After 12 Draws and a Day of Tiebreakers, Magnus Carlsen Beats Fabiano Caruana To Win World Chess Championship (nytimes.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: After three weeks, 12 straight draws and a day of tiebreakers, Norway's Magnus Carlsen finally retained the world chess championship in London on Wednesday with a victory against Fabiano Caruana (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), his American challenger. Carlsen's victory came in what amounted to sudden-death chess: a scheduled series of four so-called rapid games in which the players started with 25 minutes to make their moves. The speedier pace of the games, after the far more deliberate matchups of the previous three weeks, meant players were more likely to make blunders. And that increased the chance of a victory by one player. Carlsen won the first two games, then closed out Caruana in Game 3.

Caruana, 26, was bidding to become the first American champion since Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky to win the world title in 1972. The famously cantankerous Fischer forfeited his title in 1975 amid a dispute with the world chess federation, and the sport has been dominated by Russians and Eastern Europeans in the decades since then. The tiebreaker result was not a shock. While Carlsen, 27, and Caruana, 26, are closely matched in longer conventional chess games, known as classical chess, Carlsen had been considered the favorite in the tiebreaker because he has had better rapid chess results than Caruana. "It was the first time in the history of the world championship, which dates to the 1800s, that regulation play ended with every game a draw," the report notes.

Comments

Re:More Detailed Scoring

[Mal-2]

I immensely disagree.

First off, material imbalances insufficient for a forced win (like king-and-bishop versus a naked king) are as much a part of the game as draws themselves. So are stalemate traps.

Basically, elite-level chess has been headed toward draw death for a long time, but in the era of engines, the pace toward complete draw death has accelerated greatly as players can prepare much more thoroughly than ever before. Magnus is weird and generally prepares less than his opponent, but his instincts are so good that he dominates at shorter time controls (you should see him play Blitz, where he Berserks* almost every single game). This is now the determining factor in these championships, since he can seem to force ties in the classical time controls almost at will.

*Berserk: your time is cut in half, but if you win, you get an extra point (5 instead of 4, generally).

Re:Simple question

[alexo]

How does this affect anyone or than the two participants at all? Why should I or anyone else care about a chess championship? How does this solve any problems or make anyone's life better? There are far better things to be concerned with, like the impending war in Ukraine or man-made climate change. Priorities matter, and this seems utterly useless.

Why are you wasting your and every one else's time posting on /. instead of volunteering to peacekeeping missions in Ukraine or working on reversing climate change? Priorities matter, and this seems utterly useless.

So can anyone explain to me why a chess championship is worthwhile at all? I suspect I'll be censored to -1 because I'm not supposed to ask the tough questions, but someone needs to do it. Why would anyone at all consider chess championships a worthwhile thing? Rather than answer my important question, this will be swept under the rug by censoring my post to -1. Prove me wrong and answer my simple question about why I or anyone else should care about chess championships.

I could try making you understand, but I have better things to do with my time. After all, priorities matter, and this seems utterly useless.

Re:What next

[ShanghaiBill]

Yes, after rapid then blitz and if still even then Armageddon - white gets a slight time advantage, black only has to draw to win.

Magnus excels at speed chess, the faster the better. So it was widely presumed that he would have a bigger and bigger advantage as the games moved to faster and faster formats ... and that is what happened.

It is believed that he offered a draw in game 12, despite having a stronger position, because he figured a single blunder could cost him the championship if the game continued, and going to a 4 game rapid tie breaker would give him better odds.

Re:Make chess less theory and more fun

[teg]

Bobby Fischer felt the same way and proposed Chess960 which has a random initial board configuration for that reason:

In a 2006 Icelandic Radio interview, Fischer explained his dissatisfaction with the current chess:[575]

[In] chess, so much depends on opening theory, so the champions before the last century didn't know nearly as much as, say, I do and other players know about opening theory. So if you just brought them back from the dead they might not do too well, because they'd get bad openings. You cannot compare the playing strength, you can only talk about natural ability, because now there is so much more opening theory, so much more memorization. Memorization is enormously powerful. Some kid of fourteen today, or even younger, could get the opening advantage against Capablanca, or especially against the players of the previous century, like Morphy and Steinitz, easily. Maybe they'd still be able to outplay the young kid of today, but maybe not. Because nowadays when you get the opening advantage, not only do you get the opening advantage, but you know how to play the opening advantage â" they have so many examples of what to do from this position. So it's really deadly, it is very deadly... that's why I don't like chess anymore... It's all just memorization and prearrangement, it's a terrible game now. A very un-creative game now.

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

This is usually called Fischer Random, and the current world champion of Fischer Random is Magnus Carlsen.