hckrnws

I was struck by Ding's thoughtfulness, objectivity and humility when asked how he felt after the match (while clearly utterly dejected):

> How do you feel?

> I think I played my best tournament of the year. I think it was a fair tournament in the end. I have no regrets.

> Any message for fans?

> Thank you, I will continue to play, I hope I can show strength like this time.

Gukesh was equally as objective, humble, and gentlemanly in victory.

These attributes are what makes chess and its superstars so appealing.

> These attributes are what makes chess and its superstars so appealing.

I would say that what you just described is usually called "sportsmanship" and is pretty common in most sports (with exceptions of course, but at least most would agree that it's an ideal worth aspiring to)

A lot of exceptions sadly. But with the amount of neuroticism you see with top athletes that's to be expected I suppose

I disagree. I think what you're saying are "a lot of exceptions" are primarily going to be in what are historically referred to as "revenue sports" in the US -- football & basketball -- and also in individual sports where personal marketing is key to financial success (e.g. sponsorships).

I don't see it as unexpected for there to be big egos and boisterous personalities in sports where individuals are hugely rewarded for personal success. From an athlete's point of view, creating a commercial persona is almost as important as performing at their best on the field/track/bike/pool/course/etc.

I agree, but some people, that are just 100% driven by success really become cunts that way, even in non-commercial sports.

Never seems to be the best of the best though, more those in 2-3rd place or really narrow 1st place, something about the uncertainty of staying on the top, or never quite reaching it...

Ah yes, Hikaru.

Even in the revenue sports it’s mostly great sportsmanship. Actually surprisingly good considering how much punishing physical contact they have between them.

Trust me, there are plenty of real jerks in chess as well - at the top as well as at your local chess club.

The biggest problem is, unlike most sports, there are lots of under 10s who can easily decimate you and haven't yet learned how difficult wining gracefully is.

In addition to playing chess, I go to the climbing gym – the 10-year-olds there destroy me as well! (But the culture of indoor climbing is vastly more positive than chess culture.)

Google Bobby Fischer. Chess has its share. Hard to tell if it's greater or lesser per capita.

Gukesh then added: “You can’t hook the rook, you can’t fight the knight, black or white, I am the GREATEST OF ALL TIME! Which one of you punks is NEXT?”

Not when Hans or Hikaru are playing.

Absolutely.

Nepo and Magnus seem to be cut from a different cloth, although Magnus has never had a moment where he could demonstrate whether or not he can be humble, because he has always just crushed.

Anish Giri kind of took a shot at Magnus (with respect to his retiring from classical chess) in his early commentary with Petr Leko a few days ago. People are funny, and one doesn't usually get to be where Ding and Gukesh are without having a bit of an edge to their personality. That's what makes Ding and Gukesh so special to me.

Magnus doesn't usually direct his frustration at others (except in the infamous Hans Niemann game) but he has been known to storm out of interviews after some of his bad losses.

He sometimes lets the chess speak for itself /s

Everyone looks humble compared to Hans, though.

He certainly has created a bit of buzz.

You are quite the Chess enthusiast; I enjoy reading your comments!

Thanks. My son and I first started watching together for Magnus-Fabi, so it's something we enjoy doing together. I enjoy the sporting aspect of it even though I've never been a particularly good chess player. I'm more interested in the human aspects of it, and I enjoy the commentaries by Leko, Bobby Chess (Robert Hess), Naroditsky, Giri, and Judit. I love learning from people who have achieved greatness.

It was evident to me from the beginning that Ding was struggling physically (he had an occasionally rough-sounding cough throughout) and, perhaps, emotionally. And Gukesh was locked in from go. What a struggle!

It’s a testament to their character

Magnus described Ding's abilities as a 4/10 in the lead up to the match. In match commentary he regularly called the games "baffling" (as in baffingly bad) and regularly said they weren't strong grandmaster calibre. He is definitely very conceited and resents not being the world champion, even if it's only because of his absence.

Magnus was just being honest man. You seem to succumb to a common thinking fallacy that people who express criticism or negative opinions about something or someone must be jealous, conceited or just negative people in general. Meanwhile he was just expressing what is obvious to any strong player: Ding's level of play was subpar coming to the match, a league below elite at least. His play during the match was way below his peak level as well. Ding made 3 amateur player level blunders (hanging a bishop, missing basic tactics and missing transposition to a basic lost pawn endgame) in this match. Carlsen himself made 0 of those during 5 matches. Among his opponents Anand made 0 blunders of this caliber, Karjakin made 0, Caruana made 0 and Nepo made 2 (or 3 if you count the last game in which he was already playing for nothing as the match was decided)

Gukesh underperformed massively in comparison to his recent level (at the Candidates and the Olympiad). I am guessing due to nerves. That made the match closer than it should be. At the end of the day much better player won but it was way closer than it would normally be.

Magnus blundered simple Nxe5 in better endgame in the 6th game of the second match with Anand. Anand missed it as well.

It wasn't even so much the blunders as the strategic decisions I think. Like, a blunder isn't in itself "baffling".

Unfortunately Magnus is 100% right. Some of the mistakes and choices that were made by Ding are at chess club level strength. Sad to say but this is the truth. The mistake on the final game is absolutely orrible, something never seen in a WCC before. Another example in game 5, Ding plays brillantly and gains a small initiative and gains a pawn then, instead of trying to press, he gives two pawns back with the intention of entering an opposite color bishop endgame. You are not supposed to play to drawn when you are better. And there are several other instances of this in the match. Gukesh deserved the win for the fighting spirit but honestly the games were not at WCC level. I believe that Gukesh will redeem himself as Karpov did after winning for forfait against Fischer but today it's a sad day for chess.

Magnus is literally ~50 ELO above Gukesh. Do you have any concept of how much that is at the very top?

EDIT: Just to preempt: This is not say that Gukesh doesn't have a very bright future or couldn't surpass Magnus' top rating. Gukesh could definitely do that... but currently neither Gukesh or Ding are even particularly close to Magnus' (current!) level.

Ironically, in the match that Gukesh won and that made him world champion, he lost rating points, inceasing his distance to Magnus.

Magnus is a stereotype of a prima donna. He’s always condescending and tried to destroy Hans Niemann’s career because Hans had the nerve to beat him once. I think he wants to be crowned World Champion without going through all the trouble of playing the games, and he’s annoyed that it’s not turning out like that.

Is it conceit if he's correct, though?

Ding's was not objective neither thoughful, Ding was completely melted down after the interview and the interview was a reflection of that. Chess is a drawn game and the gist of playing chess is to be more resilient, blunder less and exploit as many of the chances you got in your game. Matches and games are won exactly because the opponent doesn't make the best of his chances. This is the cruel nature of the game. A player like Carlsen, Karpov , Kasparov, Kramnik, Anand, Topalov or any other world champion would have felt entitled to win the last game playing White after Gukesh missed a crucial chance to close the match the game before. But no, Ding played to draw and swap pieces even when he had the initiative in the 14th game. And he lost the game with a club player blunder because he still insisted on exchanging pieces when down a pawn. It's basic knowledge that pawn endgames are decisive and you have always to calculate them exactly when entering one, that when one is down material he has to exchange pawns but not pieces, and that in general rook endgames are slighly easier to play than pawn endgames. Any master would have insisted on shuffling the rook and would have never thinked of exchanging pieces in that situation. The fact that he exchanged the rook is a reflection of Ding's terrible form.

TIL there are armchair quarterbacks for chess

I believe the term is armchair grandmasters.

I reckon Ding would probably beat you in chess, even if you had 2 hours and he only had 10 minutes.

In a normal game yes, but he won't beat me in the ending that he has lost. I can draw that against Stockfish for all that matters.

Chess and its superstars are often anything but humble and modest. Magnus Carlsen's commetary for this match was riddled with derogatory statements. since he wanted to sit out this championship he should be gracious and respectful toward the players who fought for the title in his stead but he has been anything but that.

The interview (quotes at 2m10s; watching from 0m33s captures more emotion/context):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmYAvrJjWsY&t=33s

I'm not a constant follower of chess and only see events now and then, but its great to see some new faces on the block.

I think this mutual respect between players is what elevates chess beyond just a game

That was a absolutely horrible finish to a really exciting championship if you ask me.

For anyone who doesn't know, there was a lot of drama because Gukesh was playing amazingly coming into this (eg winning the gold medal on board 1 at the olympiad in crushing style) and Ding had been playing terribly. Then there were 13 games of back and forth with stalwart defending and imaginative computer preparation by both sides, playing a lot of fresh chess and both of them going for the most critical and challenging moves in each position. Ding was playing a lot better than a lot of people had expected and the previous game had been one of the best games in a world championship for a long time. Everything was tied going into the last game of the classical portion and the "bar room consensus" was that since Gukesh was so young and doesn't focus at all on the faster forms of chess (rapid and blitz) and is therefore much lower rated than Ding in those formats, that if this game was a draw then Ding would be a substantial favourite in the ensuing tiebreaks.

The final game was a complex struggle, with Ding keeping everything in lockdown with the white pieces so as not to give Gukesh a ghost of a chance. Most of the pieces had been traded and it was the most drawish of drawn endgames. Gukesh was up a pawn, but they both had a rook and bishop and all Ding had to do was hang on to his pieces and keep them well away from the enemy king. On the stream I was watching IM David Pruess had just been asked by someone in chat whether Gukesh could win and he said "1% chance".

Then all of a sudden Ding made 3 bad moves in a row. The first two were just poor endgame technique, putting his rook and bishop both on bad squares too close to the enemy king, then the real blunder. Completely inexplicably he traded off the pieces. Now he was in an endgame that was just dead lost. After 14 games of 4+ hours each It had gone from being a dead draw with him a big favourite in tie breaks to all over in a few seconds.

This really misses the key drama of what happened in the last game.

Ding had a perfectly safe position where he could try to squeeze Gukesh pretty much endlessly with basically 0 risk. He then, completely inexplicably, went down a forced line which led to the final phase of the game.

In this phase the position was drawn with perfect play, but that is completely irrelevant because it is really tough to play. And more importantly in this phase, Gukesh was the side pressing to win with all sorts of interesting ideas. Ding, by contrast, left himself in a position where he's now going to be tortured for hours, has 0 chance of winning, and a single lapse of concentration means you lose. And that's exactly what happened.

Engine evals are really misleading in these sort of positions because it says it's completely equal, which it objectively is, but white/Ding will lose that position with some degree of regularity, while black/Gukesh had 0 losing chances. So in practical terms equality is not really correct.

Yes and I think losing in this way is the most fair result. Ding has gone for a draw in every game where the score was tied, even with white (the first game, which he won as black was just a gift from Gukesh). Today, once again with white he could have pressed the position and played for more. Instead he sacrificed a pawn to play for a draw, and had the more difficult game to play even if it was always 0s. If he'd tried to play for a win today, almost certainly it would have been a draw anyway.

While I was really happy to see Ding's fighting spirit in this match, and to have recovered much of his former strength, I've been rooting for Gukesh since around the half-way point just because Ding has not been playing superior positions for a win. I just don't think thats how a champion plays, even if its a sound strategy to try to win in tie-breaks.

I think this is an unfair characterisation of how Ding played. The issue wasn't lack of ambition, but lack of confidence leading to misevaluation. Judging from the long thinks and how he's played in recent years, it's clear he doesn't fully trust his calculation. But I think he deserves credit for his ambition, actually. If he really wanted to play for draws he wouldn't be playing the French or the English. He'd be aiming for e4 e5 with an early queen trade. He mostly chose interesting openings with a lot of fight in them, often got an advantage, and simply misplayed by underestimating his position. Classic sign of a player with confidence issues.

I watched the press conferences, and I agree that misevaluation was a big part of the problem. But even in game 6 for example, there is no way he could think he was not better after black refused the queen trade, and he just kept pressing for that trade. So yes, call that lack of confidence - but its still not what I want to see in the world champion.

His long thinks is thought to be due to the fact that he simply hasn't been preparing. He stated he prepared for about 3 weeks for the championship match which was considered insanely low amount of time. But Caruana has stated he would be amazed if he even preped that long based on his games, and he always just looked like he was winging it every game.

Is there a metric I can look at in engine evaluations to determine when a situation is "risky" for white or black (e.g., the situation above) even if it looks equal with perfect play?

I've always been interested in understanding situations where this is the case (and the opposite, where the engine favours one side but it seems to require a long, hard-to-find sequence of moves.

Playing out the top lines helps if equality requires perfect play from one side.

You can measure the sharpness of the position, as in this paper section 2.3 "Complexity of a position". They find their metric correlates with human performance.

https://en.chessbase.com/news/2006/world_champions2006.pdf

I think this is something a bit different. That sort of assessment is going to find humans perform poorly in extremely sharp positions with lots of complicated lines that are difficult to evaluate. And that is certainly true. A tactical position that a computer can 'solve' in a few seconds can easily be missed by even very strong humans.

But the position Ding was in was neither sharp nor complex. A good analog to the position there is the rook + bishop v rook endgame. With perfect play that is, in most cases, a draw - and there are even formalized drawing techniques in any endgame text. But in practice it's really quite difficult, to the point that even grandmasters regularly lose it.

In those positions, on most of every move - any move is a draw. But the side with the bishop does have ways to inch up the pressure, and so the difficulty is making sure you recognize when you finally enter one of those moves where you actually need to deal with a concrete threat. The position Ding forced was very similar.

Most of every move, on every move, led to a draw - until it didn't. Gukesh had all sorts of ways to try to prod at Ding's position and make progress - prodding Ding's bishop, penetrating with his king, maneuvering his bishop to a stronger diagonal, cutting off Ding's king, and of course eventually pushing one of the pawns. He was going to be able to play for hours just constantly prodding where Ding would have stay 100% alert to when a critical threat emerges.

And this is all why Ding lost. His final mistake looks (and was) elementary, and he noticed it immediately after moving - but the reason he made that mistake is that he was thinking about how to parry the other countless dangerous threats, and he simply missed one. This is why most of everybody was shocked about Ding going for this endgame. It's just so dangerous in practical play, even if the computer can easily show you a zillion ways to draw it.

Nice paper. I’d like if someone re-ran the numbers using modern chess engines… the engine they used is exceedingly weak by modern standards.

Actually is is so weak, that it would be stomped out 1000:0 by modern engines. I like the methodology too, but the conclusions are not defendable.

Making a computer play like a 1300-rated human is harder than making a computer beat Magnus Carlsen.

This is really interesting because i ran into a pokemon bot the other day were its training led to calibration of 50% winrste at all levels of play on Pokémon showdown. It was a complete accident.

It's not hard to make a chess bot that plays at a 1300 strength, i.e. its rating would converge to 1300 if it were allowed to compete. But it will not play like a 1300-rated human. It would play like a superhuman genius on most moves and then make beginner-level blunders at random moments.

Making one that realistically plays like a human is an unsolved problem.

Of course, you are right. But (the linked site) at least has a bot that plays the opening like a human of chosen rating perfectly. It stops working after the opening-stage (since it just copies moves from humans in the lichess game database), but it is still very impressive. For later game stages, some other method would have to be used (unless we play multiple orders of magnintude more games on lichess).

