Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time

https://www.chess.com/news/view/fide-world-chess-championship-2021-game-6

by Moodles • 5 years ago

292 157 5 years ago

Carlsen's grind game is peerless.

Well done to Magnus. To Ian. To the commentators. This was an unbelievable 'play' in three acts. A game for the chess books. Great quality match so far and I hope Ian comes back from this blow and makes a fight of it. I believe he will.

loh5• 5 years ago

It was an absolutely incredible match to watch live. Historical.

My jaw dropped when Magnus ignored his rook being attacked at the end in favor of the potential fork with his knight. It is ultimately what led to the sure win.

ganeshkrishnan2• 5 years ago

The match was already lost at that point. Two moves before that, Stockfish 14 has mate in 49.

jstx14• 5 years ago

That specific moment is actually pretty basic. You're right that it was a great match to watch though.

tanmay72702• 5 years ago

You mean Rf7 when he ignored the *pawn on e6 being attacked by the queen for a potential fork with the knight (Qxe6 Ng7+)?

jjbinx007• 5 years ago

Bit of a spoiler :(

I prefer to watch analysis of games from YouTubers like Agadmator or Jerry from Chessnetwork and discover who the winner was by watching the game.

I wonder if these long games are not particularly helpful. Most chess final games end in draws as players are reluctant to create an imbalance and instead play it safe. There tends to be more exciting games played in games with a shorter time limit.

I'm not advocating bullet but perhaps they could try 30 minute matches instead?

wadkar2• 5 years ago

Bit of a spoiler :(

I get your sentiment but this is really exciting news in the chess community. A win after so many years!!

LeifCarrotson• 5 years ago

"World chess championship has win outcome in longest-ever game" would be a great headline and wouldn't contain a spoiler.

Unfortunately, they're probably optimizing for views, and Magnus has a lot of name recognition.

ganeshkrishnan2• 5 years ago

You can watch the commentary by Judith Polgar. Of all the people I enjoy watching her live commentary because she has amazing insight into best moves and explains the reasoning behind it.

For few of previous matches by Magnus, she found moves that even Magnus had missed.

jpmoral• 5 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crhU-pg7Rvw

Skip to 12:48 for the start of the commentary, 32:15 for the start of the game.

iechoz6H• 5 years ago

Judit Polgár [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

hcnews3• 5 years ago

Yeah Judit/Anish and Judit/Surya combos have been amazing for the 6 matches so far. It helps that Judit is a Catalan player and Magnus is choosing her opening.

NewEntryHN• 5 years ago

This game is a counter-example of a long boring game. It was a long exciting game.

lvass2• 5 years ago

And unfortunate choice of news outlet. As a developer, I can't help mentioning how baffling it is part of the chess community keeps using a proprietary website filled to the brim on dark patterns while a better and free as in freedom alternative is available.

anoncow• 5 years ago

Are you referring to lichess? I second that if yes.

ajkjk6• 5 years ago

I think that chess.com pays some people to use their website on streams, etc.

Although Lichess isn't perfect and it's kinda annoying. One of the bad things about Lichess is how unrealistically inflated their ratings are; 2100 on Lichess is equivalent to about 1800 on Chess.com. Chess.com is much more similar to the FIDE rating and other real-world systems. Lichess is just super inflated for some reason and it makes it kinda hard to compare your progress to other metrics.

icelancer2• 5 years ago

Indy streamers do a better job in this case (and most, probably). GM Ivanchuk covers all games live on his Twitch channel, and is my choice for analysis.

toolz• 5 years ago

I can't get over how incredibly laggy chess is. It's the single reason I moved to lichess as I started on chesscom.

dubeye• 5 years ago

Do you use both? I regularly use both and there is definitely some aspects that li is not better.

jacobolus• 5 years ago

"It was the first decisive game in the classical rounds of a world championship in over five years."

