1) Game 6 lasted 136 moves, making it the longest game in world championship history, surpassing the 124 move game 5 of Korchnoi-Karpov in 1978.
2) Carlsen's victory in game 6 was also the first decisive match game (excluding tiebreakers) since game 10 of Carlsen's defense against Karjakin in 2016. Carlsen's defense against Caruana in 2018 featured 12 draws before moving into tiebreakers.
3) Carlsen won this match 7.5-3.5, making it the most lopsided victory since Capablanca defeated Lasker 9-5 in 1921.
(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).
Or not spent at the board - Nepo seemed to prefer the side room ;-)
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.
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.
Edit: Embarrassingly I had a good laugh at my own joke after writing this.
I don’t see why removing slower chess tournaments on top of that is necessary.
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.
See, for example, https://senseis.xmp.net/?LongestTimeSpentThinkingAboutAMove
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.)
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%.
Caruana, Giri, Anand, Svidler and Nakamura have been doing commentary (simultaneously!) throughout the match. It has been a real treat, I don't believe any match before has had such a deep level of live analysis. I have had five different streams open at times just to listen to them all :)
Jan and Svidler from the Karjaken match was the best commentary team we’ve had for a championship imo. I remember the main Chennai team being pretty decent as well, Tania’s a very good commentator, so I don’t know why they had her running around the event center interviewing people.
I'm also not a huge Maurice Ashley fan - but think he did a good job handling the press conferences. What was interesting was that for Karjakin/Carlsen, Jan Gustafsson was doing commentary, but also was part of the Carlsen analytics/prep/second team. Svidler's analysis is always enjoyable, but sometimes he seems bored with games and his language almost becomes 'this is over let's move on'.
Let Fabio speak!
Nepo only squeezed in because the Candidates tournament was so weird with Covid and all. Caruana again, Ding Liren or Firouzja would have been much stronger opponents. I think the 18 year old Iranian phenom and world #2 Alireza Firouzja is the champion in waiting. But Magnus is still king and even Magnus would take another 10 years of dominance to claim GOAT from Kasparov.
Please explain obscure or very domain specific acronyms.
"goat meaning" -> first result
"goat acronym" -> first result
"goat definition" -> first result
Some big opinions here. Magnus has 5 undisputed titles. Only Lasker is ahead of him on 6, and Botvinnik ties him on 5. Vishy also ties him on 5, but one of those was from when the title split in the 90s. Karpov and Kasparov each have 6 titles, but two of Kasparov’s and 3 of Karpov’s come from when the title was split (and they were each playing on different sides of it). One more title make a good case for GOAT Magnus, two more seals it.
Comparing Magnus to Kasparov is kind of like comparing Steph Curry to MJ. Could it happen? Yes. But Magnus has to go out and do it. I think if he can beat Firouzja he makes a better case but tying Caruana and Karjack at classical wasn't all that impressive. Beating the great Anand was.
(Actually, MJ is probably a bridge too far for even Curry. Maybe LeBron is a better comparison.)
He "squeezed in" because he won the pretenders tournament, beating all other challengers who played on exact same schedule as him.
He also played incredibly well until that loss in Game 6 demoralised him, unfortunately.
Of those four, Nepo is the one with the best record against Carlsen even after this match.
Nepo (before this match): 4W 1L 8D (2/0/5 as black, 2/1/3 as white).
Nepo (after this match): 4W 5L 14D
Ding Liren: 0W 1L 8D
Caruana: 5W 11L 38D
Firouzja: 0W 4L 2D
And somehow, watching the rapid WC at the end of December has become sorta a Christmas tradition for many in Norway. It's a kind of slow TV that works really well.
[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
I first followed a WC match through live commentary in 2013 (incidentally Carlsen Vs Vishy in Chennai), which I think was the first ever live streamed on YouTube.
I've been following these WC matches since then; in similar boat as yours. Love watching all these analyses of immortal-games etc., but absolutely hate playing it :-)
Chess is only there because of history but it checks none of successful esport checkmarks. One might even argue that it has been a "solved" game for decades which is the opposite of what you want for a successful esports game.
One of the most important esport features is updates be it meta changes or new patches. That's why our current esport games are so huge even though they are relatively very new.
Online chess( pandemic apart) would never be considered equivalent to tournaments over a board
Every day we have world class GMs (including Magnus) playing online, streaming play, commentary & such. It's put a real buzz into the game. A lot of it has to do with the personalities of current competition GMs and top streamers at the top.
It also really puts into perspective how impressive Caruana was in 2018.
He is a skilled player no doubt, and impressiven in his own right, but his 2018 performance is not a good way to gauge that .
That was an unusual feeling because normally I can only get a hint of what they are doing by loading the PGN into an engine interface and playing through the game trying out variations against the engine.
Either way, feels like we saw a couple of his lines come up. His influence on the game is fascinating.
c5: Not so much :-(
The pressure of a Word Championship match is not to be underestimated.
It’s reasonable not to expect it. But the real lesson is that spoilers can be anywhere. I used to listen to a radio station on the way to work every day, and I’ve heard them talk about Formula 1 exactly 1 time, when they decided the 7am commute show was a good time to spoil the race that happened at 4am. I have no idea why this mostly hip hop oriented radio station decided to talk about F1 that single time, but the lesson I learnt was just to wake up early and watch the sport if I don’t want to have it spoiled.
