Official LRC FIDE World Chess Championship 2018 Thread

Finger fehler wrote:

Also he likes cricket which makes rather odd.

If you like watching chess for hours and days on end, then you'll love test cricket

I think that chess has some very good commentators -- Peter Svidler, Yasser Seirawan, Alexander Grischuk, and a number of others. A few are a bit too dry for me, but I don't think that I've seen much really bad live commentary -- very different from the early days of televised chess commentary in the U.S..

I'd like to see the team of Peter Svidler and Jan Gustafsson get back together. They're especially entertaining during really dull games.

mately wrote:

So where's the best place to watch? The official site has Judith Polgar again, with some blonde aiding, and an old English guy with shoulder-length hair doing interviews.

Chess-24 had Grischuk who was great! Also Peter Svidler and Sopiko (Giri's wife).

STL (St. Louis) had Kasparov visiting Game 1, and he had lots to say about how you have win games, not just make nice computer scores like Magnus Carlsen did.

Is there any better? I mostly speak English for chess.

Yesterday Daniel Rensch and Robert Hess were commenting with Hou Yifan as guest (Skyping from Oxford). I don't remember if it was on youtube or twitch but I think it was for chess.com.

If you're talking about Anna Rudolf as "some blonde" there was a long reddit thread trashing Rex Sinquefield's comments, please don't mimic him.

Avocado's Number wrote:

I'd like to see the team of Peter Svidler and Jan Gustafsson get back together. They're especially entertaining during really dull games.

Fortunately the World Championship Match has reverted from its initial interest into the usual boredom mode. 8 games still to go until the playoffs.

Grischuk: A couple more games like that and he will just revert to Karjakin's strategy of playing for a draw with both colours.

Sopiko: Won't he be afraid of tiebreaks?

Grischuk: Ok, usually people prefer a slow death to a quick one!

Svidler: I don’t know if that’s true.

Grischuk: It’s true, it’s true. Watch all those movies, like “please don’t kill me!” Ok, the guy knows he screwed up with the mafia or something, he gave away his secrets, he knows they will kill him, and still when he gets caught by them he starts to pray, “please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me”.

Game 3, Carlsen touches the horsey, then plods the farmer forward.

French referree says it's not a problem because he's not on Twitter...

Where's the justice in here?

sdfadfasfsdaf wrote:

mately wrote:

So where's the best place to watch? The official site has Judith Polgar again, with some blonde aiding, and an old English guy with shoulder-length hair doing interviews.

Chess-24 had Grischuk who was great! Also Peter Svidler and Sopiko (Giri's wife).

STL (St. Louis) had Kasparov visiting Game 1, and he had lots to say about how you have win games, not just make nice computer scores like Magnus Carlsen did.

Is there any better? I mostly speak English for chess.

Yesterday Daniel Rensch and Robert Hess were commenting with Hou Yifan as guest (Skyping from Oxford). I don't remember if it was on youtube or twitch but I think it was for chess.com.

If you're talking about Anna Rudolf as "some blonde" there was a long reddit thread trashing Rex Sinquefield's comments, please don't mimic him.

Here's a clip of Sinquefield's comments about Rudolf. He seemed genuinely disdainful of her; I'm not sure why.

On chess.com, Rensch and Hess are serviceable, I think, but when a game appears headed for a long and unexciting draw, I start looking elsewhere for entertainment value. (Hou Yifan's future obviously isn't in chess commentary, and probably not even in chess, but it's good to hear from her once in a while.)

I hardly recognized Sasha today; he looked so presentable. Usually, he looks as if he just returned from a three-day bender.

I don't understand why FIDE didn't just stick Rudolph on the Women's World Championship that's currently simultaneously going on (in Siberia). The most complimentary thing about her that I've heard is she is "bubbly", which is not particularly what anyone paying the exorbitant cost to get "official" FIDE broadcasts is seemingly apt to prefer.

At least Makro's (principal?) paramour is no longer involved.

Chess will never make it as a live spectator sport.

Bad Wigins wrote:

Finger fehler wrote:

Also he likes cricket which makes rather odd.

If you like watching chess for hours and days on end, then you'll love test cricket

Perhaps Peter should do the cricket commentary too, make it more interesting.

Fabiano Caruana -- the American helping make chess cool

"I have taken a liking to yoga recently, I've been practicing quite a lot. It's important to try to counteract the negative, physical effects of chess -- sitting down for so long under a lot of strain and mental stress,"

....."I understood that chess can be physically demanding, although it doesn't seem like it. When you're under a lot of stress and your heart is racing and you're just sitting down and there's no outlet for it you really need to be in good shape to make sure it doesn't get to your head.

"If you're crashing at the board you won't be able to play so I think pretty much all the top players these days are very aware of the necessity to be in good shape. I've tried to improve my cardio, I've done a lot of running and interval training to try to improve my cardiovascular system. I've had trainers in the past, but because I travel so much it's kind of hard to have someone there to monitor what I'm doing so I also have to take it upon myself to make sure I know how to exercise and know what I need to do."

...."At the board, I turn everything off and focus on that. I think that's years of training, through playing and trying to not let mind wander," he replies with a smile. "As a kid, I found myself staring at the ceiling during a game and wouldn't be thinking about chess at all, but through so many years of playing chess at a high level I've learnt to focus. I haven't really had to consciously try to do it, it's sort of just happened."

....Home-schooled in Spain, Caruana would practice for 10 hours a day on non-school days, but he does not regard it as a childhood lost.

...His parents reportedly estimate they spent as much as $50,000 a year paying for coaches and training before their son started making money in his late teens.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/14/sport/fabiano-caruana-magnus-carlsen-chess-world-championships-london-spt-intl/index.html

Think this was on move 18 or so (when FC took half an hour, in an already snoozy position)

Sopiko: But hetakes a lot of time. What is the thinking process?

Grischuk: For me it's very easy to understand such a thought process: "I don't like Bc3 - Kc7 I don't like - .sh*t, why have I got this position? And some thoughts completely unrelated to chess. That's my career.

Bad match strategy by Caruana. If you were going off-the-wall with obscure 6. b4 in non-exchange Rossolimo, don't wait the couple of games before doing it? Carlsen's "no comment" regarding his Qa5 (move 13) implicitly says thus had this ferreted in depths of great brain somewhere from his preparation, maybe after reviewization of Rossolimo sidelines since first 2 Sicilian games. After that move, it's just a draw already then.

Actually, they followed a line played by the arbiter in the 1969 Soviet women's championship. Carlsen himself played against b4 back in 2005. It's well known, no idea why Fabi did this. Waste of white again. He hoped Magnus would "cooperate" into fun lines, but (obviously) no dice in the World Championship.

https://www.365chess.com/view_game.php?g=2623954

Sasha FTW again wrote:

Grischuk: Actually for me it’s very easy to understand such a thought process. Basically it’s very easy to explain, it’s just, basically, “Hmm, I don’t like Bc3. Kc7 I don’t like. Shiit, why have I got this position? Ok, Nc3 Nb4 Rd1, ok, maybe interesting. Ah no, Kc7, aha, shiit, why have I got into this position?” And so on, with circles going around. Then ok, there are maybe some thoughts of something just completely unrelated to chess come into your mind at some point, and so on. This is basically how my whole career in chess is going!.

Peter Svidler: I fully endorse what Alexander said there. That would be my first guess as well. I wanted to hear you say it, because everything is funnier when you say it, but yeah, it’s basically a combination of 3-move lines which you don’t like with this overriding emotion of, “Why am I playing this position?”