played between a full strength engine and a human anymore. Even Magnus can’t win against a top engine. He might draw if he is lucky.
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoThe whole 2900 thing is so strange. ELO is a relative scale. The number only makes sense in relation to the ratings of other. You could shift everyone or scale it differently and it wouldn’t change anything. What a poor goal. I view the whole thing more as a criticism of the sorry state of FIDE and the world championship that an actual serious goal.
- ChrisLomont 4y agoOne person reaching 2900 when it's not by changing the scale shows their relative position to others is a new record. it's a worthy psychological goal, like breaking a 4 minute mile even though a minute and a mile are made up quantities. Or scoring 300 in bowling, when 10 rounds is arbitrary. Pretty much every record in every sport is arbitrary, yet people like to set goals for motivation.
- icoder 4y agoYes but the examples you mentioned are (in practice) absolute and can be reached independently of how others are performing. In that sense, ELO _is_ different (as also explained in another answer, he can reach 2900 more easily if others start performing worse).
- uf00lme 4y agoActually, he can reach his goal more easily if the people he wins against are closer to his score, so it helps if a few start perform better. I wonder if it is a valid strategy if he drops out of World Championship title contests to allow others to increase their score by not losing against him. I would have thought that wouldn't move the needle much but I guess he needs everything there is to get to 2900.
- personjerry 4y agoWhat about being "NBA Champions"? It's "relative to how others are performing". Why does that make it not valuable?
- julian_sark 4y agoHe'll be 910 years of age. I'd say barring some major scientific break-through, his chances of reaching 2900 are not great.
- braymundo 4y agoI love this comment.
- spoonjim 4y agoI wonder why Magnus has fixated on 2900. It's sort of a dumb goal for someone at his level because it's out of his control. He can win a lot of games but if his opponents don't win their games that aren't against him then he's not going to get there.
- db_admin 4y agoWell if he is bored being the world champion, he may just be looking for any hard to reach goal at all. If the top players are not winning their games, they will not stay at the top for long.
- bagacrap 4y agoI think this is it. But 2900 seems very arbitrary. It's not even that round. If he were close to 3000 that would at least be a satisfying number.
- vikingerik 4y agoHe's bored not exactly by being the world champion, but by the format, where he has to prep for a long series of games all against just one opponent. He wants to play a variety of players. He wants the world championship to be a tournament with many entrants, rather than last year's champion against just one opponent.
- throwthere 4y agoNot mentioned in the article—> if Carlsen improves his play. Presumably that’s totally possible since he will free up enormous amounts of focus previously spent researching the few possible challengers to his championship title.
- kwartz 4y agoHopefully the whole takeover of his (~8% stake) company "Play Magnus" (owner of chess24, chessable, etc.) by chess.com does not affect him. There is a cringey announcement of the takeover on YouTube, including a TikTok video of Danny Rentsch dancing (to put it mildly ...). The plan seems to be to draw Carlsen into that toxic sphere of influence. Chess streaming and the culture surrounding chess.com seem to be for the lowest common denominator. Carlsen fit much better into the European culture of chess24, I hope he can ignore the circus and it won't affect his play.
- wonnor 4y agoWhat a shame that chess is becoming more accessible to the unwashed masses.
- dhosek 4y agoELO is always a fascinating thing. I waste far too much time on boardgamearena.com which has a system where people start at 0, 100 is, I think, equivalent to the chess 1500, except that it becomes a floor rating. I “retire” from a game when I can get to 300. I got up to 285 recently on cribbage and was the 86th rated player at the game, while in other games, being a rated player requires a score of 400 or more.
- glxxyz 4y agoGiving up the world championship improves his (very slim) chances of reaching 2900, because he doesn't have to save his preparation for those 12 important games. Magnus often plays offbeat (bad, basically) openings, to take his real prep completely out of the picture.
- spekcular 4y agoIt's worth noting that one of the authors of the cited paper [1] (Nick Polson) is infamous for claiming (incorrectly) a proof of the Riemann hypothesis [2]. This case is somewhat strange because he's not the usual mathematical crank; he's actually a quite well-recognized economics researcher who is clearly mathematically competent. But for some reason he persists. (If you search his name, you can find his YouTube channel where he lectures on his RH work...) [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.09563 https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.09563 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02653 https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02653.
- lake_vincent 4y agoThe abstract kills me. "A Hadamard factorization of the Riemann Xi-function is constructed to characterize the zeros of the zeta function." Like, dude, you are claiming to solve a Millennium problem, you're gonna have to put a little more effort into explaining, ya know, the breakthrough... We care about the Riemann Hypothesis not for the theorem itself, but because the methods used to solve it will surely be revolutionary and it's those methods that are important, not the theorem. That's what makes it a Millennium problem. So a paper like this immediately shows the author doesn't even understand why the problem is important, let alone its solution.
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago> Like, dude, you are claiming to solve a Millennium problem, you're gonna have to put a little more effort into explaining, ya know, the breakthrough... In the abstract? If papers needed to cover everything in the abstract they would need to have an abstract for the abstract and they you’d just end up complaining about the abstract abstract not being complete…
- lake_vincent 4y agoRight, because only extremes exist... Or you can add, oh I dunno, two or three more sentences to maybe hint at what is novel and important about the approach?
- 4y ago
- zasdffaa 4y agoAbsolutely zero. He's as mortal as the rest of us.
- lswank 4y agoThis is the comment I came to find. Thank you, dearest zasdffaa
- jedberg 4y ago> Considering that draws at the grandmaster level are occurring 70 − 75% of the time nowadays, Does this mean we've basically solved chess at this point?
- __s 4y agoSolved is a strong word TCEC shows opening lines which allow for AIs to best each other, maybe tournaments need to move to that eventually. It's what they've done in checkers
- wonnor 4y agoThe fact that these grandmasters would get destroyed by engines means that no, we are not even close to chess being solved for human gameplay.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sam0x17 4y agoI love how I understand these scores solely because I used to play WoW as a teenager