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Who will win? This poll is closed. |
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| Vishy Anand |
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3 | 2.26% |
| Magnus Carlsen |
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30 | 22.56% |
| Kirsan Ilyumzhinov |
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100 | 75.19% |
| Total: | 133 votes | ||
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This thread is for professional chess play. If you would like to play yourself, which is a very good thing to want, we have a lovely thread in Traditional Games just on the other side of this link. We also have an infrequently used IRC channel, #chess on irc.synirc.net  2013 World Championship Match Official Website This site will have the games, as well as live commentary from Susan Polgar and Lawrence Trent. Android App for the match Official Apple App for the match Other places to get games and follow commentary will be: Polgar’s twitter: @SusanPolgar Natalia Pogonina’s twitter: @pogonina Chessdom Internet Chess Club (ICC is currently offering a free one month membership, which would cover the duration of the match.) The 2013 World Championship Match will be held in Chennai, India, with the opening ceremony being held on the 7th of November. There will be 12 games played, with the first round on the 9th, and a tiebreaker day on the 28th if necessary. The two participants will be the reigning champion, Viswanathan Anand, and the winner of this year’s candidates tournament, Magnus Carlsen. This will be the first championship played under FIDE’s new, more ambitious schedule. The hope is that there will now be a championship defence every November, a great increase in pace given that this is only Anand’s fourth championship match including his initial win over Kramnik in 2008. The Participants The Champion – Viswanathan Anand Rated 2775, 8th in the world  This will be Anand’s fourth championship match, having beaten Vladimir Kramnik (2008), Veselin Topalov (2010), and Boris Gelfand (2012). While the first two wins were quite convincing, including a pair of spectacular wins against Kramnik, he looked very weak last year against Gelfand. While he has spent two decades now as one of the best players ever, Vishy is now one of the oldest active players and it is starting to look like his time on the top is drawing to a close. This decline is something that he himself has noticed, and he voiced as much after a dismal showing at this year’s Tal Memorial (+1 -3 =5). He has tried to push himself into a renaissance, which did succeed in producing this masterpiece, he has not yet managed to put together an entire tournament of good play and often finds himself having to salvage a worse position. The Challenger – Magnus Carlsen Rated 2870, 1st in the world  Magnus Carlsen is currently the best player in the world by a wide margin, and many people view this match as the inevitable ascension of “the Mozart of chess.” Over the last couple of years, he has looked as dominant as ever, winning tournament upon tournament upon tournament upon tournament (and so on). He has, however, looked the slightest bit vulnerable at points: he has a few 2nd-place finishes in the past year, and his tournament wins rarely end with him well ahead of the pack. He also stumbled to the finish line in Candidates, edging Kramnik in tie-breaks after both players lost their final-round game. Analysis Comparing the recent play of both Carlsen and Anand certainly gives the impression that Magnus should win and win easily. This is certainly where the smart money is, and the most I feel comfortable reasonably hoping for Anand is that he acquits himself well. One player is young and peaking, while the other is one of the oldest active top players who seems to be transitioning to life as a dad. However, there are a few wrinkles that make this match far from a coronation. Carlsen’s calling card is pitch-perfect judgement on how to transition from the late middlegame to early endgame, combined with the tenacity to play even the most minimal advantage (or even no advantage at all) as long as it takes to win. The flipside of this, though, is that Carlsen often finds himself having to transition from suboptimal or even slightly worse openings/middlegames. This strategy seems like it may be better suited for tournament play than match play, where one may prepare specifically for an individual player's particular weaknesses. A great example of this would be the Anand-Topalov championship match, where Vishy isolated a very particular sort of weakness in Topalov’s play (the kings-bishop-3 square with an open c-file against a kingside fianchetto) and prepared Catalan and Grunfeld openings to exploit that. It could be that the match format places enough emphasis on opening preparation that Anand will be able to shape the games to his advantage, and determine positions that Carlsen cannot readily transition to his own advantage. One of the most interesting points of this match, I think, is to see how Carlsen adapts to match play and what his openings look like after several months of dedicated preparation. Another wrinkle is that Anand is the greatest rapid player of all time. He defeated Gelfand in the rapids tiebreakers, and fear of going to rapids led to this famous self-destruction by Topalov in their final regular game in 2010. I doubt that Carlsen fears rapid tiebreaks, but it may constitute a sort of fallback for Anand: he only needs to keep pace with Carlsen through the regular games. All told, the difference in ratings predicts at 6.5-3.5 win for Carlsen, and I would not be surprised if the final score is more or less of that shape. I would say that this match represents a changing of the guard in the chess generation – from the pre-fritz age of Kasparov to the post-fritz age of Carlsen – if it didn’t look like the next best player in the world is currently Vladimir Kramnik. e: Here is our goofy fun attempt at a pool: quote:Here's the url for the spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhEaxFpoLPbodHRMc2hDT2RiN2pOb2hkMDN5Y21MaFE&usp=sharing Hand Knit fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Feb 4, 2014 |
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Nov 3, 2013 20:14