Now that i think about it, i remember the people in the alphago documentary talking about the bot giving its moves percentage scores in both how high winning % the move had and how high % chance that a human would have made the same move that it just played. I wonder why they never showed what a full game of the most human-like moves from alphago would look like. Maybe it actually worked, by feeding it all the pro games in existence, and training it to play the high human % instead of the higest win probability moves like they did in the end.

https://www.chessassess.com/openings

So like a 1500 rated human?

I think this can be achieved with some ease with a machine learning model. You will have to train it on games between 1300-rated players and below. A transformer model might work even better in terms of the evenness of play (behaving like a 1300 rated player throughout the game).

> I think this can be achieved with some ease with a machine learning model.

What evidence lead you to think that, and how surprised would you be to be wrong?

Ahem https://lichess.org/@/lichess/blog/introducing-maia-a-human-...

ah that makes sense. thanks!

Playing a chess bot that works this way feels like playing a Magnus Carlsen who's trying to let you win.

But that doesn’t imply that that bot played like an average human.

Making a computer have a 50% score against a 1300-rated human is way easier than making it play like a 1300-rated human.

For the former, you can take a top-of-the-line program and have it flip a coin in every game whether to make a random move every move or not.

Definitely, but it seems like it's now possible: https://www.maiachess.com/

Take the computer which beats Magnus and restrain it to never make the best move in a position. Expand this to N best moves as needed to reach 1300 rating.

Even 1300s sometimes make the best move. Sometimes the best move is really easy to see or even mandatory, like if you are in check and MUST take that checking piece. Sometimes the best move is only obvious if you can look 20 moves ahead. Sometimes the best move is only obvious if you can look 5 moves ahead, but the line is so forcing that even 1300s can look that far ahead.

Despite decades of research, nobody has found a good way to make computers play like humans.

Then I can't refrain from asking: and what's the style of LLMs? For example the ChatGPT which is apparently rated around 1800? That should be completely different from that of a classic chess engine.

LLMs can be trained on chess games, but the tree of possible board states branches so fast that for any given position there is simply very little training data available. Even the billions of games played on chess.com and lichess are only a drop in the bucket compared to how many possible board states there are. This would have to be split further by rating range, so the amount of games for any given rating range would be even lower.

This means that the LLM does not actually have a lot of training data available to learn how a 1300 would play, and subsequently does a poor job at imitating it. There is a bunch of papers available online if you want more info.

LLMs already do play at elo ~1400-1800. The question was how does their style feels like to someone who can appreciate the difference between a human player and a chess engine (and the different styles of different human players).

I can’t speak for ChatGPT, but your intuition is correct that LLMs tend to play more like “humans” than Stockfish or other semi-brute force approaches.

ChatGPT will hallucinate and make impossible/invalid moves frequently, so I don't see how it could have a chess rating

That's not the case. Depending on the version, (Chat)GPT seems to be able to play between ~1400 and ~1800 elo, very rarely making invalid moves.

You've identified a potential strategy by which a computer can play like a 1300-rated player, but not one where it will "play like a 1300-rated human". Patzers can still find and make moves in your set of N (if only by blind chance).

Yeah, you would have to weigh the moves based on how "obvious" it is, such as how active the piece has been, how many turns until it leads to winning material, or other such 'bad habits' humans fall for.

This won't work. With that strategy, you can make a computer make play like a 1300 player, but not a 1300 human player.

That's kind of what they do for "training" bots and it produces something which plays NOTHING like a 1300-rated human.

I assume you could just give the computer a large set of 1300 rated games and train it to predict moves from that set :)

I think there's a real difference between "a computer"— in this context meaning an algorithm written by a human, possibly calibrated with a small number of parameters but not trained in any meaningful sense, and a "chess model" which works as you describe.

I think the chess model would be successful at producing the desired outcome but it's not as interesting. There's something to be said for being able to write down in precise terms how to play imperfectly in a manner that feels like a single cohesive intelligence strategizing against you.

The metric is to play the position against Stockfish. If you draw it again and again, it is trivial, otherwise, not so simple :-)

Yes, the Leela team has worked on a term they call Contempt. (Negative contempt in this case would make the engine seek out less sharp play from whites perspective) In the first link the authour talks about using contempt to seek out/avoid sharp lines. lc0 and nibbler are free, so feel free to try it out if curious.

https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/pull/1791#issuecomment... https://lczero.org/blog/2023/07/the-lc0-v0.30.0-wdl-rescale/...

You can evaluate on lower depth/time.

But even that isn't a good proxy.

Humans cannot out-FLOP a computer, so they need to use patterns (like an LLM). To get the human perspective, the engine would need to something similar.

There are several neural network based engines these days, including one that does exclusively what you describe (i.e. "patterns only", no calculation at all), and one that's trained on human games.

Even Stockfish uses a neural network these days by default for its positional evaluation, but it's relatively simple/lightweight in comparison to these, and it gains its strength from being used as part of deep search, rather than using a powerful/heavy neural network in a shallow tree search.

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2402.04494v1

[2] https://www.maiachess.com/

Definitely. And Google's AlphaZero did it years ago.

I don't think the patterns are very human, but they are very cool.

Have you tried Maia? I haven't myself (there isn't one in my ballpark level yet), but supposedly it plays more human due to being trained mostly on human play, not engine evaluations or self-play.

I have not.

Thank you.

https://live.lczero.org/

This is great, but I think that % is about the "correctness" of the move, not how likely it is to be played next.

I think that's not quite the point. Leela has an advantage over AB chess engines, where it has multi-PV for "free", meaning it will evaluate multiple lines by default at no cost to performance (traditional engines, like Stockfish, will lose elo with multi-PV). This allows us to know at a glance if a position is "draw/win with perfect play" or if there is margin for error. If Leela shows multiple moves where one side maintains a winning advantage/losing disadvantage/equality, we can use that as a computer-based heuristic to know if a position is "easy" to play or not.

Yes and no – the number of playable lines does not necessarily tell us how "obvious" those lines are to find for a human.

To give a trivial example, if I take your queen, then recapturing my queen is almost always the single playable move. But it's also a line that you will easily find!

Conversely, in a complex tactical position, (even) multiple saving moves could all be very tricky for a human to calculate.

I wonder if there’s a combined metric that could be calculated. Depth of the line certainly would be impactful. A line that only works if you do 5 only moves is harder to find than a single move line. “Quiet” moves are probably harder to find than captures or direct attacks. Backwards moves are famously tricky to spot. Etc

And also, humans vary wildly in their thinking and what's "obvious" to them. I'm about 1950 and am good in openings and tactics (but not tactics for the opponent). Others around the same rating are much worse than that but they understand positional play much better - how to use weak squares, which pieces to exchange and so on. To me that's a kind of magic.

Not really because it’s subjective to the level of player. What’s a blunder to a master player might only be an inaccuracy to a beginner. The same applies for higher levels of chess player. I’ve watched GothamChess say “I’ve no idea why <INSERT GM> made this move but it’s the only move,” then Hikaru Nakamura will rattle off a weird 8-move sequence to explain why it’s a major advantage despite no pieces being lost. Stockfish is a level above even Magnus if given enough depth.

> Stockfish is a level above even Magnus if given enough depth.

"a level" and "if given enough depth" are both underselling it. Stockfish running on a cheap phone with equal time for each side will beat Magnus 100 games in a row.

I believe it’s something like 500 elo points difference at this point between Magnus and Stockfish running on cheap hardware. Computers are so strong the only way to measure their strength is against other, weaker computers, and so on until you get to engines that are mere “grandmaster” strength.

Bear in mind that, beyond the “top” elo ratings, that it’s purely an estimate of relative strength. The gap between a GM and me is far greater than the gap between a GM and Stockfish, even if the stated elo difference is the same.

By this I mean, you can give me a winning position against Magnus and I’ll still lose. Give a winning position to Magnus vs Stockfish and he might draw or even win.

True, what is considered a “winning” position is different at different elo levels. The better someone is, the smaller their mistakes are relative to perfect play.

I wish top players like Magnus would do more exhibition games against top computers. They don’t have to all start with equal material or an equal position.

That’s fair, I was leaving wiggle room for things like being able to force the engine into doing stupid things like sacrifice all its pieces to avoid stalemate.

Maybe the difference between the eval of the best move vs the next one(s)? An "only move" situation would be more risky than when you have a choice between many good moves.

That's it exactly. Engines will often show you at least 3 lines each with their valuation, and you can check the difficulty often just from that delta from 1st to 2nd best move. With some practical chess experience you can also "feel" how natural or exoteric the best move is.

In the WCC match between Caruana and Carlsen, they were at one difficult endgame where Carlsen (the champion) moved and engines calculated it was a "blunder" because there was a theoretical checkmate in like 36(!) moves, but no commentator took it seriously as there was "no way" a human would be able to spot the chance and calculate it correctly under the clock.

Not necessarily. If that "only move" is obvious, then it's not really risky. Like if a queen trade is offered and the opponent accepts, then typically the "only move" that doesn't massively lose is to capture back. But that's extremely obvious, and doesn't represent a sharp or complex position.

Yes, it’s called Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS used by AlphaZero) instead of AlphaBeta search (which is what classical chess engines used)

Those are tree search techniques, they are not metrics to assess the "human" complexity of a line. They could be used for this purpose but out of the box they just give you winning probability

If multiple lines have equal-ish winning probability, rather than a single line, then you can sort of translate it to "human" complexity.

Not really – that's the point, engines, for all their awesomeness, just do not know how to assess the likelihood of "human" mistakes.

Not the mention the time trouble that Ding left himself in once again. This time Gukesh ended with almost a full hour over Ding. When you put yourself in a tough position, no matter how drawish it is in theory, you need to have enough time to figure out the ideas of the position and with only 10 minutes left and 30 seconds per move, you might slip up and make a quick move when you really needed to think harder.

Chess engines should come with another metric bar: "The twitchy-ness" of the position aka the gradient of primary eval metric as you pareto the possible moves from best to worst. The stronger this gradient, the more risky it is to play, and more changes to make a mistake.

This ignores the question how hard it is for a human to find the best (or a "good enough") move. It's easy to find games with 10 "only move" 's in a row where even a beginner could easily have played all if them.

Sure, but it's a start on adding nuance to eval beyond minmax

Is it? TBH it sounds like "climbing a tree is a start on getting to the moon beyond just jumping up and down". Yes, it does "more". But whether it will actually get you to the desired end state is highly dubious. Nobody knows if that will make chess bots more human-like, despite decades of research into the topic.

This is about eval nuance, not how bots play

Bots playing like humans is done by training them to play like humans: https://lichess.org/@/lichess/blog/introducing-maia-a-human-...

This is not a new request; many people, including engine authors, have suggested it throughout the years. The problem is that it's seemingly very hard to reliably quantify something like this and propagate it throughout the game tree.

You don't need to propagate it, you just need to show the gradient of the current position alongside with the classical evaluation, to give more context to the viewers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42401469

Agreed. I always thought of it as 'how close to the cliff edge are you' metric. It'd probably be easy to do, look at all the possible moves and add up the resultant evals. If you're currently tied but you have only one good move to keep it tie while the rest of your moves give mate in 1, well, saying the board is tied is not helpful.

Except a lot of the time there's an obvious threat that needs to be responded to, and a couple of obvious good responses that even terrible players spot.

engines arent great at that. they spot the beat move, and if you dont do it, it keeps spotting that same great move until your opponent notices it.

It's strange/crazy because Ding even purposefully even gave up his B pawn, just so he could exchange queens and be in a 3 and 2 pawn game with a bishop and rook still in the game. Gukesh just tried playing out the game to the last second making easy moves while Ding suffered.

But in the last game it wasn’t about engine evaluation. It was a move that within 2 moves led to a known lost endgame..

[dead]

Gukesh took him into the deep water the entire time, putting every possible strain on Ding's energy and reserves. It was the unrelenting pressure of an 18yo badass that cracked Ding, whom I truly feel sorry for. He is a great player and a very, very nice human being.

What is crazy is that Gukesh has only been playing chess for a little more than 11 years.

ETA: And Ding fought like a lion!

"only 11 years"... that seems like a lot to me, although reading further down in the thread it seems like it might take twice or three times as long to get to a very high level.

Do people in the chess community measure players by number of years playing? Are there expectations of how long it takes to get to a certain level? (besides world champion)

It's hard to put it in numbers since high level chess players start very young, it's basically considered impossible to become a titled player learning chess as an adult, with a slight exception for high level players from similar games transferring over. So becoming the youngest champ and becoming the champ in the shortest time are very similar. For comparison Magnus started playing chess at 5 and became WC at 22.

It's 100% possible to become a master starting as an adult, but it requires a certain sort of person - you're looking at thousands upon thousands of hours of difficult work paired alongside endless frustrations, obstacles, seriously low emotional lows the game can cause (think about how Ding feels right now, even if it wasn't a game for the title), and more.

The idea of becoming a master, especially as an adult, is far more appealing than the reality of it for most people.

You will have to qualify this statement heavily.

We do not have any examples of a grandmaster who learned rules past age 20.

One of the 19th century greats presumably learned at 17, it was Blackburne - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Henry_Blackburne - he was GM strength.

There are a few late bloomer GMs today but what is common with them is that they were already decent just below expert players before 20.

You need 3 things to become a masters and up level player.

1. Grit - conscious mastery everyone agrees on that

2. Some natural talent - certainly to become super GM

3. Start early enough - 6,7 is norm, 10 probably okay, 15 is already almost late.

There is something special going on in the brains of young teenagers learning certain skills - violin, chess, some others. As Fischer said - he "just became good" in one year from around 13 to 14. Of course he was already pretty good at 13 but the magic happens around that time.

Basically, you train hard, maybe you take a little bit of time off and then you gain this amazing "unconscious mastery". This happens around ages 11-16 or so, depending how early you start.

Every good chess player has this "unconscious mastery" - that is they can play pretty well (2200+) even if drunk, dead tired, 1-min blitz, playing simul, etc etc - in other words without "thinking".

For some reason adult starters are unable to develop this unconscious mastery.

Apparently there are certain limits to neuroplasticity in adults. Of course I'd love to be proven wrong.

Disclaimer: I am an aging Fide Master who needed 1 point in 2 games(ie 2 draws) to become IM some years ago. I went out swinging but failed.

I also know many people who took up chess late in life and did not break 1800.

Also I know many people who are full time trainers and live chess full time, but they themselves can not go above 2200.

If pure grit was sufficient at later stages in life, we'd see a lot more progress, but we do not.

I think you are leaving out #4. You need to have basically unbreakable confidence. Dealing with that horrible plateau that we all go through often breaks adult players. This [1] is Magnus' rating chart. It looks like an unstoppable line to the top until you zoom in and actually look.

In April 2004 Magnus was 2552. 15 months and 162 classical games later he was 2528. When a 'normal' adult plays 162 classical games, which is often only done over a period of many years, and only loses rating points, they assume they've hit their peak and their spirit breaks, or they try to 'fix' their training routine and just end up completely breaking it. This is one reason it's so much easier for children to improve - they [usually] don't really think about such things in the same way and just keep grinding away.

