Jeepers, talk about burying the lede until the last goddam paragraph.
tl;dr '[Fabiano] Caruana did show up, drawing his final two games to win the tournament (and its $100,000 top prize) with a record of 7-0-3, getting 8.5 points out of a possible 10. His victory at the Sinquefield Cup earned Caruana the highest tournament performance rating of all time, crushing even Karpov’s legendary result at Linares. Earth’s finest chess players couldn’t manage to pin Caruana with a single loss.'
Fabiano's performance rating was 3098. Karpov's Linares was 2985. Carlsen's top rating (not single tournament performance) was 2882, the highest yet recorded.
Fabiano's performance rating was more than 200 Elo points higher than the top-rated player. Karpov's 1997 performance was less than 200 points better than the then top-rated.
One thing the raw numbers don't take into account is ratings inflation. Look at Karpov for example. In 1979 he was the only player in the world rated above 2700. Now there are almost 50 players rated above 2700. So it's much easier to have a high performance rating now. For most of chess history it was simply impossible to have a performance rating of 3098.
The article doesn't take into account ratings inflation because it's more interesting to present your article about the best performance in the strongest tournament ever rather than a very, very good performance in a very strong event.
It was a good article and I'm glad I read it. The sub-headline (whatever that's called) does say, "One of the most amazing feats in chess history just happened, and no one noticed," clearly trying to get the reader to feel ashamed for not caring about Chess. Curious to hear what this news was, I kept reading and reading and reading... and reading and reading... and there it is. A guy other than Carlsen won an important tournament. Okay.
Just a bothersome sensational headline that really isn't needed on such a good article.
It is one thing that the headlines hide info to get a click, but what is with this whole style of articles not getting to the point? Is there a name for this atrocious style? Is it something being taught or just imitated lately?
I think I realize what it is now. It's this sites refusal to allow meaningful links. So we get crap like, "Faced with change, an all-female indie dev team evolves to a higher form" . This is a completely meaningless title for a link but I click on it anyway, find a wall of text, try reading a bit to see what it is about and...nothing.
It's not that I have a short attention span. I have multiple options and delving into an unknown article which has the only merit of being linked from hn just isn't good enough if they don't want me to know what it's about either.
At least if I have an idea what they're aiming for I can read it critically, but no luck there either. I despair that people can write so well and yet write such crap.
Daniel King's daily reports on several elite tournaments over the past few years are excellent. For anyone interested in chess, I highly recommending watching his archived videos on youtube.
Another user on YouTube who does excellent educational chess videos, including reviews of the games from this year's Sinquefield Cup, is Chessexplained, at https://www.youtube.com/user/Chessexplained/videos
But while poker is, at heart, a simple game, easy enough to grok that you can strategize along with Phil Ivey when he plays on TV, a grandmaster-level chess match is totally bewildering.
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Just as my brain is hopelessly puny next to Magnus Carlsen’s, so is Carlsen’s compared to that of a modern chess-playing machine.
I don't like these rhetorical techniques that debase one thing to show how great another thing is. There's a certain dishonesty in them, as if the author were qualified to make these observations.
There is a quantifiable difference between poker and chess, at the highest levels.
Both do require up-front study and memorization. But in chess, the amount of up-front study and memorization is orders of magnitude higher; the sheer number of openings, variations on openings, variations on variations, etc., followed by tactical/positional situations to study in midgame play... just dwarfs poker.
And both do require sustained concentration and high mental performance. But in poker there is a certain amount of forgiveness -- you can make a mistake and you just lose that hand and some chips, and still salvage the game with good play from that point. You can even make multiple such mistakes and still frequently be able to come back. But in high-level chess, even a single tiny slip is absolutely fatal.
Chess is a simple game with simple rules in the same sense that poker is. If a normal person could get inside Phil Ivey's brain, the strategy would not seem very easy to grok.
Hardly. First, it's not really a metaphor, more of an analogy; it could be reworded as:
My brain is to Carlsen's as Carlsen's is to the best computer's.
It's pretty obvious he isn't talking about his brain qua a biological organ. He's referring specifically to chess skills.
In that regard, the best computer chess engine in the world absolutely dominates the best humans. Even with a pawn or two removed as handicap, the best humans struggle to get draws.