I wonder if there’s some way other than time constraints to encourage higher variance moves.

bananamerica3• 5 years ago

I'm not an expert, but, from what I can gather, every time someone suggest a solution online they're immediately countered by multiple strong and sound counter arguments.

ARandumGuy• 5 years ago

There are plenty of ways you could do that. But then you would be playing a completely different game, and hundreds of years of theory and strategy would be gone.

varunprasad3• 5 years ago

The 5 year thing is misleading though.

It would have been 4 years if not for COVID.

And what it basically means is that there were decisive games 4 years ago, and then 2 years later (the World Chess Championship is played every 2 years), in the 2018 match between Caruana and Magnus there were no decisive games.

So essentially there was 1 match with all draws during the standard chess part of the tournament. And that match was between Fabi who is regarded as one of the players with some of the greatest prep and play in standard chess, and Magnus, who is really one of the greatest players, if not the greatest, of all time.

amalcon3• 5 years ago

The usual suggestions are things like making a draw worth 1/3 of a win instead of 1/2, so that positions with more variance actually have higher EV for both players. Obviously this wouldn't work for a match like the current one, though: if there are only two people in the tournament, it's still zero-sum. A lot of people also don't like this sort of plan in general for other reasons.

DarylZero• 5 years ago

Yes, they can change the opening position. This is done in computer vs. computer tournaments because otherwise it'd be all draws.

shawnz2• 5 years ago

Perhaps the title should be edited to remove the winner's name

Moodles• 5 years ago

Sorry about the spoiler :(

sillysaurusx• 5 years ago

You all need to watch GothamChess if games of chess seem boring :)

I love Jerry, and I do watch him occasionally. But https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhJl3BKA-n8&ab_channel=Gotha... is well done.

(If you do want to watch Gotham for this particular match, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoY5RSCi5pE&ab_channel=Gotha... starts the series, I think.)

jstx14• 5 years ago

Gotham's style isn't for everyone, he can get pretty annoying. One good thing to say about him is that he really gets how beginners think and he's good at highlighting the moments of "this is what a beginner would do and this is why the really good players do something else".

hcnews3• 5 years ago

Gotham is focussed on entertaining the masses and aims his content for folks below 1500. If you are closer to 1800-2000, you aren't going to enjoy GothamChess content much.

kilburn• 5 years ago

and if you want to learn then you should watch Daniel Naroditsky's videos (pick the series/part that suits your level) https://www.youtube.com/c/DanielNaroditskyGM/playlists

He also comments frequently, and keeps his analysis understandable to my amateurish level while having better insight than Levy. Unfortunately his comment for the world championship is in the Russian channel (although he's from the US).

tiffanyh• 5 years ago

+1 for Agadmator

Great Youtube reviews and explanation of strategy & gameplay.

shawnz2• 5 years ago

For those interested, his review is already online. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A8XpSCL2f_Y

thelittleone• 5 years ago

Rapid would be great and even blitz. Both game types offer a good intersection of being ease to follow and short enough to watch entirely for a large audience.

monkey_monkey4• 5 years ago

Is it really a spoiler? Or is it just "news"?

sleepysysadmin• 5 years ago

I'm not advocating bullet but perhaps they could try 30 minute matches instead?

Other time controls is already a thing. Personally a huge rapid fan. I think Fisher was right. The problem is just prep and theory. If we still have classical time but chess960 so there isn't 20 moves of theory memorized.

jfengel4• 5 years ago

What does "first decisive game in the classical rounds of a world championship in over five years" mean?

initialized• 5 years ago

lots of games at this level result in draws, this was a win.

NikolaeVarius• 5 years ago

I wonder if this is a limitation on how humans conceptualize Chess. Do games played with computers either vs human or another computer frequently end in draws?

If not, maybe there is some insight to be gained to raise high level play even more.

jfengel4• 5 years ago

That was the one thing I found distractingly wrong in Queen's Gambit. It completely glossed over the sheer number of draws. I'm a dilettante at chess, and even I know that.