Chess improvement is brutal. You don't put in 'x' effort and get some proportional reward back. Chess improvement is very stair-step, you wake up one day and you're suddenly much stronger than you were the day before. But until you hit that next stair-step, you see little to nothing.

In my own case I only learned how the pieces move as an adult, at least in so much as 18 counts as an adult, and feel I've gained at least a moderate level of unconscious mastery - around 2600 bullet and 2500 blitz, with the overwhelming majority of that improvement coming well after 30, and I'm still improving!

[1] - https://ratings.fide.com/profile/1503014/chart

I've only heard of one person ever doing it, and that was in the 80s when the average age was older anyway.

I think you've got to reach 1800 by your mid or maybe late teens to have a chance really.

> It's 100% possible to become a master starting as an adult

Do you have any examples of someone who has done it?

We might bicker on the meaning of "starting", but Mikhail Chigorin is definitely the most famous example. He was taught the moves at age 16 by a school teacher but in no way pursued the game until well into his twenties. He would then go on to compete at the highest level, including for the world championship.

While he's the most famous example, many famous older masters also started quite late. And I think one big difference was culture. There's a really great film about chess from 1925 (!!) here [1]. The tournament footage there is real btw - it was the Moscow tournament of 1925, and it even has a cameo by Capablanca!

The image of chess, and chess players, was quite different in the past. It was very much an adult's game. Now a days it has quite a different stereotype, and I think this impacts people's decisions on whether or not to seriously pursue it, with consequent impact on overall outcomes. Because in chess one of the biggest difficulties is when you hit your first serious plateau, which happens to everybody - it even happened to Magnus where his rating only declined for more than a year. If you lose confidence or start working poorly, that plateau will be where your improvement ends. Self belief and confidence is extremely important to keep improving.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN6m711ddZk

Your examples are all people from 100 years ago when the game was completely different. Not a ringing endorsement of the claim that it's 100% possible (present tense). If Chigorin were magically transported to the present day he would not be a professional level player.

I don't know what you mean by "professional level" which is quite the shift from titled player, as you originally proposed. Kramnik, for instance, has estimated Steinitz (in modern times) would be around 2400 and Lasker around 2700. [1] Chigorin was +24−27=8 against Steinitz, and +1 -8 =4 against Lasker. He would definitely be a master.

There are plenty of examples in modern times as well, but the problem we face is you're only going to run into people who publicize themselves unless you just dig through each master level player in the USCF, FIDE or whatever database. For instance I know Rolf Wetzell wrote a book about his journey from class player to becoming a master at the age of 50! Then there was Michael de la Maza who wrote a book about going from 1100 or something to 2000 as an adult, but retired at that point because he didn't want to put in the work to go further. I'm sure if you dig through the databases, you can find far more striking examples than these two - again those two I only know because they both wrote books, and of all people who achieve significant success as adults and write, only a tiny percent will publish books about it!

And in modern times another group you might run into is people like me. I started as an adult, have only played one rated tournament otb, but am around 2500 blitz online and would certainly hit master if I actually bothered to play more rated events, but have never really gotten around to it for a mixture of cost (living outside of major chess events means $$$ for travel + housing + tourney costs) and time, even moreso now a days with children!

[1] - https://www.chess.com/blog/Spektrowski/vladimir-kramnik-from...

Your couple of comments on this thread are insightful, I will be watching that documentary! Cheers!

What have you focused on in your chess learning to get to where you've gotten? I presume - everything?

It depends on the level. The big early gains to get to let's say 2200+ were basically exclusively tactics. You really have to get your board vision to quite a decent level before the other parts of learning really start kicking in, and that's going to take thousands of hours of tactics. An important part of tactics is to ensure you actually work out the entire line - instead of just playing the obvious tactical idea, like Bxh7 or whatever, and going from there.

This was paired with 'analyzing' games of classical master (Alekhine, Capablanca, and so on) and then comparing my analysis against master analysis in plain English. Older books like Alekhine's best games books, or the various master vs amateur books (Euwe's is amazing) are a great resource here. Chessbase also now has a feature 'replay training' built in that would be really good for this. Load up a game, click on replay training, and you can basically play guess-the-move with automatic feedback in terms of how your move compares to the game as played (without revealing that move), as well as the top computer move.

It's also important to start appreciating typical piece repositioning ideas - for instance the rook lift is something that isn't very intuitive at first but radically reshapes many positions. If that rook on a1 heads to a3 and then on over to g3, a quiet Italian position can go from uninspiring to an unstoppable kingside attack really fast. The same is true of all the other pieces - for instance in the typical Najdorf structure with pawns on e5 and d6, knights on f6/d7, and bishop on e7 - if that bishop can go from e7 to e.g. b6 (so long as d6 remains solid enough), it can suddenly become a monster piece.

A key is to avoid excessive opening study until much later. It's a trap because you can spend an infinite amount of time learning openings, and you will get some wins without ever even leaving book, which feels pretty dang rewarding, but in the longrun it will stunt your growth. I remember at one point, sometime around 1800, delusionally thinking that the main difference between me and Kasparov was his encyclopedic opening knowledge. A quick glance at Hikaru doing puzzle rush will emphasize that's not quite right, of course this was long before GMs streaming was a thing! On the equal but opposite side, I also would recommend avoiding 'system' openings as a means of not having to worry about openings because the ideas and plans you see and learn in classical openings help improve your understanding much more than seeing an e.g. Colle each and every game.

Very good of you to get back to me with such a generous reply.

I'm happy reading it. I'd studied and played (in a club, real tournaments, etc) pretty "seriously" for about six months a couple of years ago, before stopping completely, even though it was going quite well, when some unavoidable life things got in the way.

Progress had been steady, climbing up to almost 1600 classical (before the statistical ratings hike last year, putting me on 1750). I was maybe going to at least temporarily settle around there, or slightly higher, it looked like. I'd played for a few years when I was younger, but didn't have serious coaching, unfortunately, so this was not 6 months from scratch at all.

What I'd come up with when studying tracks with some of your main points above. I was focusing very much on tactics, because I love them and because it seemed unavoidable - even the high-rated players who don't consider themselves "tactical players" still have an extremely solid tactical reading of any position, and spot all the usual patterns with ease.

I'd even mostly ignored heavy opening work! Which, I must say, is not a popular approach. A friend who'd seen a bit of your game would come up to you after a match in a tournament and say: "I can't beleve you played that on move six against the French defence, that's not the best move!", and I'd struggle to convince them that openings were not my main area of concern aha.

Anyway, thanks again, and congrats on your chess accomplishments - the tournaments truly are wonderful to be involved in, I find.

Yeah, exactly on the tactics issue. Computers used to be quite horrible positionally, but were still extremely strong simply because their short-term tactical vision was nearly perfect. And you really need tactics to enable positional play. Petrosian was able to snuff out tactical possibilities so effectively only because he was fully aware of where they were!

Now a days I think the tactics streak offered on Lichess (and probably on chess.com as well) is a really great tactical resource. It's the untimed option, rather than the much more popular tactics rush where you have e.g. 5 minutes to do as many as you can. I think the 'woodpecker' method of tactics is a great idea. Basically you build up on a repeated series of tactical problems, until you're able to complete them all perfectly accurately at an extremely high rate of speed. This seems contradictory, because the sites have massive tactics database, but you will regularly see the same problems due to the birthday paradox. If you're looking for some achievable ballparks, on Lichess I tend to be able to hit around 50 somewhat regularly, with a high of about 90.

I think the fundamental thing with openings is that so long as you make logical moves, even if you make an objectively weak move - you will very rarely reach a losing position because of it. And from that point on both your opponent and you are both out of book, so whoever understands the position better, and plays better, will win. Many people, especially adults, get caught up in obsessive opening study because it's the one form of chess study where results can be immediately felt.

The one very good thing about opening study is seeing ideas and concepts that you may not otherwise be able to come up with on your own. Like in the Najdorf, the pawn structure with d6+e5 and d6 generally firmly blocked and on a semi-open file leaves d6 feeling like a major weakness at first. The fact that it's generally rock solid was a serious eye-opener for me! And that translates strongly to many other positions - backwards pawns are not necessarily dooming one to passive defense, and can even be a great dynamic weapon!

Summaries of these are being added to my chess-learning files :) I will be doing Lichess tactics streak, the forced element of "can't lose" sounds like exactly what I need to be that little bit more hotly engaged.

I love the Woodpecker method! I went all in on that during my six-months of study, and had (anecdotal) positive results. I made flashcards of all the positions, and worked through them all 3 or 4 times, trying to go faster and faster. I also looked up a big list of common checkmating patterns, and put them on flashcards, and gave them names and everything to make them memorable, and drilled them.

This culminated in my last tournament, a rapid 12'3'', and me beating my first ever 1800s and 1900s, and performing well above my I think 13 or 1400 rapid rating of the time. It literally happened in two or three of the games that I'd be looking at the exact pattern I'd drilled, and then looking at the 1700 or whatever opponent and going: aha, the method works, here's the pattern.

What you say about openings tracks with what I was doing, except I went a bit mad at one stage and started learning loads of ridiculous gambits and getting smashed by anyone half-decent. I like violent positions. I'd some spectacular wins, but I think it was a silly strategy. At one stage a frind from the club destroyed me after I played some dubious gambit as black, and he said "yeah, gambits are good fun, but maybe for bullet chess online".

At a certain point too, in the process of "getting good", it's my feeling that everyone must eventually accept the quiet positions, and the slow endgames, and working hard for a draw with no story to tell afterwards. I was getting to the level where I had to accept that, but still struggled... I still would be tempted to do things that I literally knew were unsound, and would say: "oh come on, it makes no sense", but I might do it anyway, or a variant of it. Anyway, my thinking would be heavily clouded and biased by this desire for winning in the middlegame, and avoiding the slowness!

You can easily make a sharp/tactical repertoire of sound openings. As black you can play the Najdorf and King's Indian Defense. As white - open sicilian, winawer french, advance caro kann, be3/qd2/f3/o-o-o stuff against modern/pirc, bd3 bd2 o-o-o against scandi. e4e5 is the toughest nut to crack, but the evan's gambit is generally sound - Kasparov even beat Anand with it. Against the petroff you can play Nc3+o-o-o stuff.

That should just about cover everything!

But yeah, one thing you have to do to really start improving alot is to always assume your opponent will play the best move. Hope chess is how you ruin your own position!

What you're saying is made up.

Can you provide a single example of someone who started chess in their 20s who became a grandmaster?

Starting in 20s and getting to 2000 FIDE does happen, with an awful lot of work and dedication. GM, I have never found a single example of. By all means, prove me wrong.

5-22- so 17 years instead of 11. Quite a difference! Can any of that be put down to advances in training tech that wasn't around when Magnus started playing?

In spite of claims to the contrary there is luck in chess. Your form (and your opponents') varies significantly over time, the outcome of competitive opening prep, or even just how well you're sleeping.

The stars really aligned for Gukesh in countless ways, his form and openings hit when and where they needed to, and he was left playing a very out-of-form world champ who wasn't even in the top 20 in the world.

I suspect his record (world champ at 18) will remain intact for many decades yet to come. He attributed much of his success to God, and even as an agnostic - I'm inclined to agree!

Notably he's still nowhere near the strongest player in the world - he's not even the strongest Indian! The world championship in chess can be an odd beast at times.

It's really funny when you think that even among Indians, Pragg was much more in the news with high profile wins & Arjun crossed 2800 but here we have Gukesh WC.

Yes, the luck can be being able to sleep well during this grueling event, or having food that agrees with you, or even which virii are circulating around and whether or not they get you.

As to Gukesh's faith, it brings inner peace and happiness, and if you observe the contestants' faces, the difference was evident. Gukesh isn't making a show of being prayerful, he's really doing it. It means he is doing what he is doing for a greater goal, which is always for a worldwide peace and happiness for all human beings, when really performed in harmony with our Creator. If one's religion's purpose is for dominance over others one can never gain inner peace and happiness from it. It must be for personal harmonization with peace and happiness for all human beings, or it is just more mammalian self-righteous warfare.

That's why Rumi says, "You have no idea how little we care for what people say." What he means by this is that a lot of people talk about religion, but what we do and how we feel as a result of our religiosity is the only proof that is accepted by God. Most people do not understand that such proof is evident on people's faces and in the tone of their voice, but you seem to have noticed the reality that Gukesh has it and, sadly, Ding does not.

Gukesh's victory is a way of demonstrating to folks that there are real gains to be had from seeking the peace and happiness of religion for peace and happiness's sake. No religion is superior to others in this respect. No. There are only true seekers and those who merely seek to justify their oppression of others by their religious affiliation.

I extensively explain how this works in my comments over the past week or two.

"The Way goes in." --Rumi

There's not much point comparing them. The WCC cycles are inconsistent and Magnus has never liked the format. He played the Candidates in 2007 when he was 16, but there was a four-year gap after that until the next one. By that point he was already the top player and, just like in the cycle Ding won, he decided not to play. The explanation is here: https://www.chess.com/news/view/carlsen-quits-world-champion...

He's also not really the world champion. The world champion just got bored of winning so hard.

He's the World Champion, he might not be the best in the world but that is always an arguable thing.

Bobby Fischer was never defeated either, but that doesn't matter. If you can't or won't defend the championship then you stop being champion. (And I don't see how the argument that championship matches would take too much time and prep can coexist with the claim that it wasn't challenging enough for Carlsen - if it's really that easy for him then he shouldn't need all that prep in the first place)

That’s his excuse anyway. If you can’t hold on to the title, no matter the actual or stated reasons, then you are simply not the World Champion.

Magnus Carlsen is the highest rated classical player, and has been since 2011.

It's also worth noting that is he is the reigning Rapid World Champion, the reigning Blitz World Champion, and the reigning Chess World Cup Champion.

He chose not to defend his Classical world title, and has been quite clear about the reasons.

There are stated reasons and there are actual reasons. You have to differentiate between the two, otherwise you are just extremely naive.

Please, enlighten us all.

Magnus played 5 world championships, with 3 against players of his generation. In those 3,he only managed a plus score once - against Nepo who was more than holding his own then lost one tough game and went on his notorious monkey tilt. The other two were drawn in classical.

Magnus is, by a landslide, the best tournament player (probably ever) but the world championship for classical is very different than a tournament, and his results there have not been anywhere near the level of his tournament performances.

And Magnus has also stated that he believes he has peaked. Basically - he was going to imminently lose, and I think he wanted to go out undefeated. Notably the one player he was willing to play, Alireza, was the only viable contender who he would expect to have been an overwhelming favourite against.

Also in terms of legacy, the max number of world championship victories is 6. He stopped at 5.

Excuse? You must not follow chess too closely. He is the undisputed GOAT. He is clearly bored - he plays atrocious opening moves these days just to get an interesting game. He's so good he transcended the need to keep proving it. Excuse. Lmao. Gukesh is the WC only because he is not good enough to present an interesting challenge.

Magnus may be better player than Gukesh, but the reason he is not defending WC title is not because Gukesh or any opponent is not good enough, but because it takes too much freaking preparation to defend WC title and he doesn't think it is worth the effort.

