Magnus Carlsen defeated Ian Nepomniachtchi 7.5-3.5 in the best out of 14 games World Chess Championship match that concluded last Friday. Carlsen first won the title in 2013, and he has now successfully defended his title four times. Carlsen has been the highest rated chess player in the world since July 2011, more than two years before he won the World Chess Championship for the first time.
The Carlsen-Nepomniachtchi match began with five straight draws, and computer analysis of those early games suggests that some of them are among the most accurately played games in the recorded history of the World Chess Championship. Of course, this match will not be remembered for the high degree of accuracy that the players displayed in those closely contested games, but rather for the series of blunders by Nepomniachtchi that resulted in him losing games six, eight, nine, and eleven.
However, even when the players were playing with an unprecedented accuracy level no one should have interpreted that to mean that Carlsen and Nepomniachtchi are superior to all of their predecessors. Carlsen and Nepomniatchtchi have access to computer engines and other resources not available to their predecessors. Carlsen and Nepomniatchtchi deserve credit for working hard to learn, memorize, and understand the computer engine analysis, but it would be foolish to suggest that great champions such as Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker and Bobby Fischer could not have performed at a similar accuracy level if they had been provided access to similar resources.
Given the resources available at the time, Lasker dethroned Wilhelm Steinitz in the 1894 World Chess Championship match and then held onto the title until 1921, when the 53 year old Lasker lost to the 33 year old Jose Raul Capablanca. Lasker's 27 year run as World Chess Champion remains not only an unbroken record 100 years later, but it is a record that has not been seriously challenged, though it should be noted that Steinitz did not lose a match from 1862 until Lasker bested him in 1894, and that Steinitz was likely the best player in the world from 1866-1894 even though his "official" reign as World Champion did not begin until 1886. Lasker and Steinitz demonstrated both great talent and tremendous work ethic to stay on top for so long, and those traits would serve them well in the modern era.
Similarly, given the resources available at the time, Fischer took first place in the last eight tournaments that he finished, he won 20 games in a row against elite competition, and he soundly defeated Boris Spassky to win the World Chess Championship in 1972. Perhaps the best measurement of dominant superiority is the distance between the top ranked player and his closest contemporary. When Fischer was at his peak, his rating (2785) was 125 points higher than the second best player's rating. A rating class is 200 points, so Fischer was more than half a rating class better than the rest of the world!
In contrast, Carlsen--who set the record for highest rating (2882) and currently has a rating of 2856 (not including the games from the 2021 World Chess Championship)--has never been ahead of the rest of the world by more than 75 points, and the margin between him and the second rated player has sometimes been as small as single digits. Yes, 40 or 50 points is a large margin at the very top, and it is significant that Carlsen has had an unbroken grip on the top spot for more than 10 years, but he has never been as far ahead of his contemporaries as peak Fischer was.
Carlsen is a consummate sportsman who is enjoying a lengthy run at the summit thanks to his intelligence, steady nerves, and superb physical conditioning. Nepomniachtchi may come close to matching Carlsen's intelligence, but during the course of the match Carlsen showcased his significant advantages in the other two areas.
After clinching the championship with a game 11 win, Carlsen said, "I didn't expect it to go quite like this. I think it was just a very good professional performance overall. No regrets at all, just very satisfied." He added, "After five games there were five draws and I'd had very, very few chances to play for anything more. Then everything kind of clicked and after that it all went my way. You don't expect to necessarily run away with it in a world championship."
Nepomniatchtchi tried to explain why he not only blundered so frequently at key moments but also why he made some mistakes that are shocking for a player of his caliber: "The match of course consists of many aspects. It's not only chess preparation but physical and psychological preparation. Of course it's really tense and it's a little more tense than I expected. But I guess anyway the tension is not a reason to overlook some simple things that you would never overlook in a blitz game. What can I say? I should find out why it did happen and improve."
Viswanathan Anand, who Carlsen dethroned in 2013 to become World Chess Champion, once noted that winning a World Chess Championship match is "just a question of nerves." It is worth remembering that Anand had a disastrous breakdown in his first World Chess Championship match, losing four games in a five game stretch versus reigning World Champion Garry Kasparov in 1995 en route to losing the match 10.5 to 7.5, but Anand recovered to win the FIDE World Championship in 2000 before defeating Kasparov's successor Vladimir Kramnik in 2008 to become the 15th World Chess Champion. In other words, while this may have been Nepomniachtchi's one and only chance to become World Chess Champion it may instead turn out to be a painful lesson that helps him take the final step to the chess immortality that each World Chess Champion enjoys.
One might think that the amount of computer-assisted preparation in modern chess makes playing at an elite level easier than it used to be, but in fact the players are under a lot of stress and strain to not only remember many intricate prepared lines but also to be prepared for unexpected moves by the opponent; such unexpected moves can be particularly dangerous because those moves are computer-vetted before being tried out against a human, so when a human is faced with a computer-tested line that he has not seen that is a different challenge than being presented with a novelty that has not been verified by strong computers. Casual fans/observers are often frustrated by modern chess because they do not understand what that they are watching; when the players drew the first five games, casual fans/observers complained about the large number of draws in recent World Chess Championship matches, but then after Carlsen won four games many fans/observers mocked Nepomniachtchi for playing too fast and crumbling under the pressure.
The reality cannot be accurately described without looking at the match as a whole: Carlsen's strategy was to play solidly but with tempered aggression, and to count on his steadier nerves plus superior physical conditioning to wear down Nepomniachtchi. Nepomniachtchi did not make the most of his chances in the early games, and his game six loss foreshadowed the match's outcome: game six was the longest game in World Chess Championship history, and Carlsen wore Nepomniachtchi down in that battle much like he wore Nepomniachtchi down in the match overall. Nepomniachtchi did not blunder in a vacuum; he blundered because of the mental, psychological, and physical pressure that he felt while combating Carlsen.
Further Reading:
Carlsen Retains World Chess Championship in Spectacular Style (2016)
Magnus Carlsen Convincingly Retains World Chess Championship (2014)
No comments:
Post a Comment