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Magnus Carlsen has himself commented a sentiment similar to the article , on the Lex Fridman podcast (although not the exact same terms, I think if you _try_ to

Magnus Carlsen has himself commented a sentiment similar to the article , on the Lex Fridman podcast (although not the exact same terms, I think if you _try_ to give the article a favourable interpretation, you can understand what they're trying to say). You need 'subterfuge and misdirection' in the sense that (as the world no-1 puts it), it's a semi-bluff...a weird/not-really-analysed position, but that will still end up in a draw if the opponent responds appropriately. Lex: "Is there a sense in which it's ok to make sub-optimal moves?" Magnus: "You HAVE to, because the best moves have been analysed to death, mostly." https://youtu.be/0ZO28NtkwwQ?t=1450 https://youtu.be/0ZO28NtkwwQ?t=1450

cloutchaser 4y ago
I just can't understand how this makes sense, it seems like its the wrong way round. How can over analysis mean things are less optimal? This is true of every sport, every single record always gets broken, because techniques and nutrition and training and everything improve. A world no 100 tennis player could easily beat a world no 1 from 50 years ago. How is that bad or like poker? It just means the game is evolving. It might also mean more psychological games. The tennis analogy works here too, there's plenty of that in there too. The whole premise just doesn't make sense to me. Because you have to psychologically think about your opponent, that makes the game worse?
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  I don't think he said that it made the game worse? Just that you are forced to make suboptimal moves. If you make optimal moves then your opponent will have analysed the position before and the game will end in a draw, which is a dissapointing result for whoever plays white.
  - awb 4y ago
    > which is a dissapointing result for whoever plays white. Not necessarily. If black has a higher ELO rating then white is happy to draw and may aggressively seek a draw. I think the problem is that seeking draws makes chess boring. And that it’s realistic for someone ranked well below another player to force a draw, while it’s near impossible for the lower ranked player to win outright. So you end up with a wide range of players seeking stalemates and a small minority looking for a win, but not at the expense of a potential loss.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  It’s because there is a limited number of board states + transpositions a person can reasonably memorize, and memorizing a board state + sequence of moves from a chess engine will beat human intuition. So the idea is to steer the gamestate into places your opponent did not prepare for but you did, with non-obvious moves. All near-optimal moves are obvious.
- davisoneee 4y ago
  The game _is_ more optimal now, with chess grandmasters now having deep opening preparation and understanding of positions. However, that results in a lot of draws. To win tournaments, world championships, and break ELO records (which are Magnus', and other GM's, goals), you need to win. If 'perfect' play--that we're approaching with engine analysis--results in a draw, you need to do something non-optimal and unexpected in order to get your opponent out of their engine prep and into thinking mode. Whether it's better or worse is a different argument. Some find it a bit 'dry' in that there are often less blunders, dazzling tactics, and sacrifices because both sides now know the optimal approach. It's much more of a war of attrition in high-level, long time-control games. As an aside, that's potentially why bullet and other such chess is so popular...there isn't time to deeply analyse, so it's intuition, challenging positions, blunders, and less 'standard' play.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > To win tournaments, world championships, and break ELO records (which are Magnus', and other GM's, goals), you need to win. Not quite true; you can break ELO records by performing equally well in a larger pool of people-with-ELO-ratings.
- kdmccormick 4y ago