A completely unprepared Magnus vs a 100% prepared opponent will go to a better prepared opponent (See Magnus interviews if you don't believe this). 4-6 months spending memorizing lines is not easy. It is too much work. Magnus has already proven he is GOAT, he doesn't have to prove anything.

But - this doesn't take away achievement from other players, if Magnus doesn't want to be bothered doing all the prep.I wonder if we will say the same thing in any other sport.

Ma Long for example - did not participated in Paris Olympic singles, does that mean Fan Zedong or Truls moregard achievement was any less? Nobody would say that.

That's just what he says. He is obviously not going to publicly say that he is scared of competing in the WCC. But in all likelihood, he is. At least Ding could compete in the WCC without 6 months prep, which Magnus clearly cannot.

Your apparent personal dislike of Magnus Carlsen (based on this and other comments) does not make your baseless assertions any more convincing.

What I am saying is true. I am not interested in convincing a delusional person.

Your complete lack of supporting evidence makes for a most compelling argument.

You are just yapping for the sake of yapping. You have no evidence to back anything you are saying, so you go first lol.

You’re the one disputing the stated facts, not me.

Gukesh is born in 2006, so he started playing at 7.

His quote from the interview was "six and a half to seven", so I rounded to 11 years, as he is now 18.

Disagree. Gukesh was constantly putting pressure on Ding to find defensive moves and Ding finally made a mistake. The fact that it happened when it did just makes it even more dramatic. We know from the other matches that Ding is capable of finding them, and the fact that he didn't just highlights that they're both human, both under extreme pressure and that it's not just mindless computation.

I'm not sure we disagree at all. Gukesh's strategy throughout the match was to constantly ask difficult questions and the surprise really was that Ding didn't fold earlier.

I guess I was just disagreeing with your opening sentence, the rest was spot on.

So why call it a horrible finish?

Because as a chess fan and just as a human being my heart goes out to Ding Liren who seems like a genuinely likeable and nice human being who has been open about the tremendous struggle he has had with mental health etc since winning the world championships. To pull himself out of a hole that deep and play really great chess for 13 and 9/10s matches and then lose it with a blunder at the last second is awful.

And I say that as 100% someone who wanted Gukesh to win from the beginning, which is a result I think is great for chess and I think is “objectively correct” in the sense that he has played better chess and has been (apart from Magnus Carlsen and his compatriot Arjun Erigaisi who is also a complete monster) the story of the chess world for the last year.

Because the ending was pretty meh. All this excitement, and then Ding just flubs up an end game that most super gm's should be able to draw against stockfish.

The best finale's are often when two players at their best duke it out, and one comes out on top. This was simply not Ding's best.

I disagree completely. In the eyes of some modern fans, the popularity of engines and eval bars has reduced chess to an intellectual and computational exercise. It's too easy to say "bad moves" and "blunder" when Stockfish is giving you all the answers!

In reality, chess is a fighting contest between two flesh-and-blood humans. And that's what we see throughout this exciting match, and in this final game.

Gukesh won because of his greater fighting spirit throughout the match, which is as it should be. (Similar to how Ding played the daring move ...Rg6 in the final game of his match against Nepo.)

That isn't how most appreciate sports. People are hoping for the contenders to be at the top of their game towards the end of the championships. Nobody says "Hey, at least this has a human touch! I'm sick of basketball video games." if the NBA finals are relatively boring one year.

I think maybe "that was a absolutely horrible finish" got interpreted as saying that the win wasn't well earned. That's not how I saw it at all.

> That isn't how most appreciate sports. People are hoping for the contenders to be at the top of their game towards the end of the championships.

I'm not sure how "hope" plays into it but few of the sports I follow allow for contenders to be at the top of their game towards the end of the championship. People are tired or playing injured, and it never occurred to me to believe that this made their performances less amazing.

You must not follow the NBA or MLB then. One of the major narratives of the most recent NBA postseason was how unfortunate it was that the Eastern Conference was so plagued with injuries that it limited the quality of competition, and it frequently has been a major narrative.

Off the top of my head the recent Milwaukee Bucks championship was noted as happening in a context where their strongest competitor, the Brooklyn Nets, were catastrophically compromised by injuries. The Cleveland Cavaliers were almost laughably compromised by the loss of Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love against the Golden State Warriors in 2015 due to injuries. And then in 2019 it was the Golden State Warriors turn to suffer terrible injuries as they lost in the finals to an improbable underdog in the Toronto Raptors, which spilled over into a lost season for Golden State the following year which created an opening for the Lakers to win it all in the covid shortened 2020 season.

Meanwhile in baseball injuries are so pervasive it's almost a question of which team doesn't suffer injuries.

So I think it's a broadly accurate characterization of sports fandom at least in North America, and it's bizarre to venture into a conversation like this to talk broadly about sports fandom excluding such major examples that speak to this point.

> You must not follow the NBA or MLB then.

On the contrary, the NBA was one of the sports I had in mind when I made my comment. (frankly I'm not clear which part of that comment you found factually incorrect, such that you would write something like this)

> One of the major narratives of the most recent NBA postseason was how unfortunate it was that the Eastern Conference was so plagued with injuries that it limited the quality of competition, and it frequently has been a major narrative.

I am sure that is a thing a human, or sports journalist, might believe, so, point taken. One certainly could view the "quality of competition" as being "compromised" if the athletes and teams are not functioning tip-top at the end of the season. A person could enjoy watching the competition less as a result. I think my original comment makes it clear that I don't view things that way. I find the fact that someone else might view the matter differently as being... not especially noteworthy?

> Meanwhile in baseball injuries are so pervasive it's almost a question of which team doesn't suffer injuries.

What part of few of the sports I follow allow for contenders to be at the top of their game towards the end of the championship. People are tired or playing injured made you believe I needed to be reminded that people get injured playing baseball? Not upset, just baffled.

Looks to be the difference between few and a few. A small parse error that wasn't caught later on. I've had that happen to me.

there's definitely the odd game where a player suffers an injury in practice or early in the game, and a potentially close matchup becomes a disappointing wash as a result.

Good point. Still there is something along those lines in a really good matchup. The teamwork often thrives when the individuals are tired/injured.

I've seen people leaving a game when it's locked in a shitty meta. An unsatisfying world championship is one of the indication for that

> Nobody says "Hey, at least this has a human touch! I'm sick of basketball video games." if the NBA finals are relatively boring one year.

Complete strawman. You are one of very few people who think this match was "relatively boring."

I'm not seeing the strawman. You did say:

>In reality, chess is a fighting contest between two flesh-and-blood humans

And they weren't suggesting that the match was boring so far as I can tell, but more generally, they were responding to your idea that high level play is intellectualized in a way that loses the human touch.

By "strawman" I'm referring to use of "relatively boring" in the NBA parallel, as if that's a generally accepted description of this match.

Again I don't see them saying that about this match.

They were using that as an example to illustrate that this distinction, between intellectualized high level play on the one hand, in a human touch on the other, is not something that shows up in the context of the NBA. They were not suggesting this was a description of the chess match between Gukesh and Liren.

I was suggesting that this year's chess championship was relatively boring, and that’s OK. However there are multiple dimensions between boring and exciting and in some ways this match was very far from relatively boring. And I wouldn’t say that it is boring without the relatively qualifier, no way.

It was relatively boring on the level of the momentum shifting back and forth. That is, if you sampled the game every hour, you would find more excitement in the median on some other chess championships. That doesn't make it less impressive or the outcome less inspiring, or the story of the players. Momentum shifting a lot makes for an exciting championship. The 2018 championships between Carlsen & Caruana were much more exciting IMO, despite having a more predictable outcome also IMO.

Now, really none of these championships are boring, unless you start comparing them and introduce the term relatively boring. All the players are playing with spirit, or else they wouldn't be playing at this level. Any perceived methodicalness doesn't make some player too much like an AI.

Of course, not everyone is going to agree with me, and I accept that. I also think that it’s totally fine that Magnus Carlsen stopped participating, but another commenter thinks it’s a travesty. I agree to disagree.

I think it was thematic of the match:

The whole time, Ding had failed to seize advantages and been low on time — something criticized by GM Hikaru Nakamura. In this final game, those two things caused him to blunder in a complex endgame seeking a tie against Gukesh who had nearly an hour of advantage on the clock and been relentlessly pressing the whole match (and continued that pressure, into the endgame).

That’s a strategy, not mere misfortune. And personally, I’m glad it was decided in the match rather than tie-breaks.

It felt much more like forced error than unforced error or, thematically, the closest thing I’ve seen to a milling strategy in chess. Just make them keep drawing until they’re out of ideas.

It was a forced error in the sense that Ding forced that exact endgame for no real reason and then fluffed it with 10 minutes on his clock plus increment. What's incredibly sad is that Ding clawed his way back into the match in game 12 by doing exactly what you describe - he created a horribly cramped position, refused to release the tension, and eventually Gukesh ran out of good moves and lost without any egregious blunders.

I'm explicitly not a chess player but this reminds me of Dave Sirlin's "Play To Win" where he starts by explaining that if doing a thing makes you not lose, you do that, and then eventually by definition you win.

That kinda works for fighting games, since draws are rare, as the players need to either double KO or timeout with the same exact amount of health. Chess is very different in theres (at least) 3 ways to draw, and it's very easy to fumble a won position into a draw.

Not in chess, where the (by far) most likely outcome of a world championship classical game is a draw. When Magnus Carlsen played Fabiano Caruana for the world championship, EVERY classical game was a draw and they had to go to tiebreaks, which no longer makes it a classical tournament.

chess has a lot of draws, and plenty of drawish strategies. Playing to not lose will not at all lead to winning.

Yes and if all you can do is draw in the world championship then you’ll be in trouble when the faster time controls are brought in to resolve the match.

I disagree. There were forced errors in this match, yes. But this final game's endgame wasn't an example of that. Ding collapsed of his own accord.

Wow great synopsis. Sounds like Ding just ran out of mental stamina just before buzzer.

I have little interest in chess and no real knowledge in its current events beyond mainstream media coverage, but always enjoy lively writeups of the matches like this one.

> imaginative computer preparation

Are people training AIs to play in the style of the people they're going to play against so they can practice?

No, they use chess engines to find interesting lines of play that the opponent presumably is not prepared for. Say, an odd move that looks weak, but a few moves later is back at even, and the player that pushed down this line is now prepared to play on from there (with perhaps further traps laid ahead), while the opponent is somewhat in the dark and has to analyze the situation correctly.

Has anyone tried playing one of these "chess engines" against a human?

We may have an opportunity to cut out the middleman here (no pun intended).

To be clear the high level chess engines are so far above the best humans that there isn't a point anymore.

Engines are unbelievable in open positions, so GMs who know that they are up against an engine usually just pawn lock the center and wait for the engine to start sacrificing in order to avoid a draw.

That might have worked once, but modern stockfish has an estimated elo of 3642 compared to Magnus 2882. I don't think any human could get a draw against it these days.

i think theres something interesting for chess engines to cut out a middleman.

the players have "seconds" who are doing things like finding and picking prep for the players to memorize. currently, theyre GMs/super GMs who are somewhat playing against each other, but i think you could train an AI look at lines for ones that the opponent might miss, or that would trip them up

Weirdly enough, that's a thought that I'm having in financial trading as far as using AI for idea generation.

At first glance, charting the future possible moves of a chess game is just a huge branching tree, but humans (and engines that don't have the power to fully brute force the game) use filters to trim the tree. Some lines are dead ends, even though they may play out for a while (sacrifice both rooks and the game is over, no need to follow those branches). There is also a sort of heat map and gravity to some of the lines, in that there are likely directions that players will travel in (paths where you don't give away too many pieces, where the king isn't exposed, etc).

Machines can help highlight specific areas where there are branching points that lead in many viable directions (these are the critical decision-making points in a game of chess), that are deceivingly hidden behind lines that look dead for a while.

It would output a sort of heat map, and the search could even be tweaked for certain variables, such as for number crunching complexity (if the opponent is a bit weak there) or pathways into brutal end-game scenarios (if the opponent is weak there).

This is a microcosm for the real world as well. Lines through time have reflexivity and can reinforce each other. A geopolitical situation can reinforce an economic situation which then feeds back into the political situation. Take something like inflation which tends to do that. But when humans normally look at the world, they see in a sort of normal distribution that is oversimplified. It's commonly understood that humans downplay the left and right tail risks (as explained by Taleb), but it's more nuanced than that. It's more like the chess game, in that there are these hot spots of complexity and interesting situations throughout the forward probability distribution.

Some of these hotspots are deceivingly hidden, because only one multiple possible situations unfold do they feed back into each other and create something emergent.

Back to an arena like trading, participants tend to track each possibility line independently of one another, which makes sense because humans are siloed and specialized to some degree. Technology like machine learning has the ability to synthesize this data and spit back out hot spots, just like in the chess example.

The short-sighted conclusion that most will have is to say "Great! Let it give me a list of trades, and then we can back-test it." when I'm pointing out is that there is a lot of value when it comes to idea generation and efficiently mentally traversing the future probability space. Spending your time focusing on interesting places. Maybe a traitor would look at an implied outcome distribution and realize "Hey, I think that this little part of the curve is underpriced. Maybe I should hedge this specific outcome, because I have exposure to the inputs that feed into this underpriced emergent possibility."

Of course, the trading example is also an abstraction from the raw real world, but it's a bit more close to reality than the chess example. Really, I think that this approach to using machine learning as a tool could be applied to many areas. Even more creative areas could potentially benefit from it.

Are you serious?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_versus_Garry_Kasparo...

Has anyone tried playing one of these "chess engines" against a human?

Million times a day ?

Normal, regular chess engines are sometimes called AI. Or at least they were back in 1997. And people have certainly made themed variants of these chess engines, which purport to simulate certain famous chess players.

Right now you can visit https://www.chess.com/play/computer and play a Hikaru-themed chess engine - or a MrBeast-themed chess engine.

I don't know how deep the simulation goes, though - they might all just be the same engine with a different difficulty setting and a different icon.

The bots are tuned differently to be a bit more tactical or more positional, and they have an opening book that follows the preference of the chosen player.

If anyone’s interested in what a GM’s thought process on the game looks like there’s a really great recap here which was produced without engines [1] https://youtu.be/97RZHG2rcbc?si=O41BRi2EC8Ryu0v2

[1] With the intention of trying to as honestly as possible replicate the situation for the players where obviously they have to think for themselves and don’t have access to an engine while playing.

you can also take a look at anish giri's recaps: https://youtu.be/EQDpuPzps88?feature=shared

he streamed watching most of the openings, and kept his own eval bar on the side, occassionally checking his lines against strong engines

That's the most exciting and well written description of a chess game I've ever read!

You must not read very much chess writing!

My best guess is he started feeling some time pressure and really wanted to trade for a clear draw, but crucially miscalculated the tempo and position of the K vs KP ending.

I'm not a grandmaster though, so I can only vaguely speculate since that's how I would have lost :)

> After 14 games of 4+ hours each It had gone from being a dead draw with him a big favourite in tie breaks to all over in a few seconds.

