World Chess Champs start tomorrow

Very exciting Nimzo-Indian, with the thematic e4-e5 attack for white against black's queenside counterplay. Anand's final move must be among the worst blunders in world championship history.

Did you people really post 222 times on this thread about the world chess championships....

might be JK wrote:

O/T Has anyone been listening to the commentating by the young Indian woman and the (British?) guy? They are flirting nonstop. I thought it was funny at first but then it just became a bit annoying.

not got much to offer on the chess stuff but i just want to say that an indian-british accent (on a girl!) sounds very sexy

might be JK wrote:

Has anyone been listening to the commentating by the young Indian woman and the (British?) guy? They are flirting nonstop. I thought it was funny at first but then it just became a bit annoying.

providing a link

Avocado's Number wrote:

Very exciting Nimzo-Indian, with the thematic e4-e5 attack for white against black's queenside counterplay. Anand's final move must be among the worst blunders in world championship history.

Would have been very interesting to see how this line would have played out:

28. Bf1 Qd1 29. Rh4 Qh5 30. Nxh5 gxh5 31. Rxh5 Bf5 32. Bh3 Bg6 33.e6

A new world champion. Carlsen finishes up the match very well, choosing a line in the knight-and-pawn ending that avoided an easy draw and required very accurate calculation, and not conceding the draw until everything came off the board.

The final score of 6.5-3.5, by the way, seemed to have been very close to what would have been predicted by the players' ratings. Carlsen's rating went up just two points, and Anand's went down two.

I'm a little young to remember Fischer/Spassky. Was Fischer truly as dominating a force as people who talk about him say? The commentators for the championship referenced Fischer many times. It seems like perhaps he's the Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan of chess. Was he truly the best ever?

As Carlsen has said, Fischer was the most dominant player ever. In the early '70s, long before ratings inflation, Fischer had a ELO rating of 2785 when Spassky, the world champion and second highest rated player, had an ELO rating of 2645, and Petrosian, the third highest rated player and former world champion, had a rating of 2625. I don't think that anyone else has ever come close to that ratings gap over the rest of the world. From late 1970, in the Palma interzonal tournament to select the candidates for the world championship match against Spassky, through late 1971, in the final candidates match against Petrosian, Fischer won twenty straight games against world-class competition, including his last seven games in the interzonal, six straight games against Taimanov, six straight games against Larsen, and the first match game against Petrosian. (A 20-game win streak against world class competition is, as far I know, unequaled, and there are few instances of anything close to that.) Then, after a loss and three draws, Fischer reeled off another four straight wins to finish off Petrosian, who was generally considered the toughest player in the world to beat.

Finally, in the world championship match against Spassky, after losing the first game and forfeiting the second because of his dispute with match organizers, he won seven games to Spassky's one, with a final result of 12.5-8.5 (including the one-point forfeit, which did not count for ratings purposes, and a bunch of draws after the match was effectively decided).

That said, there's a big debate about the "best" player ever. Although Fischer was the most dominant, his serious playing career came to an end before he was thirty. Kasparov, in contrast, was the best player in the world (by most accounts) for a much longer time. (I don't recall how long; I'm doing this from memory, and there was a long period when I simply didn't follow international chess, which was in a fairly chaotic state for a while, at least at the world championship level.)

The debate over the "best" ever is generally between Fischer and Kasparov supporters. (Ventolin seems to favor Karpov, but that's a rather small minority position.) Some old-timers would cast their vote for Jose Capablanca, who was almost unbeatable from about 1914 to 1927, and some would go all the way back to Paul Morphy during the 1860s. Of course, some now will say Carlsen, although he's clearly not as dominant (yet) as Fischer, and hasn't (yet) had Kasparov's career.

For what it's worth, when Carlsen has been asked about the best ever, he has said that Fischer was the most dominant, but Kasparov the greatest in light of his much longer career.

oldboy wrote:

I'm a little young to remember Fischer/Spassky. Was Fischer truly as dominating a force as people who talk about him say? The commentators for the championship referenced Fischer many times. It seems like perhaps he's the Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan of chess. Was he truly the best ever?

The wikipedia article on Fischer -

- gives a good summary of just how dominant he was from 1970-1972.

Babe Ruth is probably a good analogy. In his prime during his own era Babe Ruth was utterly dominant save when he got in his own way. The same can be said of Fischer.

I think a strong argument can be made that Babe Ruth would have been a very good baseball player in any era, and again, I think a strong argument can be made that Fischer would have been a very good chess player in any era.

The frustrating difference is that while Ruth did get in his own way from time to time, he had a fairly long and mostly successful career, whereas Fischer started behaving erratically upon reaching the highest levels of chess in the early 1960s and left the game for good before turning 30.

All of this gives rise to Fischer what ifs. For example, "What if Garry Kasparov had been born in 1953 instead of 1963?" If Kasparov had been the rising Soviet star of the early-mid 1970s, Fischer might have found it harder to walk away. But by the time Kasparov actually matured as a player in the mid 1980s, Fischer would have been past his prime even absent his psychiatric issues.

Avocado's Number and dkny64,

Thank you. Great stuff all around. I know others have said it here already, but you two (and the others who have participated on this thread, sorry for not mentioning every name) made the following of the match much more enjoyable for me, even though I'm not a great player in any sense.