(I gather that the number of draws may have been lower at the time, but they showed few or none.)

monkey_monkey4• 5 years ago

It's the first 'classical' (ie with full time limits) game that's had a win in the last 5 years of World Chess Championships - since game 10 of Carlsen vs Karjakin in 2016

gameswithgo• 5 years ago

The last five years were decided by shorter tie breaker games as the longer classical games were all draws

bonzini• 5 years ago

In 2016 the classical games were tied, but there were wins by both Carlson and Karjakin. Otherwise it would have been 7 years, since the previous world championship match was in 2014.

But titling "unlike the last time (and only the last time) there has been a win and it's also the longest game ever" would have been less clickbaity.

kjgkjhfkjf• 5 years ago

When Carlsen previously defended his title agains Fabiano Caruana, all the classical (slow) games were draws. The championship was decided by rapid games, where Carlsen demolished Caruana.

I love both playing and watching rapid chess, but I think it's better for the world championship to be decided using classical time limits. That way, we get more interesting games, rather than the indignity of top players blundering while under time pressure.

jfengel4• 5 years ago

Thank you for the explanation.

I think I agree with you. Chess is only a thing because people have played chess for a long time. Different time limits are a different kind of game -- neither better nor worse, but different from the things that made tournament-style chess popular.

Perhaps with computers it's time to retire the existing notion of chess tournaments. But people still seem interested, much as we still watch Usain Bolt despite him being outclassed by cars and even bicycles.

spoonjim3• 5 years ago

It means the first non-draw. Almost all classical chess games at the highest levels end in draws which has completely trashed the game as a spectator sport.

tehnub3• 5 years ago

It's a bit of an exaggeration to say "almost all" games at the highest level end in draws. I wouldn't have said that from my personal experience following top-level chess, and the data indeed indicates it's under 75% [0]—which is a large proportion, but not "almost all".

[0] https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-draw-rule-is-classica...

boomboomsubban2• 5 years ago

So now Carlsen is heavily encouraged to play for a draw in the next 8 games?

throwaway815233• 5 years ago

More or less yes, except it's 9 more games. The match ends if someone reaches 7.5 points, and Magnus now has 3, so with 9 more draws he wins the match by 7.5 to 6.5. Going into the last game the score is 7-6 so if Nepo wins then the match is tied and goes into tiebreaks.

CORRECTION (see below): this was game 6, not game 5 (I had lost count), so current score is 3.5 to 2.5, and there are potentially 8 classical games left.

boomboomsubban2• 5 years ago

I'm only aware of this through this post, but the website says Carlsen now has 3.5 points. So 8 draws.

junar• 5 years ago

This was Game 6. Magnus leads 3.5 to 2.5. There are only 8 more classical games remaining.

birken• 5 years ago

Yes, but also keep in mind Ian has a lot of agency. Throughout the first 6 games, he has had moments to make the games more chaotic, increasing the chances of one side having an advantage, and thus far he has almost always played calmer, less chaotic moves.

Now he will likely have to change tactics and enter into more aggressive and risky ideas. It should increase the odds of a decisive result one way or the other going forward, regardless of whether Magnus is "playing for a draw" or not.

wadkar2• 5 years ago

Vishy Sir during the end game commentary said that the engines say it’ll be a draw.

Where/which move did Ian make the mistake?