_Very_ casual chess follower here. Why was Ding a big favorite in the tie breaks? My takeaway from the match was that Ding seemed to always be worse on time, so wouldn't a shorter time control favor Gukesh?

The World Chess Championship uses rapid and blitz matches (much shorter time controls) for tie breaks. Gukesh is 46th in the world in rapid, and 82nd in blitz. Ding is 2nd and 6th.

Ding is rated over 100 points higher in rapid than Gukesh. The choice to spend time early was a choice by Ding and Ding's team. Ding is better at faster time controls than Gukesh, Gukesh was better prepared.

I don't know much about chess, but this sounds like a downright unpredictable, exciting finish.

> imaginative computer preparation by both sides

There was almost no preparation from Ding side. It was very weak.

What a great breakdown, nicely done. You should be a chess commentator if you aren't already!

That said, Gukesh deserves credit for keeping the pressure on in a seemingly drawn position

All of sudden = time pressure brought on by opponent.

Put yourself in Ding's place. OMG

[dead]

Chess really baffles me

Most of the more sophisticated people I know are completely disinterested in sports. Not that they dislike sports, it just never occupies their mind. Sports is a purposeless activity for kids

Chess is different from sports in only one way: the loss of very intelligent capable people who could be helping to create the future.

Chess is even more tragic than the olympics.

I'll take smart people playing chess any day over those people choosing to go into the tech industry where they spend all their time building addictive products that drive ad impressions.

I'd love it if they put their talents to work by going into medical research, chemistry / materials science, or even political science and try to take meaningful steps towards making the world a better place. That route seems to be a lot less popular these days and obviously compensation has a lot to do with it.

Disagree, but I have a funny anecdote in your favor.

My university's top Dota player was a 2.x GPA slacker who did nothing but play games all day. Guy was going to continue wasting-away by going to a mediocre foreign grad school, but he got his admit revoked because of stupid visa reasons.

Life hits him in the face and for 1 year, he quits dota and studies. Goes in, bags 99.99 percentile score in exam with 300k applicants and ends up at my country's HBS. That's the power level dota was holding back.

To be fair, a team of chess grand-masters tried to form a dota team once, and got destroyed. So maybe dota is harder. Speaking from personal experience, I haven't done anything in life that's as all consuming, rewarding or as destructive as dota.

Don't do Dota kids. Try drugs.

Funnily one of the two times world champion is a doctor who only plays competitively whenever there's world championship (And not the regional tournaments)

> Guy was going to continue wasting-away by going to a mediocre foreign grad school

Wow. Who knows what amazing stuff that guy could have done if he'd escaped to a new place, with new people, in an exciting new culture, rather than the very close-minded one you describe here!

> Chess is different from sports in only one way: the loss of very intelligent capable people who could be helping to create the future.

Being good at chess does not mean you're "very intelligent". Most of the top players are good at chess because they are very good at memorization & pattern recognition, those are the actual abilities of a high level chess player. Does that translate into other intellectual pursuits like theoretical physics or math? Not really.

Grandmasters aren't going to be dumb by any stretch of the imagination, but they aren't super-intelligent geniuses, either.

Okay, let's say we built the future to your satisfaction, and then what? We would probably play games. How much future do you need to build before it's okay to enjoy your time alive immersed in trivialities?

Not everything has to have a purpose.

That most of the society thinks so is a failure of our systems.

Intelligent people who create the future must choose that path for themselves. Chess isn't preventing people from making that choice. If chess didn't exist, most chess players would probably just be playing some other game instead of STEM careers or whatever your definition of creating the future is. Also plenty of very strong chess players do ultimately wind up pursuing other career paths. And then there's also the fact that a good number of the top chess players have shown themselves to be highly dysfunctional people who are unfit for the professional world such as Bobby Fischer and Vladimir Kramnik.

The stereotype of the absent-minded professor is a great illustration of how norms view the world. What WE see as focus, norms see as .. not conforming?

Focus is crucial. To be great at chess you need to focus on it. To be great at creating the future you need to focus on it. By definition you can’t focus on both

If you aren’t sacrificing, you aren’t focusing. I’m not saying you need to sacrifice everything else. But definitely you need to choose very carefully.

ps. Creating the future is easy to define. Look at OpenAI, Starship, Optimus, mass scale photovoltaic manufacturing in China. Someone had to make those happen and it took focus

Nevermind all that we learned from teaching chess to a computer. Ya a total waste.

We literally had a chemistry Nobel Prize winner crediting chess for making him curious about thinking and intelligence and ultimately to find DeepMind.

A tradition (of being highly dysfunctional at the top of chess) kicked off in great style, I would say, by the legendary Paul Morphy.

Yawn. This banal criticism has been leveled against chess and really the pursuit of any game since the dawn of recreational activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Morphy

There's no reason to imagine that a talent for chess equates with a talent for "creating the future."

It's also worth noting that very few people make a living from playing chess, so they're probably still available for your future plans.

"To play chess is the mark of a gentleman. To play chess well is the mark of a wasted life"

Honestly this sounds like a knock-on effect of the US's constant erosion of the glue of community. Church attendance down, sport attendance down, theater attendance with friends down, it's all the same.

Social norms can change this -- the Netherlands has a very similar culture to the US, But one thing people asked me while I was doing my M.Sc. there was just, "what is your sport?" ... and I got asked it enough that I eventually got one, and then for a good period of time I managed to completely kick my obesity, until I moved back to the American Midwest.

The introvert/extrovert axis also plays a role in what sort of "sport" is right for you, of course, and many of your sophisticated friends still hit the gym or jog etc. -- those are just sports for introverts in my view.

Sport time is not, time that could have been better spent elsewhere. It's like how cleaning the sink isn't time that could have been better spent elsewhere -- if you don't have a clean sink, you'll pay the interest in terms of "ugh what's that smell [...] oh it was the standing water in this bowl" and "crap I don't have a clean glass, hm, I wonder if I can just buy compostable cups on Amazon so that I don't have that problem..." etc. So as an extrovert, I can go once a week to play soccer with friends in a small league, or, just hear me out, I can get lonely and then do what I do when I get lonely, which is pop on Physics Stack Exchange and answer physics questions so that I can feel Of Use. You pay the interest either way.

Chess-time also is no great loss for the world. The top-level world chess community is something we have numbers for -- 17k titled players, 2k grandmasters, 4k international masters beneath that. They are pursuing something that exactly fits the nerdy way that their brain works -- memorize openings out to 20 moves deep, obsessively study and re-study their failed games to understand why the computer thinks they lost and how they might make better mistakes in the future, and for them it HAS to be competitive and they HAVE to have that immediate feedback of trying a new idea in the same narrow niche of ideas that they became a super-expert-in, against another top player who can punish their new mistakes.

It's just not a set of transferable world-changing skills. It's like, my brother became single-mindedly obsessed with pool in High School. This persists even though he now runs a small company operating a strip mall. This was just his thing, he loves that there is no upper bound to how much control he can have over the cue and the balls, using the spins of each to control the layout, and precisely planning a course through a 9-ball break and setting himself up for a clean sweep through the game. There was no world in which some "world-changing create-the-future" lifestyle, would have felt as much of a glove fitting his hand to him, as this did. And it is no great loss for the world that he found the glove that fits his hand. It's not like the strip mall would have become an American retail empire rivaling Amazon, if only he had spent his nighttime hours working on the mall instead of on his life passion.

For comparison, probably most of the people in the bottom 10% performance bracket at Google are being told and pressured "you need to do more, more, more, you're gonna get fired if you keep those low numbers up" and at 180k employees, that amounts to 18k people that, unlike top chess players, probably _could_ flourish and do better in some smaller scrappier company, but because America doesn't have a social safety net to speak of, they feel like "well I got the dream 6-figure job, I better hold onto that until my knuckles are white because if I got fired, Bay Area rent and cost-of-living could bankrupt me in 3 months." And that's literally just one megatech company, not even talking about the world of people Graeber argues are doing "bullshit jobs" etc. etc.

Remarkable to watch the reactions in real-time, of both players and fans from India at the moment the decisive move is played. https://www.youtube.com/live/5-uuDuGQLQA?t=14497s.

Only started following chess due to the covid shutdowns, much for fun from a fans point of view than I had imagined it would be. Having the computer evaluation at the side really helps novices like me to know what's going on, interestingly a case of superior computer players helping as mere mortals to appreciate the game.

I used to watch a lot of Go. I watched live as Lee Sedol beat AlphaGo in one single game in the last match a human could feasibly compete against AI. Against all odds, and knowing AI had overtaken us, Lee Sedol found a move to get one last victory. [1]

But I never saw anything like the crowd hype from the clip you posted, lol. This was next level in terms of the energy in the room. Very fun, thanks for sharing!

[1] https://youtu.be/mzZWPcgcRD0

That’s a fantastic video - to see both of them see it in real time is incredible. The visible emotion from both is really something.

The winning move is at 4:01:45 for anyone looking (like I was).

Just curious: The comment you're replying to had the link with timestamp 4:01:38 which is basically just before the move happens; is that not enough as it is?

Sometimes the YouTube iOS client does not seek to the timestamp. I haven’t been able to replicate it but perhaps that happened.

The reactions were my favorite part because I can barely follow the actual chess.

Wow, that's a really fun video -- thanks!

Watching the live reactions from both players and fans is always such a powerful part of these events

Wow. Thanks for this links. This is amazing.

Wow. What a match. Been watching with my son, a chess lover since we started watching the Magnus-Fabi match. Now, my son loves his chess club and has retired me from playing :-)

Two thoughts:

1) Gukesh took Ding into the deep water the entire time. Few people realize how draining chess is, especially at that level for this time control. It's beyond gruelling. Only programming is more difficult ;-)

2) Gukesh had an extraordinary advantage. His mental health and resilience over the course of the match were a testament to it. And, then, his graciousness, thankfulness, and humble joy demonstrated the Way. It was That which Gukesh first thanked in his post-match interview with GM Mo. It was how he first began each game.

And That was the difference. That said, being 18 didn't hurt either :-)

"Only programming is more difficult....". Programming is definitely easier for me. In chess, my ego gets in the way. I hate to lose.

Writing good prose can be similarly taxing.

way more imo

Programming is easy. There is no opponent!

Rust's borrow checker?

Perfection is a difficult foe, and requires a fanatical devotion to even match, and there are levels upon levels of perfection.

...although that means you can't wear your opponent down. The computer will always still be there, not doing what you want, no matter how long you draw things out, it will never screw up and start working because it's tired. But I agree that programming is (usually) easier than chess, certainly at these levels.

When you’re programming it’s an open book exam where the opponent is reality. You have all sorts of resources available to you and even the computer itself can help you find problems in your solution and you generally have as much time as you need.

Chess is a closed book exam where your opponent is another human and you have a fixed amount of time to answer questions and managing that is as as important as asking and answering questions. The question asked is who prepared better and who understands the game better and playing the man is a better strategy typically than playing reality (ie they often make suboptimal moves to try to screw up preparation ideas).

Different kinds of taxation but programming would generally be easier because there’s not as much pressure.

> you generally have as much time as you need

That's hilarious. I wish you had been my manager :-)

It reminds me of that quote by the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, about the wooshing sound deadlines make as they fly by him, or somesuch.

Nicely said, friend.

It all depends upon the problems you are solving, and they are only bounded by your own creativity.

That sense of gratitude and respect for the game and his opponent

First of all, I have the greatest respect for the two individuals who played their hearts out in this event.

Personally, I'm on the side which thinks that this format is a total stagnation. Maybe the new no-increment under 40 moves is an improvement, but overall it does not count. I agree with Carlsen that the format has to be drastically changed to determine who is the better player. Much more games, shorter games. Fischer said a long time ago that chess is dead. Considering how deep some of the variations go into theoretical territory, I can surely relate. Magnus has also expressed that it's very hard to find novelties. I'm also totally on the side that Fischer Random (chess 960) has to be included in this tournament. I believe that ultimately it will happen - sooner or later. Magnus also said that he thinks that his match with Caruana was of extremely high quality - those 14 games were all draws. I totally understand why Magnus didn't want to defend his title. On the other hand I can't comprehend how FIDE let this happen because a lot of people don't think of current tournament as high as they maybe should be, just because Magnus is not participating. That's a shame. Not on Carlsen, not on chess. On FIDE.

> Personally, I'm on the side which thinks that this format is a total stagnation.

I was with you until this WCC.

In almost every game, Gukesh took Ding out of prep extremely early. It wasn't always a success for him either! Leaving the opening book typically means you accept an objectively-worse position, but one that your opponent has to spend a significant amount of time finding the right ideas in. Even in the cases where Ding found the right idea, Gukesh put him in serous time-trouble as a result.

Yes, many of the games resulted in draws. But they were extremely sharp and imbalanced, and in virtually every game one side of the board (typically Gukesh) had a serious advantage and very strong attacking opportunities. The resulting draws were due to not finding the right ideas in time (and very likely both players psyching themselves out of the "obvious" correct move) rather than inherently boring and drawn positions.

Overall it seemed to be an extremely effective strategy for Gukesh. But it was also actually exciting to watch unlike some previous WCCs where almost every game was likely in prep through the first 20+ moves and where the resulting positions had ample drawing chances for both sides.

This lacks some context. Gukesh took Ding out of prep bc Gukesh prepped for 7 months, while Ding prepped for 3 weeks and basically wanted to retire from chess. Ding would be out of prep by move 8 as white and be an hour down on time very consistently.

Gukesh repeatedly played opening lines that went out of book shockingly early. No amount of prep can prepare you adequately for someone willing to go off script on move 6.

That is what high level chess has been for years: preparing lines where you have the disadvantage if your opponent plays perfectly, but it uses up their clock and gives you opportunities to punish mistakes in their calculation.

The same technique is used in ameture level chess too, although these are more likely to be piece gambits than merely positional ones.

There's a recent video where Caruana says he doesn't believe Ding prepped at all!

Ding says he wants to continue playing for a long time after the final. Sounds like you’re getting defensive.

Really funny people complaining about classical chess, I don't know which games they have been watching.

Nepo Magnus game 6, Nepo Ding many many games, Nepo Caruana draw on round 14 of candidates. ALL OF THEM WERE TERRIFIC GAMES.

I don't understand what people mean by stagnation

I agree, watching the World Rapid and Blitz Championships is more intense and interesting (IMO), for sure. That said, it's much more difficult for a non like me to follow those games; I can't even imagine how tiring it is for the commenters in those shorter time formats. Commenting those games is its own very specialized skillset.

I find it funny when people say it's not on Carlsen when it was entirely his decision to not compete. We already have rapid and blitz world championships that are separate. This is the classical world championship and I think the format is both exciting to watch and decently fair.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe for someone that watched every chess game all year that might be the case but I watched all 14 of these games and thought they were fantastic.

of this tournament, i think magnus would have loved to play against ding, and not at all gukesh.

prep memorization remains a bit of a cheat where its your memorization and prep picking thats playing the game, rather than actually playing the game.

i think a randomly chosen "start from x position, with y time, and z increment after move c" for some 30 games over two weeks would do pretty well. Steal the formats from engine chess.