The other night commentators were talking about the possibility of the world championship and professional chess eventually moving to chess 960 because opening theory is so well known and has become pretty generic at the highest level. What are your guys thoughts on this?

oldboy wrote:

Avocado's Number and dkny64,

Thank you. Great stuff all around. I know others have said it here already, but you two (and the others who have participated on this thread, sorry for not mentioning every name) made the following of the match much more enjoyable for me, even though I'm not a great player in any sense.

The other night commentators were talking about the possibility of the world championship and professional chess eventually moving to chess 960 because opening theory is so well known and has become pretty generic at the highest level. What are your guys thoughts on this?

Thanks to Avocado's Number and dkny64, too. One of the best things about the lets run site is being able to veer off the path and have some intelligent dialogue about other topics.

Here's an NPR link re Carlsen:

Today Anand clinched a rematch with Carlsen later this year by winning the Candidates tournament with one round remaining. I consider this something of an upset as it seemed that Anand was really on the downside of his career. Betting favorite would have been Lev Aronian but he had a disappointing tournament. Behind Anad the other seven candidates were closely bunched together.

I didn't think Anand would beat Kramnik let alone Aronian, so big congrats to Vishy. All the same, he'll probably get dominated come November.

Before this tournament, Anand had been playing very listlessly, with some pretty significant blunders, and I was wondering why he was even electing to participate in the Candidates Tournament. But he turned out to be the class of the field. He was rarely in any real danger of losing, scored some nice wins,secured a lot of solid draws, and avoided blunders. By contrast, the rest of the field played very unevenly. As Carlsen observed, a number of the other players seemed to exhibit a certain sense of desperation, taking unnecessary risks and lacking the tenacity to defend difficult positions. Aronian had some very weak games (including the first round game against Anand), Kramnik made some real blunders (check out his game as white against Svidler), Topolov seemed rusty. For the most part, the lower rated players exhibited more fighting spirit than the higher rated did.

I think it would be nice to see Anand finish off the tournament with a win against Svidler, just because he deserves a score that reflects his dominance in this tournament, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a pretty uneventful draw. I don't think that Anand has Carlsen's sense that every game should be played all-out.

Despite Anand's impressive victory, I can't say that I'm wild about another Anand-Carlsen match. A match between Carlsen and Carunua might be more interesting, and a match between Carlsen and Nakamura might be more entertaining (although Carlsen would likely slaughter Naka).

I'm not wild about an Anand/Carlsen rematch, although Vishy won it so that is what we will get. I was more entertained by the possibility of Carlsen meeting Aronian or Karjakan. I assume Naka or Caruana will have their day in the future but they have to qualify for the candidates first.

One important change was that Vishy went back to being primarily an e4 player like he was for most of his career. He really only switched to d4 for the Topolev match, best I can recall. Maybe that is behind his resurgence. His d4 always seemed somewhat listless.

but it seems silly that Svidler got the wildcard when Caruana is rated what, 4th highest in the world?

ginderbinder wrote:

but it seems silly that Svidler got the wildcard when Caruana is rated what, 4th highest in the world?

The Russians got to choose the wild card, so they chose their own guy, who (as I recall) had just won his seventh Russian Championship.

I like Svidler. He plays entertaining chess, scores some big wins (in last year's Candidates Tournament, he beat both Carlsen and Aronian, and in this year's tournament, he beat Kramnik), and he seems friendly and engaging with the press. Not a horrible choice, I suppose, although either Caruana or Nakamura might have been a more easily defensible choice.

I just saw that Karjakin defeated Aronian in the final game of the tournament. Karjakin played weakly in the first half of the tournament, almost as if he didn't feel that he really belonged there, but then played very well in the second half. If he had managed to beat Anand yesterday in the thirteenth round -- and he came very close to doing so -- he could have ended up as the tournament winner, since he would have been awarded first place on tiebreaks if he and Anand both finished with eight points. If Karjakin can continue to play and improve as he did this week, he may finally become a real force on the world chess scene, instead of simply being known as one of the various former prodigies who rocketed up to a certain level, and then just got stuck there.

The tournament turned out to be a real disaster for Aronian, who seemed to have distanced himself from all other potential challengers to Carlsen.

It's still hard to find anyone with the consistency and icy tenacity to match Carlsen. They all have moments when they just fold like tents. Carlsen occasionally gets outplayed, but never seems to just collapse.

I take it this is David K from UAHS. Haven\\\'t seen you in 35 years, but I hope you are doing well.

The \\\"no interruption\\\" rule was instituted after Season One, and it had nothing to do with me. It had to do with the fact that the viewers liked to see who was ringing in, and there\\\'s no way to show the question to the end and still see the players hitting their buzzers if you allow interruptions.

The thing with me was different. During my first four games, you could take your thumb and \\\"jiggle\\\" it on the buzzer (i.e., press it really fast over and over again), and you\\\'d generally be the first one to ring in. I liked to be aggressive and take my chances on knowing the answer, particularly because there are some categories where I\\\'m going to get all 5 right 90% of the time. In those days, they taped five shows on Tuesday and another five on Wednesday. On Tuesday, I played games 2-5 and used this strategy to win four times. When I came back to tape my final game on Wednesday (game one of that tape day), I discovered that overnight, they had put in a 1.5 second lockout on the buzzer system. That is, once you buzzed, your buzzer would go dead for 1.5 seconds. SO you couldn\\\'t start really early and just jiggle the buzzer any more. But you could still interrupt. Luckily, I adapted pretty easily and won that one, too.

Take care,

Mike

David K from UAHS indeed. Great to see the additional info [which I only happened to notice today]. How did you find yourself on this message board?