Anyways, hats off to everyone involved. Magnus, Ian, commenters, and the chess twitterati. What a game! ~8hrs!!!

monkey_monkey4• 5 years ago

From the post game interview

Q. What was the decisive moment?

“I don’t know,” he [Carlsen] says. “But it felt like at the end when I got [133. e6] and maybe there was still some miracle defense there, but it didn’t really feel that way. At that point I felt very, very good about my chances.”'

gpm2• 5 years ago

In the game theoretic sense, it was move 130... Qe6 which moved the endgame from drawing to losing. We knew that under perfect play the game had been drawn since 115... Qxh4, since that's the point at which the pre computed table of endgames has the position (which is also why we know the exact move where the game from drawing to winning under perfect play).

perihelions• 5 years ago

130...Qe6 was the "mistake" (if one dares call it that!) I don't think any commentators expected Nepomniachtchi to actually hold this mathematical draw; it's superhuman. (I was certainly rooting for him though!)

https://syzygy-tables.info/?fen=4k3/8/8/4PR2/5P2/6NK/q7/8%20...

"From May to August 2018 Bojun Guo generated 7-piece tables. The 7-piece tablebase contains 423,836,835,667,331 unique legal positions in about 18 Terabytes."

https://syzygy-tables.info/

icelancer2• 5 years ago

The game was drawn for about 30 moves but only Magnus had winning chances with piece overload. Ian had to play very precisely to preserve the draw, and he didn't, because Magnus is elite in exactly these situations.

thaurelia4• 5 years ago

This is why evaluation bars are misleading. Computer will say it's equal but for one side, every move is equal and for the other side, you have to make the only drawing move each time.

I wouldn't say that Ian made a mistake. That position was winning for white after pawn on h4 was traded. It's not Leela vs Stockfish, it's two humans playing. Defending with solo queen against RNPP w/ connected pawns is extremely hard unless perpetual check is unstoppable.

qw2• 5 years ago

The computer also does not take time limits into consideration. If the players could take as much time as they wanted, they might have been closer to the perfect match.

Maybe that would be a fun concept. A game where the players would start with 1 year on the clock?

hardwaregeek• 5 years ago

Utterly insane. Not only required a bunch of stamina but careful work to not trigger a draw.

karmakaze• 5 years ago

I liked this bit.

Known for always being quite fit, the Norwegian GM admitted this was a tiring affair: "Sure, but I think that's the way it is. As I said, it shouldn't be easy in a world championship match. You have to try for every chance no matter how small it is. Part of it was by design at some point that I thought I should make the game as long as possible so that we would both be as tired as possible when the critical moment came. That turned out to be a good strategy."

Turned the game into a sport. Which ended up paying off better than the counter-strategy of playing quick moves to apply extra time pressure. From the description it seemed like it could easily have gone either way, so clearly a win and yet by very narrow margins where replaying, if possible to go back in time, would likely yield different results.

typon• 5 years ago

I know that because Magnus won, people will be heaping praise on him. But it is incredible how well Ian kept playing engine move after engine move to defend in the end game, while trying to keep time. Unbelievable the level of chess that's being played here.

enneff• 5 years ago

Nepo is fantastic. And of course Magnus is brilliant. The game is at an all time high imo.

montblanc2• 5 years ago

I don't know much about chess but Magnus throwing away his queen like that (traded his queen + rook for two rooks), was that a common thing to do? Looked outrageous to me but what do I know.

umanwizard2• 5 years ago

It looks like he traded just his Queen for two rooks.

montblanc2• 5 years ago

Ah sorry my bad

DSMan195276• 5 years ago

A queen for two rooks is not too crazy, whether it's worth it depends a lot on the position. The naive piece worth suggests that two rooks (5 each) is worth more than a single queen (9), but in practice it's more complicated. I would say though, as someone who's not amazing at chess that was definitely one of the most significant moments in the game for me - Not that Magnus was making a mistake, but that he was creating a very big imbalance in the pieces which was going to make the game get a lot more interesting.

fullwaza• 5 years ago

There are values associated with pieces. Without considering the position, a pawn would = 1, Knight = 3, Bishop = 3.5, Rook = 5, and Queen = 9. I've not seen the game yet, but if he traded a Queen for 2 rooks that isn't such a bad deal.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 5 years ago

Modern engines value the pieces more, like knight/bishop ar 4.1, rook closer to 6 and queen at 11.

ajkjk6• 5 years ago

Not uncommon, but doesn't happen in most games.