There was a recent match played between the world #5 human (Nakamura) and the world #1 computer (Stockfish). Even when Stockfish played black, used a handicap of removing the b-pawn before beginning, and didn't use any opening books, Nakamura was still beaten.
The age of Human vs. Computer competition ended pretty conclusively in the mid 2000s, and the gulf has just widened.
This tournament was amazing! I was lucky because I decided to analyse the tournament through twitter, so every day I was capturing tweets from #sinqcup hastag and sending to elasticsearch + kibana and monitoring the tweets in real time.
If anyone is interested I can provide the tweets in json raw for sentiment analyse.
It would be interesting if Caruana keeps improving. The one thing Carlsen is missing is an opponent who is close to his level. Kasparov's reputation was made by his battles with Karpov.
Agree and I think if Caruana has the passion to be the best, he will be better than Carlsen.
"Caruana is earning a reputation as the most prepared player of his era—a man who studies everything and forgets nothing."
"If there’s a rap on Carlsen, it’s that he’s the anti-Caruana: He doesn’t prepare as diligently as he could."
"It’s as though he [Carlsen] serves underhand to just get the point started because he knows he can beat you in the rally. But Caruana has the booming serve."
Caruana has been in the top 10 for 2.5 years though [1], and hopefully he can breakthrough and firmly be someone who can give Carlsen a challenge. As a data point [2], it took Kasparov 2 years to get in the top 10, another 2 years to become #2, and another 2 years to become the best.
I say this as someone with fairly little experience with chess, and even less exposure to competitive chess.
This article did a poor job at quickly explaining enough of what feat was amazing and why to keep me interested.
After skimming the rest of the article (past where it lost my attention), it seems to jump randomly through both the biographies of the players in the tournament and of historical players who weren't even present at the tournament.
Was this amazing because of the high overall ranking of the players? Because that would strike me as profoundly un-amazing. Pitting the world's best in a sport against each other is fairly common, is that not the case in chess?
In a tournament featuring six of the top nine chess players, playing a game heavily geared towards draws, Fabiano Caruana won his first six games and finished 7-0-3. For perspective, current world champion Magnus Carlsen was second with a 2-1-7 record; his only loss was to Caruana.
This just doesn't happen. The last time anyone dominated such a high-level tournament was in 1994 (Anatoly Karpov at Linares).
That was an excellent summary, thanks. Even re-skimming the article that point is thoroughly buried. They barely even mention Caruana until a third of the way into the article.
He actually won 7 on trot until carlsen drew with him :
'Carlsen, employing an unexpected Accelerated Dragon defense, fell behind early but then managed to work a draw. Caruana’s streak of outright victories was over. “It's an amazing result,” said Carlsen in a post-match interview with Sinquefield Cup commentators. “Even if he doesn't turn up for the last two games, it would be one of the greatest of our time.”'
Top player meet fairly often, but about half of their matches end one draws. A simple model of 25% win, 50% draw, 25% lose gives a top player a 1/4^7 change (about 1:16000) of winning seven in a row against another top player.
Maybe not, but I bet one can model the results of chess matches as some random noise over the expected probability distribution of "player P against player Q for every pair of players (P,Q)" fairly well.
It is surprisingly hard to show that any sports time series is not random. 'Streaks' in baseball, for example, do not really exist according to some statisticians.
The article was a nice piece of long form writing. If you haven't got the patience to persist with it you miss out on the payoff. Sorry, no soup for you.
A nice piece of writing might have an intriguing headline (this did), it then follows up with an opening that gives a brief hint of why the headline was justified (this totally failed), then you get background into the situation that led to the intriguing part (nope), then it ties it all together into a satisfying resolution (nope nope).
As an amateur chess journalist myself I was really excited to see chess coverage from a mainstream journalist that respected the subject matter and wasn't filled with excrutiating misconceptions and downright mistakes. So that colours my thinking. But I also think the piece was just an example of good magazine style writing. The individual parts of the story were introduced in detail and the whole thing came together in the end. Unlike you I thought the click-baity headline was the worst thing about the article. I excused the author on the basis that he probably had no input on the title Slate chose to run his piece with. My apologies for the unnecessarily snarky tone in my original reply.