  I am not a chess player, so I don't know how this holds up, but the idea of "making bad moves because the good moves are overanalyzed" reminds me of the Eephus Pitch [0]: > An eephus pitch in baseball is a very high-arcing off-speed pitch. The delivery from the pitcher has very low velocity and often catches the hitter off-guard. The pitcher essentially lobs the ball at the hitter [1]. Major league players are so focused on hitting extremely fast and/or curving pitches that they whiff or stand idle at a pitch that your ten-year-old nephew could probably clobber. It's a risky pitch, because if the batter is able to adapt, they can hit a home run. The power of the pitch is entirely that it's unexpected. I know it's not a perfect analogy, since chess players have so much more time to react to any sub-optimal moves. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eephus_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eephus_pitch [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikLlRT2j7EQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikLlRT2j7EQ
  - throwawaytemp27 4y ago
    Much of the velocity on a home run comes from the pitch (equal and opposite reaction) rather than the bat speed. So it’s not that easy to hit a home run on a 50 mph pitch.
    - kdmccormick 4y ago
      Okay, true. But it should be pretty easy to make contact, at least.
    - llbeansandrice 4y ago
      This is so incredibly false. They're not throwing +80mph pitches at the MLB home run derby. Batting practice pitches are about 60mph.
      - baseballfan 4y ago
        You are very incorrect: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18222/how-does-the-speed-of-an-incoming-pitch-affect-the-speed-of-a-baseball-after-it https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18222/how-does-t... Incoming speed makes significant difference to exit velocity. If you were going for max distance, you would want 100 mph pitches. In home run derby, they are optimizing for ability to get a good repeatable swing with enough power to go over the fence. If they were playing in a park with like 440 ft fence, they would need faster pitches.
- aesch 4y ago
  It depends on the state-space over which you are optimizing. When they say sub-optimal, I think the state-space they are referring to includes only the pieces on the board. However, if you include your opponent's mind in the state-space, a move that appears sub-optimal may actually be optimal.
- dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  I just can't understand how this makes sense, it seems like its the wrong way round. How can over analysis mean things are less optimal? When your opponent is the one doing the analysis. It makes perfect sense to me that anything your opponent is prepared for is less optimal than it would be otherwise.
- jlg23 4y ago
  "Over analysis" here means by the opponent: If you chose the optimal move, thousands have done so before, so has your opponent. By doing something non-perfect, you enter territory where your opponent does not already have the tree of possible responses mapped out in their head. This is, at least for me (a chess player), where the actual thinking begins - all before is just memorization, with the opening moves committed directly to muscle memory.
- SkyBelow 4y ago
  To simplify a bit, you get two options. Move A. Move B. From the best knowledge we have from our best engines, A is the better move (though I don't think we have formally proven such yet). But if you play A, you are playing your opponent in a game of memorization. If you play B, your opponent loses any memorization advantage. Thus they must play based on ability other than memorizing responses. For a player whose memorization ability is equal or worse than their ability to play based on other ability, choosing move B is clearly the worse option. But if the player is one whose memorization is better than their other abilities at chess, then playing B means fighting them in an area they are worse at. The advantage of this can easily outweigh the disadvantage of move B compared to A in general. Imagine a military commander choosing an engagement over terrain more familiar to their side even though it is a worse engagement if both sides had equal knowledge of the terrain, because the terrain knowledge more than compensates for the negatives.
georgiecasey 4y ago
surely they're talking about the opening only, where the best moves have been analyzed to death. once you're in the middle game and it's a position that's new, you play the best moves.
- davisoneee 4y ago
  You get to new middlegame positions by playing the sub-optimal/weird moves in the opening that Magnus is suggesting. Otherwise, you get to a familiar middlegame and just grind out a draw.
  - icelancer 4y ago