I think after the performances seen in the match, it is fair to say, that Carlsen would probably have won against both of them, at some point taking the lead and they might have never evened the score after that.

I think something like game/30 would be better, but I’m not terribly edumacated on the intricacies of classical chess time controls.

Absolutely. It would be AMAZING if no prep was possible. Memorizing engine lines 20 deep is nothing to be proud of.

That's the appeal of Chess960 / Fischer Random / Freestyle Chess / whatever they're calling it this week.

I enjoyed the entire match and was surprised to see Ding putting up such a good fight given his poor form going into the match and Gukesh's great form after leading India to gold at the Olympiads.

Ding was inconsistent at times but had moments of brilliance where he played like an engine, unfortunately he also exhibited poor time management throughout the match and failed to capitalize on his chances where he instead seemed content to play for draws whereas Gukesh would take every opportunity to play on, even when it would require taking a slight disadvantage.

Unfortunately the last game was lost more than it was won, as Ding was looking for every chance to draw where he gave up a pawn in order to trade queens and a pair of rooks to go into an equal pawn down end game, which he eventually blundered under time pressure. It's a common sentiment in chess that to get a draw you have to play for a win, ultimately Gukesh's tenacity to keep games going and applying constant pressure eventually rewarded him as history's youngest Chess World Champion.

At 18, this is no small thing. Kasparov was 22, I don't see Gukesh's record being broken for a long while

With 12-year-old GMs running around it's hard to know how long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_prodigy

There's a decent gap between GM and world champion to be honest.

Absolutely, a huge one.

But still, chess is a game that favours young people that have more energy and can calculate more, and that peak is achieved in one's late teens.

But also a big gap between 12 and 18, so who knows

Those statistics blow my mind. For reference, Bobby Fischer became a GM at fifteen.

Online and computer chess have changed things. 12 year old kids generally can't travel to tournaments, but they can play against other strong players or against the computer online.

Fischer lived in New York, and therefore could play in the Manhattan Chess Club.

Yes, they amass thousands upon thousands of games at a very young age. I did the same programming my C64 in 8th-10th grades. The hours just fly by, doing what you love.

One other factor is that 3500-level chess engines are freely available for anyone with the net to analyze every situation, every move.

And then there are the streamers like Hikaru who teach chess so brilliantly. He is a true one-off, to be that top-level and able to live-comment his own blitz games. It is an underappreciated and completely unique talent, and enlightening for the chess afficianado.

Yes, they didn't know this back then that it was possible. If they had known, they would have certainly made Fischer a GM much much sooner

There's also a decent amount of controversy around really young GMs. Basically that their parents game the system by choosing official tournaments with burnt out GMs with low ratings so they can get their norms easier. Mishra recently had a lot of backlash from top GMs with those types of accusations. If that's true, those players will likely never reach the top ranks, but who knows.

I've seen the same suggested of Sergey Karjakin, and he made it to the top (and I've seen it suggested that it helped him get to the top, that being a GM sooner got him more access to top trainers sooner).

We're still relatively early in the chess engine era and there was an explosion of new young talent discovering chess in the covid years. I expect to see more young chess prodigies.

Didn’t Kasparov say that he doesn’t consider this a World Chess Championship since the best player isn’t playing?

Gukesh has beaten Magnus before. Sure Magnus is an demi god of chess but we haven’t seen him play this format against gukesh and that’s entirely his fault.

What is the deal with Gukesh's last name? It's officially listed as just D on his FIDE profile. I asked a couple Indian coworkers who said it was probably just being abbreviated for being long, but honestly it's not that long of a name and Gukesh isn't from the same region as them. I've read elsewhere that Telugu speaking people don't really use last names.

Gukesh's last name is Dommaraju. It's his family surname. He is a Telugu person by birth, but he grew up in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. In the state of Tamil Nadu, people often take their father's given names as their last names, and always write it in abbreviation. Indian last names often disclose caste, and due to a widely influential movement in TN (see [0]), most people of TN gave up using caste-based surnames, and switched to solely using father's names. But, the father's name is often written as the first letter of that name, and the person is called like that in official places, too. Among friends, colleagues, teachers, etc., only the given name ever is used.

As Gukesh grew up in Chennai, he used his last name like that. His parents also use one name only.

Anecdote: my distant cousin, a Bengali, also grew up in TN. His parents also Tamilized his name. His name was, say, Rama Dass, and he went by and put his name as D. Rama, or Rama D.

When their family moved back to Bengal, his name was Rama Dass again.

Srinivasa Ramanujan's given name was Ramanujan, and Srinivasa was his father's name.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periyar

Naming conventions vary, and when you consider names across history/geography, it is the present-day Western convention of "GivenName FamilyName" that is unusual and needs explanation.

Generally speaking, someone is born and at some point days/months later, their parents start calling them by some name, while the rest of the world might also doing so at some point, possibly different people using different names. For purposes of interacting with administrative systems yet another name may be adopted. Only when it has been necessary to distinguish between multiple people with the same name do secondary names start getting used, either occupational descriptions (John the Baker vs John the Carpenter vs John the Smith) or places where they came from or were noted for (Jesus of Nazareth, William of Orange, Leonardo from Vinci), or disambiguating with parents' names (Mohammed bin [son of] Salman, Björk Guðmundsdóttir [daughter of Guðmund]) — these are all conventions still existing today, with occasional funny consequences when someone imagines one of these to be a "family name" that persists from father to child across generations. (See "what would Of Nazareth do" about people—even otherwise educated ones—treating “da Vinci” as such.)

Coming to India: there are different conventions. Typically just a name and an initial letter (placed either before or after the name) to distinguish between multiple people (in the same classroom say) with that name. When a boy was named "Anand" by his parents, because his father was "K. Viswanathan", he became "V. Anand" in school records, and this is the name I remember reading articles about this chess prodigy in Indian newspapers. At some point the international press started spelling out his first name and called him "Viswanathan Anand", putting his father's name first, and even started calling him "Viswanathan" or "Vishy" — he used to object and point out that they were calling him by his father's name, but eventually he just got used to it and even began to like it. In this generation, this boy was named "Gukesh" by his parents, and was "D. Gukesh" in school records and news reports, but somewhat wisely they decided for international sources to put the initial after the name, so "Gukesh D", and for those who cannot handle just an initial, spell it out to "Gukesh Dommaraju".

(You have had other replies claiming this to have something to do with Tamil Nadu anti-caste politics. While no doubt that movement discouraged the use of caste names as surnames, the initial convention pre-exists any of those political movements and exists in parallel in other states too. E.g. "S. Ramanujan" was the name on his early papers before the movement being spoken of. Some families/communities use surnames (in the sense you're thinking of) and some don't; that's all there is to it.)

> What is the deal with Gukesh's last name

In Tamil Nadu, an initial is often used in the surname due to the Periyar/Dravidian movement in the 20th century. Furthermore, plenty of people in Tamil Nadu historically didn't even use surnames.

Gukesh is Telugu, but his family are Chennai natives. Chennai becoming part of TN instead of Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh was very politically charged in the early days of India.

Ah, so it's an anti-caste thing?

Historically yes. But in 2024 it's just a naming convention now. Being Telugu in Tamil Nadu, they probably adopted Tamil naming conventions to make life easier.

States in India are basically different countries, and the existing state borders for most states don't make sense.

Reminds me of falsehoods programmers believe about… https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

This is good.

My distant cousing, a Bengali, named, say, Rama Dass, also grew up in Tamil Nadu. His name was Tamilized to D. Rama or Rama D.- even though Dass was a family surname.

> States in India are basically different countries, and the existing state borders for most states don't make sense.

No. Huge oversimplification there. It's not definitely like oblasts of Russian Federation. Although they are not close like OR and ID.

> No. Huge oversimplification there

I mean culturally and administratively.

Heck, in my ancestral state, non-natives cannot purchase land.

> It's not definitely like oblasts of Russian Federation

It absolutely is.

Heck, my ancestral state (HP) is a merger of 3 entirely distinct ethnic communities (Lower Himachalis who are the same community as in Jammu division, Upper Himachalis who are closer to Garwhalis and Kumaounis in Uttarakhand, and Changtang Tibetans in Lahaul/Spiti/Kinnaur who should be merged with Ladakh) with no rhyme or reason because it was a bunch of Himalayan hill states that where conquered by the Sikhs, Nepalis, and later British in the 19th century and merged into Punjab, and this has caused political deadlock.

This is a common situation all over India. There's no reason that Purvanchal is lumped with Awadh, that Rayalseema is lumped with Kosta Andhra, or Barak Valley is lumped with Assam.

My Pahari family has no traditional culture in common with a Gujarati from Saurashtra or a Bihari from Bhojpur.

These ethnic (and linguistic) differences do impact internal mobility outside of Tier 1 cities.

India has been very successful thanks to it's diversity, but most states still hold colonial era borders which exacerbate regional inequalities by giving regional interests an ethnic or even religious tinge (eg. Seemanchal and Bihar).

You took an extreme example (HP). But only a handful states in India have that restriction where outsiders are not allowed to buy land.

There are many all-India services and people are transferred all across India. Many work in different states than those of their home state. Same Constitution, same legal framework. Same religion.

I think if you go deeper you will notice the unifying characteristics rather than superficial differences among states of India.

And while I differ with you on Indian states being very far aways from different Russian states in terms of similarity/differences, I definitely agree with your opinion that Indian state borders don't make much sense.

> You took an extreme example

True! It was a rhetorical point, but similar examples abound in the Tier 3/4 cities and small towns that represent the majority of India.

You're still at the mercy of the DC's office and the associated State PSC to let the transaction go through, and local bias will abound. And in these kinds of places, if you get into a land dispute, the entire apparatus will rally behind the local even if they are in the wrong, because the local can leverage their local family/social network.

> Same Constitution, same legal framework

Absolutely, yet dependent on state PSC to implement. And local customary laws can often take precedence over central rules and regulations due to Article 13(1).

> There are many all-India services and people are transferred all across India. Many work in different states than those of their home state

There are, yet at the end of the day, Home Bias remains, as IAS officers posted outside their home state are significantly less likely to climb up the ladder and tend to get hamstrung [0].

Anecdotally, in the early 2000s, my ancestral district got an ethnic Tamil DC/ADC, but they were completely frozen out by the local panchayat, MLAs, and MP because they were viewed as an "Outsider", and the man was quietly transferred within 2 years and an ethnic Punjabi officer was brought it (still an "outsider" but viewed as "closer").

> Same religion

At a broad level Hinduism sounds unifying, but in action, the regional variations are massive.

It doesn't matter as much to sharyi/city folk, but local deities and practices vary massively and what one regions treats as "Hindu" can appear entirely alien to another region.

Tamil society doesn't bat an eye at cousin marriage while that would be grounds for a honor killing in HP/PB/HR. Meanwhile, in my region we revere a number of Muslim mystics like Lakhdata and in some cases even practice Muharram (Hussaini Brahmin), but to a Hindu from Gujarat or Karnataka, that would appear Muslim.

> I think if you go deeper you will notice the unifying characteristics

There absolutely are unifying characteristics, but I think these are much more prominent in Tier 1/1.5/2 cities which are melting pots.

Most Indian urbanization is being driven by Tier 3/4 cities which tend to be much more insular.

-----------

Big picture, I think differences are significant when outside the Tier 1/2 cities, but this is part of the power of Indian federalism.

The loosely coupled nature of Indian federalism allows regional ethnic identity to continue to exist with a unified "Indian" identity and act as an outlet to ethnic insurgency.

This is how ethnic insurgents in NE India were able to merge into the BJP in the 2010s, and regionalist and linguistic parties such as Shiv Sena, DMK, TDP, TMC, etc are able to create loose political alliances and coalitions with "national parties".

Also, this imo is a major reason why BJP has been so dominant over the past decade - they are able to co-opt localist movements into the state branch of their party.

The INC used to be able to do this, but these local leaders split off to create their own parties by the 1990s.

[0] - https://www.nber.org/papers/w25389

> that Rayalseema is lumped with Kosta Andhra,

They share a common language ?

Sure (though imo, even the difference between dialect and language can be significant - try listening to Bundelkhandi as a Hindi speaker, you won't understand it even though Bundelkhandi is counted as "Hindi" largely for political reasons), but entirely different caste structure and political social structure historically speaking.

Coastal Andhra had been under direct British rule since 1823 and before that largely under the Northern Circars, but Rayalseema was a frontier land between Mysore, the British, the Hyderabad Sultanate, and plenty of local kings and factions.

All over India, the British administration largely just co-opted the preexisting administration and governance, which wasn't professionalized until the early 20th Century. This meant that functionaries of the pre-existing states were co-opted into local administration.

Ofc, in princely states the difference was even more significant.

But my argument is that it makes sense for Rayalseema to be split off from Coastal Andhra, as the administrative history is distinct, and even the history is distinct.

Not everything in India is/have to be about an individual's caste at all.

The most plausible and likely explanation is that it is just shortened initials of surname for convenience.

Typically indian teachers have a habit of turning surname to initials to deal with multiple students having same names. Those names tend to be sticky and students just refer themselves with initials in such contexts.

I'd be very much surprised if his official government IDs have initials and not surname.

Not everything about India has to be about caste but this is definitely about caste even though it probably happens on autopilot now.

A social movement throughout TN, has made people give up their surnames and instead only mention their initial, so that no one can tell your caste easily. And everyone just follows that convention now. A remarkable example of a societal wide movement making real progress on societal issues without requiring the force of government.

> I'd be very much surprised if his official government IDs have initials and not surname

Not necessarily. He's from TN. Initials are fairly common.

yes in an abstract way. Same for Vishwanathan Anand (name and his fathers name with no surname) or even Sundar Pichai (name and fathers name)

Not at all.

As a South Indian My name (in public school records) till I was age 21, was <name>. <initial>

I was forced to pick the last name for passport purposes and typically i either have the option of attaching my dad's name or my dad's town name.

My wife, didn't even do that and when she migrated to US, she was <name> LNU (short for Last Name Unknown). While applying for greencard we decided it was too much of a hassle for her and she attached her father's name

> when she migrated to US, she was <name> LNU (short for Last Name Unknown).

Interesting!

The loser of the previous World Chess Championship match was Russia's Ian Nepomniachtchi. His last name means "one who doesn't remember [his last name]" -when asked by the Czar's census taker!

I guess this kind of thing happens in many countries.

Yes. I am Telugu and family name is usually not written or called out. So he would usually write D. Gukesh or Gukesh D. Most people also have a sort of middle name for example D. Gukesh Kumar. Middle name is spelled and used for calling together with main name.

Wikipedia says his full name is "Gukesh Dommaraju".

IMHO Gukesh is a great role model for everyone. Determination and humility shining right through. Though I really like Ding, it just felt that Gukesh was pushing more for a win in all the games and probably deserve this slightly more.

Now hope that Magnus comes back into Candidates and we we have a Gukesh vs Magnus match in 2026.

The way that the game has been played and FIDE ignoring his feedback about format makes me think that’s unlikely. Magnus has been fairly critical about the quality of play in many games and that the play has been boring. He’s also talked about the importance of making space for the next generation of talent to have something to strive for because of how dominant he still is.

