Re: Your point (1), I read somewhere that the match took longer than watching the entire "Queen's Gambit" NetFlix series start to finish. (To put it in perspective for readers who may not realise how much time is spent at the board during these sorts of games).

The 6th game alone took longer than The Queen's Gambit.

(This is probably what you meant, but in chess a game means a single contest, while a match always means a series of games between two players or two teams).

Thanks for pointing this out! Game 6 started at 4:30pm local time and ended at 12:17am, making the game length 7 hours and 47 minutes total. It was the first time since adjournments were abolished in the 90s that a championship game started on one day and ended on another.

Is there a time limit for each player?

It varies a bit, but in this case[1] they had two hours each to reach 40 moves, without additional time per move. After move 40 then they got an additional hour each until move 60. After move 60 they got 15 minutes each, as well as each move now giving them 30 seconds.

If the player runs out of time they lose.

[1]: https://www.chess.com/article/view/world-chess-championship-...

> may not realise how much time is spent at the board

Or not spent at the board - Nepo seemed to prefer the side room ;-)

It could be the worst challenger performance in the history of the game. Nepo’s performance in the very long game 6 was actually quite good, even though he lost it. Neither of them played accurately in the in the time scramble to move 40, but Nepo didn’t lose to a massive blunder or anything.

However after that he was clearly tilted off the face of the earth. He was playing much too quickly and made blunders than even a competent amateur could have spotted. In game 11 I’m sure he simply gave up after seeing a draw was inevitable, because he didn’t want to show up for game 12.

The most remarkable aspect of this match for me was the absolute mental meltdown of the challenger. Nepo’s a great player, and I hope he comes back from this. But those last 5 games were the worst games he’s played in his career.

As a not-even-really-observer casual observer, game 6 must have just broke him. Even in those rare moments where he had played to an advantage, he unforced-error-blundered it away mere moments later. There were at least two instances where Magnus was so stunned at the nature and plainness of the blunder that he had to collect himself in a "am I walking into a trap, you couldn't have just made that mistake" sort of way. Opening himself to that pawn fork... these weren't carefully laid traps he was falling into. This was shooting himself in the foot and face with Magnus out of the room. Absolutely stunning meltdown. I feel sorry for him, but mental endurance is obviously no small part of the calculus to being world champion and Nepo showed he simply doesn't have it.

Good mental is one of the core skills, and I think the silver lining for Nepo in this is that it’s very clear what he needs to improve. Hopefully he’ll be able to pick himself up and become a stronger competitor from it.

Incidentally the mental test of this best of 14 format isn’t even as hard as it can get. They used to play to a certain number of wins. The 1984 championship was abandoned in February 1985 (it started in September 1984) after 48 games (40 draws). They also had longer time controls back then, and would adjourn games overnight if necessary, so when you woke up to play a game you wouldn’t even know if you’d be able to go to sleep that night having finished it.

Do you really think Nepo would be at that level without mental endurance?

How else would you explain the moves well below his level that objectively cost him? He is a great player but does not have Magnus’ mental and emotional consistency. Not everyone advances to the top in chess with the same combination of inner traits. This is also seen in other competitions where humans must perform at their absolute best in all aspects to reliably win.

Saying Nepo has less mental endurance than Carlsen is not the same as saying he doesn't have any as this poster wrote.

Ah. I think the meaning was clearly relative to the level of play and you took it too literally.

That’s incorrect. The original poster said Nepo lacks the mental endurance required to be world champion, not that he lacks it altogether.

He lacks enough of it to become one at this point in time (when we have Magnus and Nepo has his current mental edurance) :)

Actually relative strength is one of the things that wonder me the most I would say in the game: when one of the opponents is much stronger than the other the wins look so easy and the loses so stupid, but when the winner is matched against someone even stronger you see the same exact picture. I love you all I dunno why I say that now but here you go.

Before the match, Carlsen said about Nepo:

“It remains to be seen, of course, if Ian will be more resilient than he has been in the past if he is down”

So yes, it seems he has a bit of a problem in that department.

(https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/nov/24/magnus-carlsen...)

It's interesting because this weakness of Nepo was known going into the championship. And I have to presume that he worked on it. But there was just not enough time to have him build up the necessary mental conditioning. I suspect if he had a year or two to prep, Ian would have done a lot better.