    I don't really understand Magnus' position about playing a sideline vs. Hans Niemann in the infamous cheating game, and was reportedly shocked Hans knew the responses. Before any of that became public and I was reviewing the game, I just thought it was a sideline transposition to a Catalan position, and everyone knows Magnus plays the Catalan as a main white opening - so a weird way of getting to that structure is not that novel. Hans' explanation made sense, even if he was wrong in his first interview and it came off weird.
- awb 4y ago
  The opening can be a sequence of 20-30 moves long, which includes what most amateurs consider the middle game. I think that’s what Magnus is saying is that if you play by the book you go from opening to end game without much creativity or challenge. So, the top “creative” players will try to go off script to make their top “book smart” opponents have to think on the fly.
- msluyter 4y ago
  I think that's mostly correct, and at beginner/intermediate levels of play can very much be true. Back when I used to play, I'd often run into people who specialized in weird gambits like the Grob or the Latvian, because even though those probably won't win many masters levels games, they're full of traps which can trip up lesser players. But even in mid-game, it might mean that if you know that your opponent prefers open / tactical positions, for example, you try to force a closed position, even if it may be slightly suboptimal.
treis 4y ago
>Magnus Carlsen has himself commented a sentiment similar to the article This goes at least back to Bobby Fischer. With the minor difference that instead of computers he was up against teams of Soviet Grandmasters. It's why he created Fischer Random chess where the pieces on the backrow are randomized. That (mostly) eliminates memorization and forces players to rely on their own creativity.
- lbalazscs 4y ago
  Fischer announced Fischer Random Chess in 1996, long after his retirement from competitive chess (1972). His reason for doing so in 1996 was very prosaic: he was simply no longer familiar with modern opening theory.
  - icelancer 4y ago
    Yeah, it's been retconned somehow that Fischer was this non-booked up player and didn't like opening theory. Instead, it's his convenient excuse for not wanting to study anymore. There was probably not a more booked-up player than Fischer in his prime, something he seemed to try to make people forget. Famously when asked about a young Soviet prodigy by the Soviets, Fischer responded that the kid was good, but that there was a better player in their women's division who had more signs of promise. Many of the Soviet masters had no idea who Bobby was talking about; but Bobby was reading all Soviet chess literature and magazines to stay up to date. That said, FRC is pretty interesting.
    - lupire 4y ago
      He didn't try to make people forget it, he just didn't keep it up.
  - lupire 4y ago
    > he was simply no longer familiar with modern opening theory. That's what parent said. Fischer wanted to get the memorization out, since memorization makes the game unplayable for someone who doesn't have The Knowledge.
- 4y ago
rybosworld 4y ago
The analogy to poker seems like a stretch. Poker relies on bluffing so heavily only because the cards of your opponent are unknown. The board state is always known. Magnus is saying that at the top level, grandmasters know how to force draws in all of the lines that incorporate best-move, second-best-move, etc. That means that if you want to pull off a win, you have to incorporate unstudied lines that will force your opponent to calculate rather than draw from memory/experience.
- shabbatt 4y ago
  Yes but likewise, the motives and their future intent is unknown by a sub optimal move. So in a sense, it is similar to bluffing when you don't know the actions of the other person, deception is required to make yourself unpredictable. This is why playing against a maniac (seemingly random and not respecting bluffs or equity) is very difficult because if they get lucky enough times, they are able to "break the game" by getting the opponent to be extremely risk averse OR take on more risks. I believe this is what Magnus is referring to, its that making yourself unpredictable by questionable moves and no longer playing in a way that has been taught. For example the common strategy is to go all in with strong pairs like AA, KK but someone beats it with a totally random garbage hand (52o, 37o) and does so repeatedly, no theory can help you win against somebody who is just repeatedly lucky and brash.