What a match! It was sad to see the blunder by Ding. Reminded me of Nepo dropping pieces in the tie-break last time. But its a great sportmanship by Ding as he said its a fair outcome given all the games they have played.

For anyone that wants to test their mettle, the FEN of the key position in this game was:

B7/8/4b3/4kp2/5Rp1/6P1/1r6/6K1 w - - 16 55

Give yourself 10 minutes and 30 seconds increment as White and see if you can hold against Stockfish on maximum difficulty.

It was quite sad to see Ding lose at the end. But it's been a very tough year and half or so. Precisely since he won the championship.

I was quite sad at the way some very top players spoke of him.

But the way he came back and almost took the game to tie breaks was unbelievable as a Ding fan.

At the end of the day, it's generational shift that chess is witnessing.

Almost written in destiny that it all started with candidates about how Alireza played against Gukesh and where it is now!

Since there seem to be a lot of chess nerds in here, I have a question.

Why didn't Fischer chess ever take off? A lot of comments in here amount to "he went slightly off book and it was amazing!".

Wouldn't Fischer chess take the game to a whole new level, making it so that all the opening books are useless and the midgame requires much more improv?

Many different reasons:

1. The biggest one is probably that there is already so much interest and depth in regular chess. "Everyone" focuses on it, so that's what your friends know and where you can find competitions and community. This leads to a chicken-egg problem where it hard to kick it off. It's basically like another board game.

2. Some opening positions in Fischer chess are quite awkward: The pieces are on squares where it takes a while for them to come into proper play. This can make the opening phase quite unsatisfying to play. You need to make a lot of extra moves before you actually get into the interesting parts. It's not necessarily more "fun" to play this way than regular chess. There's also some positions which are much better for white (although it's on average more balanced I believe)

3. IMO, regular chess is easier for lower-rated players. The choice of openings don't matter so much (either way the game is decided by someone hanging a piece), and it's a lot easier to follow existing games. In Fischer chess it can be even harder to know "okay, what do I do?", while in regular chess there's both general principles and systems to follow. This means that most newer players keep being exposed to regular chess instead of Fischer chess.

> Wouldn't Fischer chess take the game to a whole new level, making it so that all the opening books are useless and the midgame requires much more improv?

Magnus Carlsen is promoting and advocating for Freestyle Chess (same game as Fischer chess, but with different name): https://www.freestyle-chess.com/. Maybe it'll take off.

Interesting, I read that link. It looks like they specifically call out Fischer chess: "all matches are played under Fischer-Random (Chess960) rules,"

So he really is just trying to build a tournament format around Fischer chess. That's pretty cool. I hope it takes off.

I don’t like it because you can get some starting position that’s not balanced, or that one of the players has memorized the openings for. So it feels much more luck based than regular chess, whereas luck is pretty much the antithesis of what chess is all about.

Luck is what makes it interesting for spectators though. :). Just like with other sports -- a lot of it is skill but there is always some luck involved.

Introducing: Balanced Fischer chess. Just randomly sample from the starting positions that are more balanced than regular chess.

It’s still annoying if the starting position is one that only one of the players is deeply familiar with. Too much luck factor. They should go the shogi route and get rid of draws if they want to improve chess so much.

I’ve thought about this quite a bit. I don’t think this possible. Draws happen when two players are very closely matched that the difference in their play is not large enough to lead to a definite outcome. Currently in chess, 2800 like Magnus would draw say 70% of the time against a 2600 and win the rest (making up numbers here). The only way to solve this problem, is if the game magnifies differences in capability and enables a certain side to win. Making a game that does this, is probably very hard and would not look anything like chess.

Any other solution would face the same issue that chess faces now. For example let us say, we imbalance the sides a bit more so that white has a more definitive advantage. That just means that players will alternate winning and you’ll have to play a lot of games before anything definitive happens. In a technical sense there may not be draws, but if it just alternates 1-0, 0-1 and so on, is it better than 0.5-0.5 and so?

Shogi allows early momentum to snowball (since a captured piece is your piece). This means white has a much more definitive advantage in Shogi as white has the tempo, so I don’t think Shogi will fix anything, it will just cause see-saws. In fact I think fixing this chess issue, is far harder than it looks, and may require coordination to move all chess players to a new tactical game that magnifies differences in playing capability far more than chess which already magnifies it quite a bit.

Good points yeah, I wasn't imagining shogi to be a game with early momentum for white since I don't play it but it make sense.

It still might - that is an ongoing debate at the top of the chess world.

For instance, Magnus Carlsen, the world number one by rating, is a fan of Fischer chess aka Chess960.

From the Wikipedia page on Chess960:

> Hence, on average, a Chess960 starting position is actually 18.2% more balanced than the standard starting position.

I'm also interested in the underlying distribution (not just the average). For each of the 960 starting positions, what is known about the first-player advantage? (I'm pretty sure these would just be estimates because a full solution is still infeasible.)

On average. Some starting positions are much less balanced than regular chess.

>> I'm also interested in the underlying distribution (not just the average).

> On average. Some starting positions are much less balanced than regular chess.

Yes, I expect variation, which I why I asked. :confused-face: At the risk of over-explaining, when I said "distribution" I meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_distribution

What does "much less" mean, quantitatively? For each position, what is the white-winning probability if you used e.g. Stockfish or some suitably adapted tool?

I would love to see e.g. a histogram where the x-axis buckets the estimated-advantage-to-white and the y-axis counts how many of the 960 starting positions fall into the bucket. What shape might it take? Lacking any particular insight, I would guess normal.

Doesn’t seem fair to have unequal starting points.

Because tradition is incredibly important.

It seems like Team Ding's strategy was to survive until tie breaks, where he would have been the favorite. Given Ding's form, they probably didn't believe he could reliably win games in classical versus an in-form Gukesh.

As such, Ding went for draws in multiple games with clearly superior positions that someone like e.g. Magnus Carlsen would have played out and won. I'm sure they regret that strategy now.

It was painful watching Ding Liren blunder the rook and realize what he had done.

It was. But he had 9 minutes vs more than an hour for Gukesh. The entire match has been Ding defending miraculously, I thought it was a matter of time before he eventually failed. The fact that it happened on the last moves of the last game, it's definitely hard for Ding, but fair for Gukesh IMO.

Overall I agree, the entire match seemed to be Ding defending. Gukesh kind of failed to capitalise the whole way through though.

wrt the time, this is kind of a bread and butter endgame. Ding shouldn't have blundered here with 10 minutes on the clock. Highly unlikely he would have blundered this two years ago.

Well it sounds like an instance of "your keys are always in the last place you look, because then you stop looking"

This was game 14, they were tied almost the whole way, and this was the only time Gukesh won with the black pieces.

Before the match, the expectation was that Gukesh would take an early lead and never look back, with the match ending before game 14. This morning, the expectation would be that Ding would make an easy draw with white (as he has done in 5 of his games as white already, winning the other), and it would go to tiebreaks.

Having the championship decided by a decisive final classical game is pretty rare. The last time it happened was 2010.

The match was more than one game

ding was attacking though. it skuat crazy that he was looking to play for a draw with the white pieces, when he was in a great position to play for the win earlier, before he forced a trade of all the pieces.

ding may have lost for a blunder late in the game, but i think he lost the game and match early, when he traded down to try to play for a draw.

gukesh played every game for a win

I don't get the "fair" argument. Would it be unfair if Ding did not blunder the rook? How so?

Presumably the classical world championship should be determined by classical chess games, and this was the last one before the shorter tiebreak games. Ding looked like he would’ve started losing more if there were more classical games, who knows though.

So the argument is some of the rules are unfair?

Agree completely.

Amazing to watch Gukesh as well as he realised the opportunity. At first confusion and disbelief, then excitement, joy and nervousness as he tried to calm himself down and take the win.

And the graciousness to keep his joy in humble reserve, knowing how much Ding would be crushed. Truly a young man of God.

"Sitting on his hands" to double check showed great maturity!

i felt for ding, even though i was cheering for gukesh.

i was so sure it was going to go into tiebreaks.

I was looking forward to rapid, wanted more drama.

In the end, Ding deservedly lost. He was constantly low on time; managed to play excellent in losing positions for the whole match but it took only a single mistake to lose the crown. One can do miracles only a few times before it fails.

Spoiler alert! I was planning to watch the recap without knowing the outcome, but I'm not that invested. Congratulations to the new champion.

This video is quite fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDtECNekJ-4

Why would you spoil match 14 for me like this T_T

You're not the first to say this here, and I've been trying to think if there's a good solution to the problem. The headline could be something like, "Chess world championship winner declared." But I'll be honest, I probably wouldn't have clicked on it without the "youngest" hook, which is exactly the problem you're talking about. I don't know. Tough problem :)

The solution is to stay off the computer, or at least news websites. Sports scores always get pushed into your face from unexpected locations

I empathize. The first thing I did when I opened my eyes this morning was watch a recap of the game, since I knew something somewhere (social media, reddit, youtube, etc) would probably have a headline that would spoil it.

Just the World Champion. Youngest FIDE World Champion (the title Gukesh just won) was Ruslan Ponomaryov, at 6681 days old. Gukesh is currently 6772 days old.

(And no, we shouldn't go arguing that Ponomaryov wasn't a real champion because the indisputably best player chose not to play sometimes earlier and created all that mess, because currently we're in exactly same situation.)

Undisputed world champion and disputed world champion are different things than someone choosing not to compete. If you can’t compete, doesn’t matter the reason or excuses you can come up with, you are just not the world champion.

So if Carlsen now would start his own chess association for whatever reasons, Gukesh's title would instantly diminish? No. FIDE champion is FIDE champion, case closed.

Terrible time management from Ding Liren in the most critical game of the match, leading to a very simple blunder. Painful to witness.

Apparently poor time management throughout the match, though I didn't see every game. It sounds like he was lucky to survive 6-6.

He wasn't, Ding has played some terrific chess during this tournament.

But honestly both players lack an end game killer instinct.

Worst WCC in the history of chess. I would have been able to draw the endgame in the final game myself ( 1800 FIDE ) just by shuffling the rook around. Apart from game one, Ding was a shade of his former self, and played most of the time to swap pieces even when he had the initiative.

Yes you would, after 2 weeks of playing 4+ hour matches, knowing Gukesh was playing not to draw all along since Liren is the better player on rapid/blitz (played in case of a draw), and having 10 minutes on the clock against your opponent's 1 hour.

Why would you loudly proclaim "youngest world champion in history" in the headline and then never mention his age at any point? I clicked the article specifically looking for the answer to "how old is he" and was thoroughly disappointed. Author is fired from journalism permanently.

Just in case anyone besides me was wondering, he's 18 (the article didn't say).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gukesh_Dommaraju

How come Gukesh got to sit in a really tall gaming-style chair which towers above Ding’s ordinary looking chair?

To me that looks like a power move designed to intimidate the opposition. Is there a story behind it or do they just get to choose their own chairs?

They can pick their own chairs.

Here's a really good explainer video of the blunder at the end. https://youtu.be/FJU4BXsZCvg?si=qC961oYH3wkB6Vyk&t=925

Two of the most humble, kind, professional players. And a great match.

It's quite surprising what the brain can do to people under stress.

Everybody, even chess amateurs knew that the rook trade was a blunder instantly, yet pressure can play such terrible jokes.

Well, Ding's prediction was right, it wasn't a short draw. Horrible end to a another pretty disappointing cycle. Ding's game 12 win to tie the match was a positional masterpiece but it ultimately seems fitting that his blunder decided the result. Hope he gets a long break from classical chess and finds his way back to enjoying the game.

Ding has nothing to be ashamed of. He fought like a true warrior. He was a great champion, with class and brilliance. I just don't think he was physically as strong as he could be, and that affects one's ability to think as they must at that level.

All said, tho, it was definitely Gukesh's time, and being 18 has some serious benefits in terms of recovery and stamina.

I don't think 26. a4 was fighting like a true warrior, it was more giving up half your kingdom in the hope that your opponent will then accept a peace treaty.

I can't speak to the subtleties of chess, but I did watch Hikaru's recap and he was of a similar opinion.

I still think Ding was physically and/or emotionally compromised to some extent. That's why I still consider his effort lionine, because his game 12 game was masterful and he was in it until the end. I hope he holds his head high.

At least they could mention the age...

Did Magnus not compete?

To add a little more color... Magnus, in recent years, has been expressing his dislike for chess under classical time controls, seeing it as a battle of prep vs prep at the SuperGM level rather than skill vs skill. He doesn't seem to be enthusiastic about doing that prep anymore, and that seems to have been a factor in his decision to no longer fight for the WC title.

No, he has been expressing his dislike for the format of the WCC. He has no major issues with Classical time controls.

No, he retired from the championship circuit last year which is why Ding was champion in the first place.

He had concerns over the format and FIDE was unwilling to make changes.

We're in a bit of a weird spot in chess right now because Magnus is still the consensus best player even though he's not the official champion.

No, he did not compete in the last one either.

I suspect, the results would have been different if he had.

Not an expert in chess, but I heard that the uniqueness in openings were an interesting characteristic of the match. Can someone explain this to me?

One of the worst-played matches in the history of the world championships. Both players made huge mistakes, decisive mistakes in previous matches, and a decisive mistake in this last one. What happened to Ding? Ten years ago he was playing great chess, which was a pleasure to watch. Gukesh was playing a nervous game, making mistakes by players much lower than his rating. At times it seemed like two Fide Masters playing. Terrible. Carlsen did well to give up the title, because any of the challengers for the title today would be no match for him.

Moral of the game, don't ever put white bishop in the white coner, or black bishop vice versa in the end game because it can be forced to sacrifice.

He is considering https://chessladders.com/ sponsorship deal.

FYI: Gukesh is 18 yrs old and the youngest World Champion. He is also the 18th champion, in its 138 years history.

Must be amazing getting started off in life with such an amazing title out of the gate

He didn't become a Master yesterday to say "out of the gate", in his eyes he's been playing chess seriously for "all" of this life, and professionally for half of it.

It's a weird thing to say to someone who overcame so much while still young. He wasn't given anything "out of the gate".

You should read about the amount of sacrifices he and his parents did. Chess is very expensive if you want to be a professional and progress to the GM title.

He's not "getting started," it's just that he's finished his first marathon while most 18-year-olds are just tying their shoes for their first jog

Congrats to Gukesh

Let's convert that chess knowledge to deep learning for more $

So that’s it for Magnus Carlson’s perfect streak?

Congratulations Gukesh! Amazing run, truly living a dream.

So does Magnus unretire?

I don't think so. He's still active, he just wants to play tournaments and not championships.

He's 18.

surprised guke.sh isn't taken

well yeah, but only because of Magnus.

For being the headline, they sure hid his age pretty well.

Not at the opening paragraph nor end of the article, nor photo captions near the top or bottom.

cmd+f "years" 0 results

cmd+f "age" 0 results

And scanning for numbers is useless since most of the article is chess moves written out.

For someone who has complained a LOT about this information not being readily available, you haven't put it here for us either.

You bothered to comment but didn't bother to help either. Here, I'll do it, Gukesh is 18, Ding is 32.

