What's fascinating to me as someone who has followed the game for a while is the evolution of engines and how their play has influenced human play. Stockfish versus AlphaZero was fascinating only because it showed that at the highest of highest levels of chess (3000+ ELO) - there are ways to trick engines and employ "human" strategies (for example, there was a game where Alpha "blundered": it sacrificed 2 pawns and ceded the center of the board to push a wing pawn that 25 moves later ended up blocking Stockfish's kingside development entirely). Incredible, but the flip side of this is realizing that traditional chess is essentially a solved problem to some degree.
From what I can understand, chess at the highest of human levels is just using an engine to find tricks and traps 30+ moves into a given match. Anywhere about 2000+ rating or above, most people will play a relatively fixed number of openings that have been explored to death time and time again. It's now about psychological hacks that can be be backed up by deep engine analysis. "If at move 45 in a Sicilian Dragon game I play sub-optimal move X instead of optimal move Y, my opponent might make a sub-optimal response which will open up a specific square or hang a piece 10 turns later according to AlphaZero or Stockfish".
I can see why Magnus is kind of bored by it.
To me, Fisher Random (Chess960) solves this by eliminating opening theory almost entirely. Crazyhouse Chess is also a blast, but it too is hampered by theory as there are fewer competent opening moves than standard chess and there's even less room for creativity. Crazyhouse960 is by far my favorite variation of chess, because there's no endgame to solve towards and little to none opening theory to draw from. Shame nobody plays it these days - if you're so inclined, come join over at PyChess.org and play a few rounds!
From what I can understand, chess at the highest of human levels is just using an engine to find tricks and traps 30+ moves into a given match. Anywhere about 2000+ rating or above, most people will play a relatively fixed number of openings that have been explored to death time and time again. It's now about psychological hacks that can be be backed up by deep engine analysis. "If at move 45 in a Sicilian Dragon game I play sub-optimal move X instead of optimal move Y, my opponent might make a sub-optimal response which will open up a specific square or hang a piece 10 turns later according to AlphaZero or Stockfish".
I can see why Magnus is kind of bored by it.
To me, Fisher Random (Chess960) solves this by eliminating opening theory almost entirely. Crazyhouse Chess is also a blast, but it too is hampered by theory as there are fewer competent opening moves than standard chess and there's even less room for creativity. Crazyhouse960 is by far my favorite variation of chess, because there's no endgame to solve towards and little to none opening theory to draw from. Shame nobody plays it these days - if you're so inclined, come join over at PyChess.org and play a few rounds!