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.

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.

Humans aren't computers.

A machine can throw a fastball at speeds well above what humans can do. That doesn't mean we retire pitchers completely and end the game of baseball. A car can cover 100m in a fraction of the time humans can, doesn't mean we end track and field.

Chess is a game between humans and that's what makes it exciting.

And with computers we have a whole additional layer added where we can see what an essentially perfect game would look like and compare to that (although computers can still occasionally be surprised by human moves).

We probably have the technology to have races using self driving cars without drivers (perhaps with more accidents). It may be interesting to watch, but it would be a different sport

We don't. Self-driving race cars are hilariously bad.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9fv2HR6Sc48

> Perhaps with computers it's time to retire the existing notion of chess tournaments.

You clearly don't follow chess, given your question. So I have to ask: why are you so quick to take a stance on something you don't follow or understand?

I'm unclear why you'd think that a question beginning with "perhaps" constitutes taking a stand.

You didn't ask a question in the post I responded to.

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

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

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.

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.

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...

At the very highest level, the draw percentage is much higher. In the last World Chess Championship in 2018, all twelve classical games went to draws! It's complete garbage from a spectator point of view.

It's not the level, but the WCC format, which makes current players not want to take risks at all. Today's game is a great example of why they are conservative: Taking any risks with black, like Nepo did when he avoided an early queen trade, is just too dangerous. A single loss means your opponent can aim for a draw in every single further game. If a super GM wants a draw out of the game from the very opening, choosing the most boring variations they can think of, someone is going to have to take crazy risks to stop it. Remember Kramnik's approach with the Berlin, turning the Ruy Lopez opening, known for its sharpness for centuries, into a recipe for draws.

Look instead at the next highest level tournament, the WCC candidates. There's money on the line, but really, the chance for the title is so much more important, winning the tournament is all that matters, and you aren't getting there with just draws, or even just a couple of wins. The very top players in the world, other than the current WCC are the only ones that participate, and yet the draw rate is lower than that average 75% too: In the last tournament, Nepo lost 1 and won 5 out of 14 games. Same with Caruana in the 2018 candidates.

That said, we'd see fewer draws too with shorter time controls, but then the top players also change. In 2018, if the championship was an infinite classic series until someone has 3 wins, Caruana was probably the favorite, given how he had Carlsen against the ropes over and over again, just a bit shy of victory. But in Rapid or Blitz, He's nowhere near as good.

Interesting, thanks for the clarification.

Sure, but that's mainly because the WCC is such a high-stakes match. Their overall record is not so draw-dominated. According to [0],

  Classical games: Ian Nepomniachtchi beat Magnus Carlsen 4 to 2, with 14 draws.

which gives a draw rate of 80%.

[0]: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?page=1&player=carls....

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

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.)

It's perhaps a shortcoming of the medium – lack of time – and to keep the script short & engaging for the viewers. In a similar vein, computer nerds are shown to write code or hack systems in no time, when in reality a lot of high-concentration hours are burned, but from the outside watching someone stare at a screen doing not much other than think just isn't that exciting, and in the same way chess games ending in draws again and again aren't that exciting to watch for lay viewers. Also, films like that tend to ignore the "team" element (whether it's in sports or computing) and tend to over-emphasize the single protagonist "genius", also unrealistic.

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.

Engine games (you can watch them at tcec-chess.com and some are terrific) with the standard starting position are almost always drawn. Engine tournaments are usually played instead with human selected, unbalanced openings designed to produce an exciting game with lower likelihood of a draw. The unbalanced opening intentionally gives one side (black or white) an advantage, so each opening is used twice, with each engine playing one game as black and one as white, to balance things out. The games are usually drawn anyway, with some occasional exciting wins. The top human players now study engine games closely, and play more like engines themselves. Very few mistakes => more draws.

It's unknown what would happen if a top human with serious preparation played against a modern engine. They'd have basically no chance of winning and a fairly low chance of a draw, with the unknown being "how low is fairly low". My wild-ass guess is maybe 1 game in 10 when the human has the white pieces and much lower with the black pieces. There is not much chess theory about what happens when a human plays a game from the beginning aiming for a draw, even though they do that all the time in real chess. It is something of a gap in the "literature".

High level computers draw each other almost 100% of the time and beat humans 100% of the time.

In general as skill increases (assuming the competitors are evenly matched), so does draw rate. Human grandmasters draw much more often than human beginners, and engines draw even more than human GMs.

This is one of the intuitive reasons for hypothesizing that chess is drawn with perfect play, even though we can’t prove it.

Yes, there is a limitation. People have to learn high-level ideas and develop their intuition. Computers can have millions of training games (to teach the NN and to do regression tests), terabytes of tablebase positions and an ability to calculate thousands of lines in real-time.