I agree that it was a slightly clickbait title, but my bigger problem is that I don't feel the article delivered on the promise. The event referenced in the title is an amazing upset, and the article addressed that only very obliquely. I want to read an article about that upset, not about the sociopolitical environment of this tournament, coupled with the tournament's history.
Alternatively, if the sociopolitical environment is worth reading, then have the title let me know that's what I'm getting in for, and organize the article in such a way that it's clearly the focus, rather than a distraction from the main story.
I actually really agree with you, and I even know most of old chess champions since I've been a chess fan for a long time. The article randomly jumped every few paragraphs for no reason to something completely unrelated. I just could not read it, nor understand what the point was.
An article was unexpectingly political: it is about a tournament with all players from top-10 except for those who are Russians, an article starts with bashing Russians and ends with bashing Russians? It even manages to mention Putin several times. Is it what competitive chess about?
I've played competitive chess for a short while, and the level of concentration involved leaves you absolutely exhausted at the end. Imagine computing hundreds of scenarios, each of them up to a dozen levels deep, for four hours straight. In other words, you have to get in the flow state and stay there for a very long time.
> Though [Hikaru Nakamura] is ranked seventh in the world, he seems to consider himself Magnus Carlsen’s chief rival, as evidenced by this November 2013 tweet in which he equates Carlsen with a mythological necromancer.
>> Starting to realize that I am the only person who is going to be able to stop Sauron in the context of chess history. - @GMHikaru
Describing Sauron as a 'necromancer' is akin to calling Gandalf a 'fireworks manufacturer'. It's a small part of their skillsets, and not what they've built their personal brand around.
I don't think there's really any evidence Sauron was a necromancer at all, so if you're going to explain these things to me, start with that. Sauron's army did not contain any undead. The nazgul are called "ringwraiths" but they don't seem to be any more undead than gollum or bilbo.
Tolkien wrote lord of the rings before the modern (silly) understanding of the word necromancer had been established, and sauron does't match that description let alone the more anthropologically accurate version (what today would be called a medium). Did sauron EVER commune with the dead?
Now Sauron was known as "the Necromancer", but that's a name, not a description. A serial killer known as "The Butcher" would not be a butcher (necessarily).
All we really know about Sauron is he was really good at making jewelry which had weird effects on people, that half his power was invested in "the ring" (which was also a ring), but his powers never really get displayed. He can make bad weather and mutate elves into orcs or something. But his awesome bad weather power was nullified by Gandalf, so that's not terribly impressive. And Saruman was better at making orcs than Sauron, so again not so impressive.
Read what I said. It establishes him as being referred to as "the necromancer", but he doesn't actually do anything necromantic. Ever.
There's really no evidence in Lord of the Rings that Sauron is a bad guy at all. The Nazgul smell bad and their horses are scary looking, but the only real war crimes we see are committed by the Riders of Rohan and Saruman. So, it's quite possible that Sauron was simply a victim of bad PR, much as we might refer to Sarah Palin as "The Moron" whereas she's merely of average intelligence.
There is quite a bit of circumstantial evidence against Sauron in Silmarillion. (E.g. the dwarf kings all meeting sticky ends, and of course the human kings becoming Nazgul -- but maybe that was because they wanted immortality and thought he was awesome. Which he kind of was. It's not like he went around telling people that dying of old age was a "gift".) But again, no necromancy that I can recall. (It's been a long time, and Silmarillion is mostly very, very boring.)
I think the original point was that he is not "mythical" but fictional. As for the necromancer part -- I've gone on waaaaay too long about that already.
Wow. I met Fabiano in an elevator once. I watched a couple of his games, too. Unfortunately he was so far above my level I struggled to comprehend what made his game work. At a certain point it just looks devoid of even the slightest mistakes. That was a long time ago.
That Carlsen-Caruana game, Round 3.1, is very interesting. After 15 Bxf7+, for sure! Most players don't handle kingside pressure so well.
tl;dr '[Fabiano] Caruana did show up, drawing his final two games to win the tournament (and its $100,000 top prize) with a record of 7-0-3, getting 8.5 points out of a possible 10. His victory at the Sinquefield Cup earned Caruana the highest tournament performance rating of all time, crushing even Karpov’s legendary result at Linares. Earth’s finest chess players couldn’t manage to pin Caruana with a single loss.'