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Sinquefield Cup: One of the most amazing feats in chess history
- pachydermic 12y agoKingscrusher is a user on YouTube who has a ton of great chess videos. He covered the Sinquefield quite a lot - here's the first encounter between Carlsen and Caruana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfgRWM6IfP0&list=UUDUDDmslypVXYoUsZafHSUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfgRWM6IfP0&list=UUDUDDmslyp... And all of his videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/kingscrusher/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/kingscrusher/videos I know they're pretty long (often 45 mins or more), but if you're a big chess fan they're pretty awesome. The level that these super GMs play at is astounding.
- acak 12y agoJust want to mention another great publisher of Chess analysis on Youtube - Daniel King. https://www.youtube.com/user/PowerPlayChess/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/PowerPlayChess/videos
- linuxfan 12y agoDaniel King's daily reports on several elite tournaments over the past few years are excellent. For anyone interested in chess, I highly recommending watching his archived videos on youtube.
- legohead 12y agoand yet another, Jerry from ChessNetwork https://www.youtube.com/user/ChessNetwork https://www.youtube.com/user/ChessNetwork I stumbled across one of his videos, not being much of a chess person, and have watched probably a hundred since and love chess now. he's a US Master.
- alexjeffrey 12y agoit should also be mentioned that Jerry's commentary is _hilarious_ - he's basically the SeaNanners of chess.
- conistonwater 12y agoAnother user on YouTube who does excellent educational chess videos, including reviews of the games from this year's Sinquefield Cup, is Chessexplained, at https://www.youtube.com/user/Chessexplained/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/Chessexplained/videos
- nih 12y agoThere's also Andrew Martin, well worth watching. https://www.youtube.com/user/YMChessMaster/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/YMChessMaster/videos
- j-b 12y agoGreg Shahade is really entertaining as well. https://www.youtube.com/user/GregShahadechess https://www.youtube.com/user/GregShahadechess
- rafaelfers 12y agoThis tournament was amazing! I was lucky because I decided to analyse the tournament through twitter, so every day I was capturing tweets from #sinqcup hastag and sending to elasticsearch + kibana and monitoring the tweets in real time. If anyone is interested I can provide the tweets in json raw for sentiment analyse.
- aardshark 12y agoBut while poker is, at heart, a simple game, easy enough to grok that you can strategize along with Phil Ivey when he plays on TV, a grandmaster-level chess match is totally bewildering. --- Just as my brain is hopelessly puny next to Magnus Carlsen’s, so is Carlsen’s compared to that of a modern chess-playing machine. I don't like these rhetorical techniques that debase one thing to show how great another thing is. There's a certain dishonesty in them, as if the author were qualified to make these observations.
- grifpete 12y agoMaybe. But he's right.
- blacksmith_tb 12y agoFor certain values of 'right'. The machine doesn't have a brain, making the metaphor strained at best.
- gamegoblin 12y agoHardly. First, it's not really a metaphor, more of an analogy; it could be reworded as: My brain is to Carlsen's as Carlsen's is to the best computer's. It's pretty obvious he isn't talking about his brain qua a biological organ. He's referring specifically to chess skills. In that regard, the best computer chess engine in the world absolutely dominates the best humans. Even with a pawn or two removed as handicap, the best humans struggle to get draws. There was a recent match played between the world #5 human (Nakamura) and the world #1 computer (Stockfish). Even when Stockfish played black, used a handicap of removing the b-pawn before beginning, and didn't use any opening books, Nakamura was still beaten. The age of Human vs. Computer competition ended pretty conclusively in the mid 2000s, and the gulf has just widened.
- Dylan16807 12y agoHe is? Shouldn't a machine be even better at overwhelming puny humans on an 'easy' game? The basic rules of poker and chess are pretty simple. The deeper strategy is nonobvious in both of them, too.
- thret 12y ago"Professional chess requires a level of peak mental alertness that most of us achieve only in the throes of searing tooth pain." Whether this is true or not I cannot say, but it is a great line.
- gk1 12y agoI've played competitive chess for a short while, and the level of concentration involved leaves you absolutely exhausted at the end. Imagine computing hundreds of scenarios, each of them up to a dozen levels deep, for four hours straight. In other words, you have to get in the flow state and stay there for a very long time.
- delecti 12y agoI say this as someone with fairly little experience with chess, and even less exposure to competitive chess. This article did a poor job at quickly explaining enough of what feat was amazing and why to keep me interested. After skimming the rest of the article (past where it lost my attention), it seems to jump randomly through both the biographies of the players in the tournament and of historical players who weren't even present at the tournament. Was this amazing because of the high overall ranking of the players? Because that would strike me as profoundly un-amazing. Pitting the world's best in a sport against each other is fairly common, is that not the case in chess?
- billforsternz 12y agoThe article was a nice piece of long form writing. If you haven't got the patience to persist with it you miss out on the payoff. Sorry, no soup for you.
- delecti 12y agoA nice piece of writing might have an intriguing headline (this did), it then follows up with an opening that gives a brief hint of why the headline was justified (this totally failed), then you get background into the situation that led to the intriguing part (nope), then it ties it all together into a satisfying resolution (nope nope). The title sure was nice though.
- billforsternz 12y agoAs an amateur chess journalist myself I was really excited to see chess coverage from a mainstream journalist that respected the subject matter and wasn't filled with excrutiating misconceptions and downright mistakes. So that colours my thinking. But I also think the piece was just an example of good magazine style writing. The individual parts of the story were introduced in detail and the whole thing came together in the end. Unlike you I thought the click-baity headline was the worst thing about the article. I excused the author on the basis that he probably had no input on the title Slate chose to run his piece with. My apologies for the unnecessarily snarky tone in my original reply.