  - fisf 4y ago
    No, this is not really what this is about. But the article is terrible in conveying this -- actually I find the comparison with poker to be very inept. This is less about playing mindtricks and bluffing, but more 'mundane'. I.e. a decent player will know all the good mainlines of popular openings, and end up in 'comfortable' positions (among other things due to computer analysis). The metagame is to prepare a non-garbage sideline, that your opponent is not so familiar with. Nobody at a high rating plays 'questionable' variations on purpose, in order to bluff. The resulting positions would be much too punishing.
    - hatha 4y ago
myownpetard 4y ago
This reminds me of my favorite chess quote, "You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.” - Tal. He was notorious for doing just this. He would make what have now been engine analyzed as sub-optimal moves but which lead to such complex and dynamic positions that his opponent would eventually slip and he would exploit their error in dramatic fashion. This is one reason why he is considered one of the most creative attacking players ever.
- cowmoo728 4y ago
  It's also widely known that if a modern super GM were to play against Tal, they would outright refute the vast majority of his play. It's hard to find a super GM that has not analyzed Tal games as part of their training, and therefore already know the answer, but many of them instantly notice Tal's blunders when presented with his games. So the Tal approach gets harder and harder every year - finding a line that is sub-optimal and therefore not analyzed to death, but also solid enough to maintain winning chances against top players.
- icelancer 4y ago
  Tal's games haven't aged very well unfortunately. In today's era, someone playing like Tal would get crushed at the highest levels pretty regularly due to much better knowledge of the game. You still see the general creative spirit in certain top players like Rapport, Mamedyarov, Firouzja, though. Magnus is particularly boring to watch, but it's what makes him great. Fischer was not so different, and felt that Tal was overly creative for the sake of being creative, rather than good. IM Marc Esserman is probably one of the more exciting players to watch, but he's not a GM, though he arguably plays at GM strength often. He's the author of Mayhem in the Morra, well worth reading if you like Tal's spirit. Esserman is inactive OTB unfortunately, but he does stream chess online.
  - CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    Well sure, they lit up the forest and put in roads and signs and invented GPS. That obsoleted his plan, but it was a great plan at the time.
8note 4y ago
Notably the first time kasparov lost to a computer was basically a bluff. The bot hit a bug that chose a strange move, and since kasparov couldn't figure out what the line was, he resigned. If he analysed the board instead of what the bot was thinking, he would have won easily
- vikingerik 4y ago
  Mythbusting here: There were three separate incidents in Kasparov - Deep Blue 1997, that often get conflated. The bug move (a rook) was in game 1. It was inconsequential to the game result. The position was already lost for Deep Blue. It made a random move because everything had the same outcome of losing. The bugged move simply made it lose sooner. Kasparov knew this and there was no controversy. In game 2, Kasparov set a trap, offering a sacrifice of two pawns for great positional improvement. Kasparov thought Deep Blue couldn't calculate far enough ahead to see the positional improvement, but it did. This made Kasparov suspect and accuse IBM of human intervention in the computer's moves. The fatal move (a knight sacrifice by Deep Blue) was in game 6. Kasparov deliberately played an opening with a known weakness, that he thought the computer wouldn't find as it wouldn't sacrifice material and calculate far enough ahead to see the positional advantage. Deep Blue found it. Kasparov again accused IBM of human intervention. The Deep Blue team then said they had added this variation into its opening database just before that game, pre-analyzing that line deeper since Kasparov had previously played it in game 4. There was some dispute as to whether the rules for the competition were intended to allow IBM to modify Deep Blue during the match.
failrate 4y ago
See also "donkeyspace".
ajhurliman 4y ago