Do didn’t reply to the OP so I had to look one thread deeper

18. The answer is 18.

for anyone wondering hes 18

For anyone wondering about related facts: the oldest age someone had while being the chess world champion was 58 years [1].

https://www.chesspower.co.nz/chess-records.html#theoldest

So my son has 7 years to set a new record. (I’m not really expecting that, of course.)

I told him about the match and told him he only had 7 years to be the new youngest chess world champion and he told me that he didn’t want to be a world champion, he just wanted to play. I approve of this philosophy.

It's already too late unless he is playing at GM level already — testament to how absurdly good super GMs are.

thank you, I came looking for this as well and didn't want the predictable community drama of asking or pointing out how the article fails

thank you!

For context, legendary Magnus Carlsen was 23 when he first became world champion. Ding Liren, the other finalist and previous winner, is 32. The title holder before Magnus was Anand who first won the title at age 31 (or arguably 38, depending on your stance about the PCA). Kramnik before him was 31. Legendary Garry Kasparov was 22.

It's normal for the champion to get his first win in his early 30s. Getting it in your early 20s is how you become famous beyond the chess world. Doing it with 18 is seriously impressive.

The comparison to others comes with a caveat though. The best player in the world is not participating in the current WC format.

Why wasnt Magnus in this tournament? Surely this would be impressive if the headline was:

Youngest champion ever beats current best chess player.

Instead it's new champion crowned after legendary chess play does not partake in said competition

Magnus didn't show up because he more or less just doesn't give a shit anymore about classical chess.

He got bored. Won the thing 10 years in a row and just didn't fancy it anymore. That's really it - he's so much better than, well, everyone that he just didn't want to go through the stress of prepping for such an event.

I think he's not a huge fan of classical chess, prefers more dynamic, creative and faster games. He's effectively mastered classical chess and wants a new challenge.

> He's effectively mastered classical chess

Have you heard of Stockfish? Makes Magnus look like a child. Stockfish and the other engines arguably keep getting better too, and in the engine tournaments like TCEC they continue to discover crazy new lines. E.g.

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=4HQZSMZz_MY

That's Stockfish playing black in the Ruy Lopez, and the game is effectively over after 18 moves, against an engine rated 3692. Magnus' highest rating was 2882. Ratings aren't really sensibly comparable like that between humans and engines, but I'm trying to put it in a way that chess bros will understand.

The point being - neither Magnus nor the top engines who are leagues above him have "mastered classical chess". So your comment is very ignorant of the realities of chess.

Magnus is incredible, and dominated human chess, and I have immensely enjoyed following his games, for the record. Human chess and engine chess are both wonderful in their own ways.

What a strange reply. You're getting downvoted because winning the WCC 10 times in a row means by any reasonable definition that Magnus has indeed "effectively mastered classical chess".

If for argument's sake we entertain the point you were making, there'd still be no motivation for Magnus to continue in the WCC because it'd still be against humans and not engines.

Commenting about voting is considered poor form in the rules here, so if you could refrain from spouting your opinions as if they were verified facts, that'd be lovely, cheers.

Carlsen won the WCC 5 times. Where you get 10 from, I don't know. Perhaps your opinion on these matters is just another ill-informed hot take, but we'll never know for sure.

No, that is a totally nonsensical definition for anyone who's serious about games. I presume Carlsen would agree, to be honest, as someone who takes games seriously.

Dominating human chess =/= "mastering" chess. Mastering implies "completing", "finishing", "solving". Sure, he's arguably the greatest human chess "master" who ever lived, and I love his games (as I said), but the man isn't infallible, and in fact is roughly as far from Stockfish as I am from him.

Which is nuts, how good Stockfish is, when Carlsen is so good. But he's not undefeatable - the top players have beaten him (on occasion). Even the mighty Stockfish suffers the occasional defeat from lc0!

So this sort of youtube-chess-bro level of discussion is garbage, and I frankly couldn't care less what sorts of "votes" come in. The fact you bring that up says more about you than me, dear netizen.

>Where you get 10 from, I don't know

5 times, yes. 10 from is the fact that he held the title of "undisputed world champion" for a decade.

I think perhaps you need to take a break from your screen :)

You complained that I'm presenting my opinions as facts, and then you proceed to do exactly the same with your opinions ;) We're just having a discussion! Chill :)

OK, I meant 5 in a row, but I stand by my point. Your tone suggests I'm wasting my breath though, but that's fine.

"ill-informed hot take", "this sort of youtube-chess-bro level of discussion is garbage", questioning whether I'm "serious about games". Whatever your opinion is about "poor form", I imagine attacking someone's character or intelligence would also fit into that category :)

Magnus is bored of classical chess and doesn't want to spend 6 months every two years preparing for classical games against one opponent.

Same reason it was Nepo and Ding last time. Combination of he wants to give other people the ability to compete for it, him not having the same interest for what it takes to prepare for such a tournament, and FIDE refusing to adjust the format to make for what he thinks would be a more interesting tournament.

Seems like its not that big of an accomplishment relative to the way the headline makes it (obviously a big personal accomplishment). I figure 18 year old chess should have the mental abilities and maybe experience at that point to be able to rise to the top...

HAHAHA Only an HN comment could call the youngest person ever to do something would be said to "not that big of an accomplishment". How would you change that headline?

Not nearly as big of an accomplishment as that guy reducing latency by 3.7% on the legacy microservice at work

Hey now, that microservice happens to violate data protection law in 40 jurisdictions per second, that’s basically a criminal mastermind.

To really put it in perspective right now is the hardest and most competitive chess era in history thanks to computer-aided practice and international popularity.

It’s not the most competitive world championship though, since Magnus opted out of playing it. If previous champions had similarly opted out of defending their championship at the age of 30 then maybe the average age of champions would have trended downward and this wouldn’t have been the first 18 year old champion.

He’s only been playing chess for 11 years. That’s very impressive.

18 is young. It's impressive.

You think materially everyone over the age of 18 who plays chess ought to be good enough to be world champion?

... but you can infer from the HN post title that it's unusual.

Agreed. I think all the people who don't like my take i offer this. Blasting a headline like that typically implies like a 13-14 year old. This is impressive but its not some massive upset - 18 is a grown adult for all intents and purposes (brain still developing true…)

No one said very young. Youngest is a comparison, and having 6 years on the previous youngest is massively impressive.

Is it though? You can play so many more games now with computational aid and speed up your learning rates.

I'm impressed but this isn't the same as coming from another era -- this feels like technology pushing the learning rate for younger people.

Gukesh rarely plays online (he prefers OTB), and only began using computers for opening prep four years ago.

Does that make his achievement suitably impressive for you?

All intents and purposes not requiring the brain, then. Which one is chess?

The only people who consider 18 year olds fully grown adults are 18 year olds.

I suppose in the usual lichess watchers bubble, everyone knows who Gukesh is and how old/young he is :)

Why the snark? Is it so surprising that spectators following a world championship match in any sport would know something about the competitors?

Because HN is a different bubble so whoever posted this could have elaborated.

The article itself is written assuming everyone knows who Gukesh is and says nothing about him, just his most recent matches that got him the title.

Definitely written for a bubble.

The article seems geared towards people at least already somewhat invested in either chess or the world championship, given that it's on a chess website and everything.

That said, click either name in the article and you'll land on their respective Lichess profile, which prominently features their age.

Don't disagree it was annoying.

While this is no defense, clicking Gukesh's name when it was hyperlinked from the article led here: https://lichess.org/fide/46616543/Gukesh_D

Age and other info present.

My point exactly.

[flagged]

came to the comments to try and find the answer, still don't see it lol

someone answered it 1 hr ago: 18.

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

> Ah yes, chess, the game where people love to remember sequences.

You can remember openings. From the middle game, you have to "play".

I once randomly typed 'How to think like a chess grandmaster' or something to that effect in YouTube. And it was interesting how the whole they went about playing.

There are patterns. Like how to start(openings), endgames. Like patterns of movements well defined. You just have to read enough books, and play enough games to have them hard burned into your memory. They are not really thinking the way an ordinary person imagines. By and large a chess GM is database of chess games. And most of your moves are these.

Second part is having a strong internal monologue, which is basically a way of saying to oneself(silently)-

1. What happens if I make this move? Where is my game headed? Where is the opponent's game headed?

2. Does my move fit in to the patterns I already know?

3. Are my pieces in trouble? How do I save them? Or should I?

4. If I make these series of moves I can make check mate the opponent in k moves.

5. Which move do I make to take this opponent's piece?

6. Are there an obvious traps I can spot?

etc etc.

Like a never ending monologue/internal chatter. What if I do this, or What if I do that? What are knowns, unknowns? Same questions now from the opponents perspective. Like you need to develop these skills. And the ability to work this fast.

There are already broad moves that are supposed to be made. Like you move the horses as early as you can. You don't get stuck in piece traffic jams. The rook is supposed to be a endgame piece. White gives you an edge, as you can move that horse first, castling etc etc.

Mostly its reading a lot, and talking to oneself while playing a lot.

Any specific video(s)?

Listening to chess event commentators it's all sequences

Outside of the opening, Chess players tend to call them combinations, and it's not really memorisation as such, it's pattern recognition, and it's a very difficult skill to master.

Outside of the opening, it's not rote memorisation, it's a mix of pattern recognition and calculation. You have to spot familiar patterns, but from a "distance", and calculate whether the differences in your specific instance are crucial or not to the pattern.

Chess is incredibly difficult.

>>Chess is incredibly difficult.

Its not exactly difficult. Or more precise, It can appear difficult as people don't show how the work is done.

You see this even among the Math people as well. It appears as pure magic. But in reality its mostly understanding what the axioms and rules are. Then starting at some point, and making the most smallest atomic change possible to a thing and seeing it its consistent with the rules. Else move to making new change(s) and test if it works/consistent with rules. This can resemble working down trees of changes.

At the end its basically having the patience to sit for hours, and then days full of such hours- And then work things on paper(paper work). At the end you will find yourself with lots of paper work, basically trees of decision branches, that you made while making small changes.

Think of it like a trial of large change log. And forks.

When people see this from the outside, they only see the start point to end result, not all the decision trees. So there is a tendency to imagine the Math guy thought up a perfect solution in exact number of steps. The paper work is hidden and it all looks like pure magic.

When it comes to chess, more top people need to come out and show how they are working through their decisions. Their prep work, their though log etc.

Long story short, they are showing you a magic trick, like a excellent display of sleight of hand. Once you see the practice and the trick is revealed it doesn't appear as difficult.

I had to quit because I found it extremely frustrating. I could hardly ever win. And when I did it was from massive blunders, not from anything I did. I never had an issue with losing in other games, I'm not a competitive type that has to win. But chess made me feel like I had the illusion that I could win but in fact it was almost never possible. I also hate the characteristic that if you make one mistake you lose. You can never recover, whereas in tennis or basketball or something you can be ahead and behind and still have a chance. Chess is like that board game Operation, you make one bad move and it nullifies everything you did before that moment.

> Its not exactly difficult. Or more precise, It can appear difficult as people don't show how the work is done.

What is difficulty other than priori repetition of a sequence? Anything difficult can be trivialised to this requirement.

Exactly. I also believe a lot of these magic like fields in the current era sound so 'meh' largely because the mechanical processes behind achieving results is revealed.

>>What is difficulty other than priori repetition of a sequence?

Its not easy, but its not where it was either.

Only a decade or two back these things were restricted to nerds and was somewhat like rare occult knowledge. You had to be part of some club to even participate.

While you still need to practice a lot to work in the upper level in competitions and all. It no longer has a magic like appeal.

Yea played myself for a while but didn't want to remember 300 openings for both colors. Chess is only fun if both people are equally bad at it.

I never understood this complaint outside of pure snark.

Over the years I've noticed many games have pretty bad tendencies, simply because they've floated to the top through what essentially amounts to luck (also modern games have "balance changes" that often push novelty + profit over actual fun). However, most bestselling games always have that one core part that's pure beauty, and that's what people keep coming back to.

If you don't like opening theory, that's fine. There's plenty about chess to be enjoyed outside of memorizing theory.

I play chess tactics or alt gamemodes exclusively because of this. Not planning to be a chess professional. But the creativity is vast in this space.

If we want to make better games, first start by breaking down the core parts that are good and the core parts that are bad, then iterating on it, just like how many disciplines (both scientific and artistic) operate.

You don't need to remember 300 openings. Remembering openings is the most straight forward thing to study - you just need to remember them and then select in game as your opponent gets a choice as to which of those 300 you are playing as well. That is hard to do in practice, but it is easy to explain.

For most people you are better off ignoring all that though. Instead you should train tactics and endgames. Both are easy enough to explain, but it isn't useful to just memorize them. You have to see when they apply even though there are other unrelated pieces on the board. You have to see when they apply even though the pieces are in slightly different positions from what you studied. You have to see how they will apply after complex sequence of moves even though they don't apply yet.

You should probably pick one or two openings and focus on those rather than trying to learn every opening right from the beginning. Like almost every game, chess is more fun when the two players are equally matches. Playing online (chess.com or lichess.org) lets you play an opponent who is perfectly matched to your level.

They’re coming up with those on the fly, not repeating them from memory.

They are just showing alternate reasonable lines of play - some of what the players are calculating mentally.

Of course it's all sequences—any turn-based game is—but they're certainly not all "remembered".

Also as a great symbolism of our times: An Indian beat a Chinese. India is rising while China is already in decline.

India did invent the game (probably).

I am not happy with this result (quite the blunder deciding this match) and in general who played for the crown here. Ding is not in the top for a while now and Gukesh has rarely played in Top GM tourns. The silent champ (Magnus) is still around, winning tournaments.

"World champion" currently means "some lucky Top GM" and not "the undisputed number one".

If I follow your logic, why have a world championship cycle in any sport - chess, tennis, soccer, whatever?

We could just use the rating or ranking list.

Ok, admittedly, in blitz and rapid Ding is quite close to the top.

This was a great match overall, with a very dramatic/surprising end.

But I disagree with other comments that are describing the overall championship in a favorable light.

To me, this was some of the most boring chess I've watched. Ding was certainly trying to force draws in every game, which makes for some very unexciting lines. It's been suggested that Ding felt he had better chances in rapid formats, so forcing draws makes sense in that light. But it led to some extremely uncreative chess imo.

Reminds me of many of the Magnus vs Fabi games in 2018.

I agree! It's a shame you're being downvoted just for expressing your opinion. Come on HN, downvoting is not for expressing disagreement...

And yeah. People saying this was exciting chess are lemmings. It was absolutely not. It was yet another boring draw-fest. The format incentivizes prep and penalizes creativity and risk-taking. If my child got very good at that it would be hard to be proud. What a waste of human spirit! Why would I want to watch two extremely smart young men waste months of their lives on this for the sake of boring us? It's perverse. Let's move on to Chess960 already. THAT would be exciting.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

draws are plenty exciting. prep is not

in his defending games, ding got outprepped, but then consistently outplayed gukesh while being 30min to an hour lower on time.

ding played a fanstastic prep game in one round, but it was very creative prep overall, that ding played very creative defenses for to hold to a draw