YossarianFrPrez3• 5 years ago

I'm not a chess expert, so feel like I must be missing something. In the last move Black's king isn't in check? Was the loss due to time?

llimllib• 5 years ago

The player with the black pieces, Ian Nepomniachtchi, resigned because he saw his position was lost

YossarianFrPrez3• 5 years ago

Ah! Thanks a bunch for clearing that up.

Scarblac2• 5 years ago

The pawn wil advance twice and promote to a queen, after which the win is trivial (both squares the pawn moves to are protected, by the rook and the Knight).

In reply black can only try to give endless checks with his queen, but the white king can hide behind the Knight and they will end.

YossarianFrPrez3• 5 years ago

Great, thanks for pointing that out.

vittore• 5 years ago

Was rooting for Nepo!

pg_bot• 5 years ago

I feel like the 30 second increment is a bit cheesy given the time constraints of classical chess. Magnus was down to less than a minute but can just make some quick moves to add several minutes back to his clock. If you have an increment it should only be 1-2 seconds regardless of time format.

t-writescode• 5 years ago

That would be a different game mode, then.

This is the game mode that has been decided and agreed upon by all parties.

unixhero• 5 years ago

Typical of Norwegians to win.

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

Please... please don't use titles like this and spoil it for everyone.

Can we edit the title to say "Magnus Carlsen and Ian Nepomnitchi play the longest world chess championship game"?

yyyk2• 5 years ago

You have a good point, however HN etiquette is to be as close to the original headline as possible. Perhaps there should have an exception for sports.

Rexxar• 5 years ago

I can understand "spoil" for films, book, games but this is just sport news.

gpm2• 5 years ago

Chess is different from other sports in that watching it "live" isn't really the best way to experience it. Half the time you'd be looking at a chess board with no one around it, and you don't get to spend time thinking where you want to think, you have to spend it where the players decided to. Lots of people are going to instead watch the game later, at their own pace, watching someone analysis of the game, or doing their own. It's not entirely unreasonable to not want that spoiled.

adflux• 5 years ago

Change the title, wtf man?

nvr219• 5 years ago

Imagine lasting 136 moves against Carlsen... This is the guy who gives people eight free moves and still destroys them two minutes later.

WJW• 5 years ago

Nepo is not exactly a slouch either. There's a reason he's the challenger for the world championship.

routerl3• 5 years ago

Nepo has previously worked as part of Magnus's team (one of his "seconds"), and they have been friends who compete against each other since childhood.

It is likely that this is the most evenly matched world championship of the 21st century, as both players are extremely well-prepared to face each other at the highest level.

lavp• 5 years ago

If you’re talking under classical time formats only, I would disagree with you since Caruana and Magnus were at equal strengths coming in and the consecutive 12 draws proved that too.

The rapid tie-breaker was a different story however.

ssiddharth• 5 years ago

Magnus, the GOAT! What else is there to say? He’s an endgame god. Incredible win. After the 2018 championship match, I was pretty much expecting no decisive games here.

Tough luck for Ian though. It’ll be hard not to tilt after this but he’s a champion.

yyyk2• 5 years ago

Yet another example of the Carlsen special - drag a game to a long not-obviously-drawn endgame, and grind a win from that. Carlsen seems to have this match well in hand.

thom2• 5 years ago

Genuinely enjoyable and timely game. Out of prep early, machine evaluations useless throughout, plenty to play for and Magnus's quality and stamina showed.

I'm of the opinion that there's nothing to gain from fans having engines open during a game, despite working in sports analytics and ostensibly being on the side of the machines. Obviously engines have a lot to say about the modern game, and the match so far had clearly been dominated by excellent prep by both teams. But the excellent commentary on Levitov Chess World by the peerless Peter Svidler, Vladimir Kramnik and Evgenij Miroshnichenko was firmly of the opinion that we had a game on our hands throughout. They were correct.