I think the casual reader will get the wrong impression of the term “sub optimal move” as if people are sacking pieces just to move off of well-traveled paths. The moves being discussed here are often imperceptibly sub optimal, just variations that came out a few decimal points inferior to another move. There’s very seldom a single, obvious move that makes sense. The level of chaos in chess is still sufficiently high to make it an interesting game, even when you study all the available opening theory.
thomasahle 4y ago
What doesn't follow is "the recent cheating scandal only shows the darker side of what chess slowly has become." Who says it's bad that you now have to "engage in subterfuge, misdirection, and other psychological techniques"? Surely that just makes the game into a real sport and more exciting for viewers. Besides - hasn't the psychological aspect always been a part of chess? Maybe the most interesting aspect?
- lupire 4y ago
  Cheating is the dark side, not the rest. (Of course, there is no evidence of cheating, but arguably Carlsen's unsporting conduct is also the dark side. But anyway, none of this is new to high level chess.)
awb 4y ago
In semi-related chess news Magnus resigned on the 2nd move today, seemingly in protest over accusations against his opponent of using computer-assistance to cheat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32901249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32901249
jackmott 4y ago
EGreg 4y ago
Well, most chess games end in a draw. This reminds me of something I think I came up with in Blitz and Bullet games a decade ago and coined the name: a “time sac”. It is when in the middlegame I make a dubious sacrifice (positional or material) — some possibly cool combination or a move that makes the opponent think in time pressure. It is not a bluff because it MIGHT work out, but I am not sure. This works mostly in games without an increment. The idea is to make them get much lower on the clock than me, so even if I end up with a slightly worse position or down material, I can easily hold it until I win on time. My opponents in chess, even over 2100 often got nerd swiped with this! Hahahaha
joe-collins 4y ago
This idea of playing less than "perfect", so as to steer your opponent into plays that give you greater advantage than is available in the perfect mirror-match, is a well-worn familiar concept to game designers, and yes, poker players. If that's something new that bothers chess aficionados, I don't feel like it reflects particularly well on that game's culture. https://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=2346 https://gamedesignadvance.com/?p=2346 https://www.sirlin.net/articles/solvability https://www.sirlin.net/articles/solvability
- davisoneee 4y ago
  I think it's perfectly fine for different games to have different cultures...for people of game A to want more calculation, and game B more towards psychology. Suggesting it doesn't reflect well on chess' culture suggests that wanting psychology is _more_ right. It's not. It's just _different_. Now whether chess really IS more about calculation these days is a difficult question to answer. It might just be that it values a different kind of calculation or skill than the past. Given the deep preparation necessary for someone to be a chess professional, I'm biased towards (micro-edit: believing that...) more calculation _is_ necessary for high level performance, and psychology is more gimmicky. The difference is that poker isn't a game of complete information, chess is. This means that, technically, there is a _right_ answer in chess. With the ambiguity of poker, and other games, that leaves room for psychology to be more natural.
AmericanChopper 4y ago
The sub-optimal moves he’s talking about here isn’t really a form of subterfuge. He plays sub-optimal lines because it’s less likely that his opponents have studied them. If he has studied them in his preparation, then he can potentially gain an advantage that overcomes the disadvantage he put himself in. Magnus also plays sub-optimal lines for the sole purpose of complicating the position, because he (usually rightly) trusts his ability to calculate complex, out-of-book positions over his opponent’s. I don’t think those comments from Magnus support the point in this article at all really.
quickthrower2 4y ago
If anything this makes the game way more interesting, surely? Rather than "just poker now", what about "Chess was just a simple game, now it is very interesting with aspects of poker". The best games have bluffing, IMO.