- anigbrowl 12y agoJeepers, talk about burying the lede until the last goddam paragraph. tl;dr '[Fabiano] Caruana did show up, drawing his final two games to win the tournament (and its $100,000 top prize) with a record of 7-0-3, getting 8.5 points out of a possible 10. His victory at the Sinquefield Cup earned Caruana the highest tournament performance rating of all time, crushing even Karpov’s legendary result at Linares. Earth’s finest chess players couldn’t manage to pin Caruana with a single loss.'
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- blahedo 12y agoWell, the writing isn't news, it's magazine. Different communicative goal.
- coldpie 12y agoIt was a good article and I'm glad I read it. The sub-headline (whatever that's called) does say, "One of the most amazing feats in chess history just happened, and no one noticed," clearly trying to get the reader to feel ashamed for not caring about Chess. Curious to hear what this news was, I kept reading and reading and reading... and reading and reading... and there it is. A guy other than Carlsen won an important tournament. Okay. Just a bothersome sensational headline that really isn't needed on such a good article.
- MaysonL 12y agoFabiano's performance rating was 3098. Karpov's Linares was 2985. Carlsen's top rating (not single tournament performance) was 2882, the highest yet recorded. Fabiano's performance rating was more than 200 Elo points higher than the top-rated player. Karpov's 1997 performance was less than 200 points better than the then top-rated.
- slm_HN 12y agoOne thing the raw numbers don't take into account is ratings inflation. Look at Karpov for example. In 1979 he was the only player in the world rated above 2700. Now there are almost 50 players rated above 2700. So it's much easier to have a high performance rating now. For most of chess history it was simply impossible to have a performance rating of 3098. The article doesn't take into account ratings inflation because it's more interesting to present your article about the best performance in the strongest tournament ever rather than a very, very good performance in a very strong event.
- arh68 12y agoWow. I met Fabiano in an elevator once. I watched a couple of his games, too. Unfortunately he was so far above my level I struggled to comprehend what made his game work. At a certain point it just looks devoid of even the slightest mistakes. That was a long time ago. That Carlsen-Caruana game, Round 3.1, is very interesting. After 15 Bxf7+, for sure! Most players don't handle kingside pressure so well.
- nl 12y agoIt would be interesting if Caruana keeps improving. The one thing Carlsen is missing is an opponent who is close to his level. Kasparov's reputation was made by his battles with Karpov.
- jc123 12y agoAgree and I think if Caruana has the passion to be the best, he will be better than Carlsen. "Caruana is earning a reputation as the most prepared player of his era—a man who studies everything and forgets nothing." "If there’s a rap on Carlsen, it’s that he’s the anti-Caruana: He doesn’t prepare as diligently as he could." "It’s as though he [Carlsen] serves underhand to just get the point started because he knows he can beat you in the rally. But Caruana has the booming serve." Caruana has been in the top 10 for 2.5 years though [1], and hopefully he can breakthrough and firmly be someone who can give Carlsen a challenge. As a data point [2], it took Kasparov 2 years to get in the top 10, another 2 years to become #2, and another 2 years to become the best. [1] http://ratings.fide.com/top_files.phtml?id=2020009 http://ratings.fide.com/top_files.phtml?id=2020009 [2] http://www.olimpbase.org/Elo/player/Kasparov,%20Garry.html http://www.olimpbase.org/Elo/player/Kasparov,%20Garry.html
- nl 12y agoCarlsen hasn't had to prepare. It might be that a real challenger is what we (and he) need to find out just good he can be.
- tomwilde 12y ago> Though [Hikaru Nakamura] is ranked seventh in the world, he seems to consider himself Magnus Carlsen’s chief rival, as evidenced by this November 2013 tweet in which he equates Carlsen with a mythological necromancer. >> Starting to realize that I am the only person who is going to be able to stop Sauron in the context of chess history. - @GMHikaru Mythological necromancer my ass.
- Tloewald 12y agoAside from not being mythological or a necromancer, what problem do you have with this description?
- ceallen 12y agoDescribing Sauron as a 'necromancer' is akin to calling Gandalf a 'fireworks manufacturer'. It's a small part of their skillsets, and not what they've built their personal brand around.
- duaneb 12y agoSauron is exclusively referred to in The Hobbit as a "necromancer"; I see nothing wrong with this.
- Tloewald 12y agoI think the original point was that he is not "mythical" but fictional. As for the necromancer part -- I've gone on waaaaay too long about that already.
- Tloewald 12y agoI don't think there's really any evidence Sauron was a necromancer at all, so if you're going to explain these things to me, start with that. Sauron's army did not contain any undead. The nazgul are called "ringwraiths" but they don't seem to be any more undead than gollum or bilbo. Tolkien wrote lord of the rings before the modern (silly) understanding of the word necromancer had been established, and sauron does't match that description let alone the more anthropologically accurate version (what today would be called a medium). Did sauron EVER commune with the dead? Now Sauron was known as "the Necromancer", but that's a name, not a description. A serial killer known as "The Butcher" would not be a butcher (necessarily). All we really know about Sauron is he was really good at making jewelry which had weird effects on people, that half his power was invested in "the ring" (which was also a ring), but his powers never really get displayed. He can make bad weather and mutate elves into orcs or something. But his awesome bad weather power was nullified by Gandalf, so that's not terribly impressive. And Saruman was better at making orcs than Sauron, so again not so impressive.