I looked into some stats from the most recent TCEC superfinal just to get a feel for the error bars in engine evaluations. I think it's clear that even up to about +1.5, a draw is still on the cards between the superhuman engines, let alone humans. About a quarter of the superfinal games were decisive, despite us treating them as oracles. They're far more accurate in their draw predictions - in games that reached a 0.0 evaluation, only 3 ended with a win.

But in this game, even when we hit the tablebase results, where the result is a foregone conclusion for the machines, they still don't reflect the outcome of a human game, especially when the time controls start to get more stressful.

Anyway, what a wonderful, reassuring game. The players will be exhausted and it sets up a fascinating weekend of play. I couldn't be happier.

pedrocr• 5 years ago

I'm of the opinion that there's nothing to gain from fans having engines open during a game

Isn't this game a great argument for engines. Using a threshold of 2 to be well above your 1.5 this game had a total of 4 moments where one of the players had a very good chance for a win, and one of those moments was for Nepo:

https://analysis.sesse.net/

Having the engine show you that is a great complement to hearing the commentary from top super GMs. Why would you throw away that part of the coverage?

But in this game, even when we hit the tablebase results, where the result is a foregone conclusion for the machines, they still don't reflect the outcome of a human game, especially when the time controls start to get more stressful.

While true I think the solution is to double down and extract metrics from the engine search that reflect that. Not only the evaluation of the position but also how narrow the path is for white and black, to better understand how even if it's a draw from the machine's point of view, how hard of a draw it will be for the human to hold.

thom2• 5 years ago

If I were to make a serious point it would be this: sometimes a machine learning model shouldn’t be optimised for accuracy, it should be optimised for teaching humans an effective policy. Often those are the same goal, for example in opening preparation in chess. But often they’re not, and just having 1000 fans suggesting lines from Stockfish without really thinking about a position or its human contestants isn’t particularly edifying for me. It feels like shopping for great art based on the price tag alone.

So yes, I agree with your second point, the engines/metrics/stats could be doing more here. Just relying on the evaluation at ridiculous depths isn’t very interesting, and I don’t believe those scores necessarily translate to a very good chance to win. 33 Rcc2 would have been very hard to calculate and involves a double pawn sacrifice. 36… Bxb4 probably was the move most humans would have made but I’m still not convinced Nepo always wins from there. I’m sure there were other swings I’m forgetting. But outside of “this line exists at depth 30 if you see it” there’s a lot to learn about the components of that evaluation, like mobility and king safety etc that do mirror some of the human thought process and which you can apply yourself. I’d love to see more detailed metrics like that, especially if they could capture why the humans felt it was a very good Catalan for white with lots of options, and not just zeroes. But as of today, I’d rather hear what Kramnik thinks than Stockfish. And the difficulty of holding a position is far more accurate coming from humans than the machines (game 5 for example). Even when the computer thinks there’s only one move in a position, that’s often based on the opponent playing perfectly to a great depth afterwards.

I don’t want to sound too much of a curmudgeon here, I like engines, I write my own and of course I have Sesse and my own copy of Leela open most games. But I think too often they short circuit one’s brain, and I’ve found my enjoyment increases when I follow the human thought process and not the machine one. I’d love to see a richer synthesis of the two though!

alexeiz• 5 years ago

I also like Svindler's et al. commentary better because they don't resort to computer analysis. They explore ideas on the chessboard from the human point of view and that makes their analysis much better than what you see on chess.com or chess24.

routerl3• 5 years ago

Wow spoiler in the title? Wtf

rasulkireev• 5 years ago

1. Didn't realize chess content was popular on HN. 2. Don't understand why people upvote a spoiler. 3. Was watching the stream, and couldn't stop watching, was too nervous for Ian.

Magnus Carlsen wins longest world chess championship game of all time

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