cloutchaser 4y ago

I just can't understand how this makes sense, it seems like its the wrong way round. How can over analysis mean things are less optimal? This is true of every sport, every single record always gets broken, because techniques and nutrition and training and everything improve. A world no 100 tennis player could easily beat a world no 1 from 50 years ago. How is that bad or like poker? It just means the game is evolving. It might also mean more psychological games. The tennis analogy works here too, there's plenty of that in there too. The whole premise just doesn't make sense to me. Because you have to psychologically think about your opponent, that makes the game worse?

sebzim4500 4y ago
I don't think he said that it made the game worse? Just that you are forced to make suboptimal moves. If you make optimal moves then your opponent will have analysed the position before and the game will end in a draw, which is a dissapointing result for whoever plays white.
- awb 4y ago
  > which is a dissapointing result for whoever plays white. Not necessarily. If black has a higher ELO rating then white is happy to draw and may aggressively seek a draw. I think the problem is that seeking draws makes chess boring. And that it’s realistic for someone ranked well below another player to force a draw, while it’s near impossible for the lower ranked player to win outright. So you end up with a wide range of players seeking stalemates and a small minority looking for a win, but not at the expense of a potential loss.
mattnewton 4y ago
It’s because there is a limited number of board states + transpositions a person can reasonably memorize, and memorizing a board state + sequence of moves from a chess engine will beat human intuition. So the idea is to steer the gamestate into places your opponent did not prepare for but you did, with non-obvious moves. All near-optimal moves are obvious.
davisoneee 4y ago
The game _is_ more optimal now, with chess grandmasters now having deep opening preparation and understanding of positions. However, that results in a lot of draws. To win tournaments, world championships, and break ELO records (which are Magnus', and other GM's, goals), you need to win. If 'perfect' play--that we're approaching with engine analysis--results in a draw, you need to do something non-optimal and unexpected in order to get your opponent out of their engine prep and into thinking mode. Whether it's better or worse is a different argument. Some find it a bit 'dry' in that there are often less blunders, dazzling tactics, and sacrifices because both sides now know the optimal approach. It's much more of a war of attrition in high-level, long time-control games. As an aside, that's potentially why bullet and other such chess is so popular...there isn't time to deeply analyse, so it's intuition, challenging positions, blunders, and less 'standard' play.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > To win tournaments, world championships, and break ELO records (which are Magnus', and other GM's, goals), you need to win. Not quite true; you can break ELO records by performing equally well in a larger pool of people-with-ELO-ratings.
kdmccormick 4y ago
I am not a chess player, so I don't know how this holds up, but the idea of "making bad moves because the good moves are overanalyzed" reminds me of the Eephus Pitch [0]: > An eephus pitch in baseball is a very high-arcing off-speed pitch. The delivery from the pitcher has very low velocity and often catches the hitter off-guard. The pitcher essentially lobs the ball at the hitter [1]. Major league players are so focused on hitting extremely fast and/or curving pitches that they whiff or stand idle at a pitch that your ten-year-old nephew could probably clobber. It's a risky pitch, because if the batter is able to adapt, they can hit a home run. The power of the pitch is entirely that it's unexpected. I know it's not a perfect analogy, since chess players have so much more time to react to any sub-optimal moves. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eephus_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eephus_pitch [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikLlRT2j7EQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikLlRT2j7EQ
- throwawaytemp27 4y ago
  Much of the velocity on a home run comes from the pitch (equal and opposite reaction) rather than the bat speed. So it’s not that easy to hit a home run on a 50 mph pitch.
  - kdmccormick 4y ago
    Okay, true. But it should be pretty easy to make contact, at least.
  - llbeansandrice 4y ago
    This is so incredibly false. They're not throwing +80mph pitches at the MLB home run derby. Batting practice pitches are about 60mph.
    - baseballfan 4y ago
      You are very incorrect: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18222/how-does-the-speed-of-an-incoming-pitch-affect-the-speed-of-a-baseball-after-it https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18222/how-does-t... Incoming speed makes significant difference to exit velocity. If you were going for max distance, you would want 100 mph pitches. In home run derby, they are optimizing for ability to get a good repeatable swing with enough power to go over the fence. If they were playing in a park with like 440 ft fence, they would need faster pitches.
aesch 4y ago
It depends on the state-space over which you are optimizing. When they say sub-optimal, I think the state-space they are referring to includes only the pieces on the board. However, if you include your opponent's mind in the state-space, a move that appears sub-optimal may actually be optimal.
dec0dedab0de 4y ago
I just can't understand how this makes sense, it seems like its the wrong way round. How can over analysis mean things are less optimal? When your opponent is the one doing the analysis. It makes perfect sense to me that anything your opponent is prepared for is less optimal than it would be otherwise.
jlg23 4y ago
"Over analysis" here means by the opponent: If you chose the optimal move, thousands have done so before, so has your opponent. By doing something non-perfect, you enter territory where your opponent does not already have the tree of possible responses mapped out in their head. This is, at least for me (a chess player), where the actual thinking begins - all before is just memorization, with the opening moves committed directly to muscle memory.
SkyBelow 4y ago
To simplify a bit, you get two options. Move A. Move B. From the best knowledge we have from our best engines, A is the better move (though I don't think we have formally proven such yet). But if you play A, you are playing your opponent in a game of memorization. If you play B, your opponent loses any memorization advantage. Thus they must play based on ability other than memorizing responses. For a player whose memorization ability is equal or worse than their ability to play based on other ability, choosing move B is clearly the worse option. But if the player is one whose memorization is better than their other abilities at chess, then playing B means fighting them in an area they are worse at. The advantage of this can easily outweigh the disadvantage of move B compared to A in general. Imagine a military commander choosing an engagement over terrain more familiar to their side even though it is a worse engagement if both sides had equal knowledge of the terrain, because the terrain knowledge more than compensates for the negatives.

