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Re:Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship by tzs on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @10:25PM (#13076966)
I'd like to see tiebreaks first in soccer.

Yasser Seirawan had an interesting suggestion. Make championship matches 13 games, not 12, with the challenger getting white 7 times and the defending champion getting white 6 times, and with the championing retaining the title in the case of a 6.5 - 6.5 tie.

One nice thing about Seirawan's suggestion is that it does not involve rapid or blitz. Many people don't like the idea that the world championship of classical chess might be decided by rapid or blitz games. (There are separate championships for rapid and blitz, held annually).

As computers get better and better at chess, I wonder if it might become reasonable someday to use computer evaluations to break ties? There has been work on using computer evaluations to measure how accurate and strong chess players are. Computer scientist and IM Ken Regan has done a lot in this area, both in the context of trying to determine how strong past players actually were, and in the context of trying to determine when someone is using a computer to cheat.

For instance, in this match Carlsen had winning positions in some of the drawn games, but was not able to convert. I don't think that in any of the drawn games Karjakin ever had a winning position. I suspect that if polled, most GMs would say that Carlsen outplayed Karjakin during the classical portion of the match. With computers, that could be put on an objective basis.

Svidler is an interesting commentator. He has a quick and sharp wit. During one of the earlier games, when Eric Hansen was co-commentator [1], they were talking about IM Lawrence Trent (Fabiano Caruana's manager). I didn't catch all of it as I was listening while working, but apparently Carlsen was playing an opening line or something that Trent doesn't think is good. Hansen said something like "I wouldn't want to be Lawrence Trent, betting against Magnus Carlsen". Svidler immediately shot back, "That sentence was too long".

[1] This was on chess24.com. Svidler and Hansen were commenting for them, not for the official broadcast. For the later part of the match, the chess24 commentary was Svidler and German GM Jan Gustafsson. Both the Svidler/Hansen and the Svidler/Gustafsson pairings were quite good.

Re:Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship by NhanH on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @10:32PM (#13076994)
Computer evaluation would cut off all the "human" factors involving in a match, especially championship one. It is part of any sport that being slightly better is not enough, you have to be able to turn that into concrete advantage over the scores. To put it another way, "match strategy" is part of the game.

We know with reasonable certainty that Carlsen is the stronger player, thanks to the rating system. Championship match has always be about more than being _just_ the stronger player.

Re:Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship by ktRolster on Thursday December 01, 2016 @01:27AM (#13077604)
The point is that Carlsen was ahead, so if enough games had been played, he eventually would have managed to convert one of those games to victory (by sheer probability).

Because the number of games played was too short, the game score wasn't allowed to reflect the true strength of the players.

Re:Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship by mehwoot on Thursday December 01, 2016 @01:33AM (#13077635)
Yes but that's a feature of almost every sport (to varying degrees). The aim of championships are not necessarily to determine who is stronger.
Re:Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship by ktRolster on Thursday December 01, 2016 @02:42AM (#13077903)
I think in chess the purpose of the match is to determine who is stronger.
Re:Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship by dagw on Thursday December 01, 2016 @02:57AM (#13077957)
If all you want to know is who is the strongest player overall, then we don't need these special championship matches, we'd just look at the overall rankings.

Being able to perform "on the day" is an integral part of every sport championship and the thing that makes them exciting.

Re:Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship by ktRolster on Thursday December 01, 2016 @02:42PM (#13082737)
Overall rankings don't tell you that. They also involve things like "who's been trying really hard lately"
Re:Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship by Uhhrrr on Thursday December 01, 2016 @02:22AM (#13077814)
I don't like the idea of computer evaluation at all. The measure of whether one has a winning position should be winning.
Re:Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship by inopinatus on Thursday December 01, 2016 @03:19AM (#13078018)
I agree but here's an anecdote. Chess tournaments have been decided by a third party. I recall the story of a match in Holland between two clubs, during which someone died of a heart attack. The clocks were stopped and never resumed; whether out of respect or distress (or both) the remaining participants did not want to continue the match, so the game positions were recorded, and a GM subsequently called in by the Dutch association to evaluate the positions and decide the result.

(I suspect no violation of the FIDE laws of chess, which concern themselves primarily with the conduct and outcome of individual games and have little to say on the deciding of matches).

Note also that computer evaluations of the strength of a position do not necessarily reflect the ability of a human being to play it. Not merely due to move depth and complexity (like when Stockfish comes back with a hilarious "mate in 24"), but also time: I recall moments in Carlsen vs Karjakin where the engines judged SK to hold a positional advantage despite mere seconds remaining on the clock.

Re:Carlsen–Karjakin World Championship by pps43 on Thursday December 01, 2016 @02:04PM (#13082368)
> I don't think that in any of the drawn games Karjakin ever had a winning position.

Karjakin had a winning position in game 9, but did not find the key move Qc4. He analyzed this line, but did not see Bg8 and thought it's not winning.