> Carlsen's defense against Caruana in 2018 featured 12 draws before moving into tiebreakers

I really hope they are able to figure out some not-too-unnatural way to reduce the likelihood of draws. One easy possibility I saw suggested a number of times would be to remove the increment. Give additional time at certain move thresholds like they do now, but then at some point, that's it. No more time. Time pressure should remain a legitimate possibility of a threat throughout the match. When two GMs are in the endgame, +30s each move is an eternity, and how many tiny moves did we see them make just to get another +30s?

Oh well. I know excitement isn't the main driving force, I just think it's a real shame to see a world championship matchup like Carlsen/Caruana go to 12 straight draws and be decided by tiebreakers.

Strongly disagree. The main series of WCC should have players playing at the highest level, so there should not be too much time pressure. If it's all draw, that means players are equal at that level, so the tie-breaker match has more time pressure.

Rapid chess is almost a different game, shown by how handily Carlsen beat Caruana in the tie breakers.

Perhaps white can move twice before black is allowed to make his first move?

Edit: Embarrassingly I had a good laugh at my own joke after writing this.

There’s plenty of chess tournaments with much shorter speeds. Some people only play rapid chess variants.

I don’t see why removing slower chess tournaments on top of that is necessary.

There was Fischer-Spassky, 12.5 to 8.5 in 1972, where one of Spassky's 8.5 points came from Fischer forfeiting a game by not showing up.

With Fischer his lopsided path to the championship should also be considered.

In the 1970 Interzonal to pick 6 players to go to the Candidates Tournament (along with Korchnoi and Petrosian), Fischer won with 15 W, 1 L, 7 D giving 18.5 points. The next 5 were 3 tied at 15 and 2 tied at 14.

You can change every one of Fischer's draws to a loss in that tournament and he'd still have tied for first.

Then in the Candidates, he played Taimanov, Larsen, and Petrosian.

He beat Taimanov with 6 W, 0 L, 0 D. (Taimanov, a Russian) got into considerable trouble over this. The Russian government did not believe it was possible for a player of his level to be so thoroughly beaten unless it was on purpose. They stopped paying him and banned him from foreign travel).

Then he beat Larsen with 6 W, 0 L, 0 D.

Then he beat Petrosian with 5 W, 1 L, 3 D.

> You can change every one of Fischer's draws to a loss in that tournament and he'd still have tied for first.

Nitpick: that’s incorrect. Reading https://www.mark-weeks.com/chess/7072$iix.htm, he drew with Hübner, so if you change that to a loss, Hübner would get half a point more, moving to 15½.

Although Fischer achieved the same 4 point margin, Spassky had 3 victories (including the forfeit) in that match, whereas both Lasker and Nepomniachtchi had none.

1921 was before 1972, so the magnitude of that blow-out has no relevance to whether or not the match in 2021 was the most lopsided since then.

Go / baduk / weiqi is also amazing from the point of view of how much stamina the players have to have.

See, for example, https://senseis.xmp.net/?LongestTimeSpentThinkingAboutAMove

I was looking at Go vs Shogi time control and was surprised that at top level Shogi match usually give more time to players, despite being mathematically less complex. AFAIK the longest allotted time in Go is Japanese Mejin match at 8 hour/player. Longest for Shogi is Shogi Mejiin Match at 9 hour/player. Even standard ranking match in Japanese Shogi allow 6 hour/player, more than any Chess tournament I have seen (at present).

I watched a lot of Shogi match, and that just make 3.15 hours allotted in WCC looks low.

(The 8-9 hour match is a 2-day match. At specified time on the first day player do sealed move, to be reveal at the beginning of a match the next day.)

3) That depends on what games you count and how you define lopsided. I'd say a reasonable quantification of lopsidedness is [winning score]/[games played].

By that metric Carlsen-Nepomniachtchi is fairly lopsided at 68.2%, Capablanca-Lasker is only 64.3%.

The disputed era FIDE world championship final in 2000 had Anand beating Shirov with 3.5 of 4, a whooping 87.5%. But you might no count that as it was not a traditional long 1v1 match.

So if we discount that we have to go all the way back to 1910 Lasker-Janowski, 9.5 of 11, 86.4% to find a more lopsided match.

The only other 1v1 world championship matches that have been more lopsided are:

1896-1897 Lasker-Steinitz 12.5 of 17, 73.5%.

1907 Lasker-Marshall 11.5 of 15, 76,7%.