georgiecasey 4y ago

surely they're talking about the opening only, where the best moves have been analyzed to death. once you're in the middle game and it's a position that's new, you play the best moves.

davisoneee 4y ago
You get to new middlegame positions by playing the sub-optimal/weird moves in the opening that Magnus is suggesting. Otherwise, you get to a familiar middlegame and just grind out a draw.
- icelancer 4y ago
  I don't really understand Magnus' position about playing a sideline vs. Hans Niemann in the infamous cheating game, and was reportedly shocked Hans knew the responses. Before any of that became public and I was reviewing the game, I just thought it was a sideline transposition to a Catalan position, and everyone knows Magnus plays the Catalan as a main white opening - so a weird way of getting to that structure is not that novel. Hans' explanation made sense, even if he was wrong in his first interview and it came off weird.
awb 4y ago
The opening can be a sequence of 20-30 moves long, which includes what most amateurs consider the middle game. I think that’s what Magnus is saying is that if you play by the book you go from opening to end game without much creativity or challenge. So, the top “creative” players will try to go off script to make their top “book smart” opponents have to think on the fly.
msluyter 4y ago
I think that's mostly correct, and at beginner/intermediate levels of play can very much be true. Back when I used to play, I'd often run into people who specialized in weird gambits like the Grob or the Latvian, because even though those probably won't win many masters levels games, they're full of traps which can trip up lesser players. But even in mid-game, it might mean that if you know that your opponent prefers open / tactical positions, for example, you try to force a closed position, even if it may be slightly suboptimal.

treis 4y ago

>Magnus Carlsen has himself commented a sentiment similar to the article This goes at least back to Bobby Fischer. With the minor difference that instead of computers he was up against teams of Soviet Grandmasters. It's why he created Fischer Random chess where the pieces on the backrow are randomized. That (mostly) eliminates memorization and forces players to rely on their own creativity.

lbalazscs 4y ago
Fischer announced Fischer Random Chess in 1996, long after his retirement from competitive chess (1972). His reason for doing so in 1996 was very prosaic: he was simply no longer familiar with modern opening theory.
- icelancer 4y ago
  Yeah, it's been retconned somehow that Fischer was this non-booked up player and didn't like opening theory. Instead, it's his convenient excuse for not wanting to study anymore. There was probably not a more booked-up player than Fischer in his prime, something he seemed to try to make people forget. Famously when asked about a young Soviet prodigy by the Soviets, Fischer responded that the kid was good, but that there was a better player in their women's division who had more signs of promise. Many of the Soviet masters had no idea who Bobby was talking about; but Bobby was reading all Soviet chess literature and magazines to stay up to date. That said, FRC is pretty interesting.
  - lupire 4y ago
    He didn't try to make people forget it, he just didn't keep it up.
- lupire 4y ago
  > he was simply no longer familiar with modern opening theory. That's what parent said. Fischer wanted to get the memorization out, since memorization makes the game unplayable for someone who doesn't have The Knowledge.
4y ago

rybosworld 4y ago

The analogy to poker seems like a stretch. Poker relies on bluffing so heavily only because the cards of your opponent are unknown. The board state is always known. Magnus is saying that at the top level, grandmasters know how to force draws in all of the lines that incorporate best-move, second-best-move, etc. That means that if you want to pull off a win, you have to incorporate unstudied lines that will force your opponent to calculate rather than draw from memory/experience.

shabbatt 4y ago
Yes but likewise, the motives and their future intent is unknown by a sub optimal move. So in a sense, it is similar to bluffing when you don't know the actions of the other person, deception is required to make yourself unpredictable. This is why playing against a maniac (seemingly random and not respecting bluffs or equity) is very difficult because if they get lucky enough times, they are able to "break the game" by getting the opponent to be extremely risk averse OR take on more risks. I believe this is what Magnus is referring to, its that making yourself unpredictable by questionable moves and no longer playing in a way that has been taught. For example the common strategy is to go all in with strong pairs like AA, KK but someone beats it with a totally random garbage hand (52o, 37o) and does so repeatedly, no theory can help you win against somebody who is just repeatedly lucky and brash.
- fisf 4y ago
  No, this is not really what this is about. But the article is terrible in conveying this -- actually I find the comparison with poker to be very inept. This is less about playing mindtricks and bluffing, but more 'mundane'. I.e. a decent player will know all the good mainlines of popular openings, and end up in 'comfortable' positions (among other things due to computer analysis). The metagame is to prepare a non-garbage sideline, that your opponent is not so familiar with. Nobody at a high rating plays 'questionable' variations on purpose, in order to bluff. The resulting positions would be much too punishing.
  - hatha 4y ago

myownpetard 4y ago

This reminds me of my favorite chess quote, "You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.” - Tal. He was notorious for doing just this. He would make what have now been engine analyzed as sub-optimal moves but which lead to such complex and dynamic positions that his opponent would eventually slip and he would exploit their error in dramatic fashion. This is one reason why he is considered one of the most creative attacking players ever.

cowmoo728 4y ago
It's also widely known that if a modern super GM were to play against Tal, they would outright refute the vast majority of his play. It's hard to find a super GM that has not analyzed Tal games as part of their training, and therefore already know the answer, but many of them instantly notice Tal's blunders when presented with his games. So the Tal approach gets harder and harder every year - finding a line that is sub-optimal and therefore not analyzed to death, but also solid enough to maintain winning chances against top players.
icelancer 4y ago
Tal's games haven't aged very well unfortunately. In today's era, someone playing like Tal would get crushed at the highest levels pretty regularly due to much better knowledge of the game. You still see the general creative spirit in certain top players like Rapport, Mamedyarov, Firouzja, though. Magnus is particularly boring to watch, but it's what makes him great. Fischer was not so different, and felt that Tal was overly creative for the sake of being creative, rather than good. IM Marc Esserman is probably one of the more exciting players to watch, but he's not a GM, though he arguably plays at GM strength often. He's the author of Mayhem in the Morra, well worth reading if you like Tal's spirit. Esserman is inactive OTB unfortunately, but he does stream chess online.
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  Well sure, they lit up the forest and put in roads and signs and invented GPS. That obsoleted his plan, but it was a great plan at the time.

8note 4y ago

Notably the first time kasparov lost to a computer was basically a bluff. The bot hit a bug that chose a strange move, and since kasparov couldn't figure out what the line was, he resigned. If he analysed the board instead of what the bot was thinking, he would have won easily

vikingerik 4y ago
Mythbusting here: There were three separate incidents in Kasparov - Deep Blue 1997, that often get conflated. The bug move (a rook) was in game 1. It was inconsequential to the game result. The position was already lost for Deep Blue. It made a random move because everything had the same outcome of losing. The bugged move simply made it lose sooner. Kasparov knew this and there was no controversy. In game 2, Kasparov set a trap, offering a sacrifice of two pawns for great positional improvement. Kasparov thought Deep Blue couldn't calculate far enough ahead to see the positional improvement, but it did. This made Kasparov suspect and accuse IBM of human intervention in the computer's moves. The fatal move (a knight sacrifice by Deep Blue) was in game 6. Kasparov deliberately played an opening with a known weakness, that he thought the computer wouldn't find as it wouldn't sacrifice material and calculate far enough ahead to see the positional advantage. Deep Blue found it. Kasparov again accused IBM of human intervention. The Deep Blue team then said they had added this variation into its opening database just before that game, pre-analyzing that line deeper since Kasparov had previously played it in game 4. There was some dispute as to whether the rules for the competition were intended to allow IBM to modify Deep Blue during the match.

failrate 4y ago