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Schedule and Links to All Games Opening Ceremony: November 7, 2013 Round 1: November 9, 2013 3:00 PM India time; 4:30 AM EST Draw Chessgames.com Round 2: November 10, 2013 3:00 PM India time; 4:30 AM EST Draw Chessgames.com Rest day Round 3: November 12, 2013 3:00 PM India time; 4:30 AM EST Draw Chessgames.com Round 4: November 13, 2013 3:00 PM India time; 4:30 AM EST Draw Chessgames.com Rest day Round 5: November 15, 2013 3:00 PM India time; 4:30 AM EST Carlsen wins Chessgames.com Round 6: November 16, 2013 3:00 PM India time; 4:30 AM EST Carlsen wins Chessgames.com Rest day Round 7: November 18, 2013 3:00 PM India time; 4:30 AM EST Draw Chessgames.com Round 8: November 19, 2013 3:00 PM India time; 4:30 AM EST Draw Chessgames.com Rest day Round 9: November 21, 2013 3:00 PM India time; 4:30 AM EST Carlsen Wins  Chessgames.comRound 10: November 22, 2013 3:00 PM India time; 4:30 AM EST Rest day Round 11: November 24, 2013 3:00 PM India time; 4:30 AM EST Rest day Round 12: November 26, 2013 3:00 PM India time; 4:30 AM EST Rest day Tie Breakers, if necessary: November 28, 2013 Closing Ceremony: November 28, 2013 Hand Knit fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Nov 21, 2013 |
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Nov 3, 2013 20:15
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Great OP. I'm interested to see if Carlsen will vary his opening play or if he will try to narrow it based on some prep. There was some speculation that he was trying to hide some of his opening preparation by playing the Dutch in the Sinquefield Cup. Although the majority of people will say that Carlsen is a shoo-in for the next World Champion, Anand usually brings out his best chess for the match format.
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Nov 4, 2013 02:21
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It looks like Playchess will be broadcasting live commentary as well.
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Nov 4, 2013 02:39
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I'm kind of rooting for Anand to hold on to the championship one more time. It's just a matter of time until Magnus becomes world champion and once he wins he's going to be hanging onto it until he gets bored of so easily dominating the chess world.
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Nov 4, 2013 02:59
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Yikes, 4:30 AM.
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Nov 4, 2013 03:02
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1:30 AM for me in California. Maybe I'll stay up for one of the games just for giggles. I hope the match produces good games. I expect Carlsen will win, like everybody else, but I agree with the OP that his lack of match experience could bite him. I'm sure he'll try to get Anand out of his opening preparation as fast as possible, and then spin the game out as long as he can, just keeping a little pressure and waiting for Anand to slip. Hand Knit, how would you describe Anand's style? Perhaps it's just because he's had such a long career, but it's almost like he doesn't have one. Any type of game you can think of, he's played it.
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Nov 4, 2013 06:57
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BurningStone posted:Hand Knit, how would you describe Anand's style? Perhaps it's just because he's had such a long career, but it's almost like he doesn't have one. Any type of game you can think of, he's played it. Anand considers himself to have never been particularly great at tactics, which I find pretty funny. He's played for over two decades now, so he's obviously had to change things as developments come and go. He started as a very regular e4 player, but started moving towards 1.d4 systems around the time of his match against Kramnik. If there's a through-line in his play, I'd say that he's stuck to attack-oriented semi-open positions. It's what he played when he was younger (1.e4 as white and the Najdorf as black), and it's how he plays the semi-slav now. Of course I'm not an Anand scholar and I'm not old enough to remember his younger play so this is all very... speculative.
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Nov 4, 2013 20:06
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Hand Knit posted:Anand considers himself to have never been particularly great at tactics, which I find pretty funny. I'm in the same boat. I've heard plenty of stories about his early play, like about how he'd play at rapid or even blitz speed in classical time control games for instance, but I can't claim I was paying all that much attention to world-class chess when I was 10 or 12 years old.
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Nov 4, 2013 20:56
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A Norwegian newspaper just put up a documentary of sorts (in English) about Carlsen, it's a bit of a fluff piece but I found it kinda interesting. http://www.vgtv.no/#!id=73427&index=11
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Nov 4, 2013 20:58
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I really liked what the stl chess club did for the Sinquefield Cup, but the stream was kinda laggy and choppy. They had video of the commentators, the board layout, and alternated the player view. Any chance you guys know which live option is the best? I'm probably gonna try all of them, ICC is free for the month, and I'm gonna pick up the 14 dollar level for the month on chess.com, 3:30 am central time is gonna be a killer though. I'm looking forward to it, live chess is definitely more interesting than most live sports.
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Nov 5, 2013 00:48
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DJ BK posted:I really liked what the stl chess club did for the Sinquefield Cup, but the stream was kinda laggy and choppy. They had video of the commentators, the board layout, and alternated the player view. Any chance you guys know which live option is the best? I'm probably gonna try all of them, ICC is free for the month, and I'm gonna pick up the 14 dollar level for the month on chess.com, 3:30 am central time is gonna be a killer though. I'm looking forward to it, live chess is definitely more interesting than most live sports. I'd go with the official one with Susan Polgar and Lawrence Trent. Hopefully they can get another Ivanchuk cameo. 
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Nov 5, 2013 02:22
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Speaking of World Championships, the organizer's selection for the 2014 Candidates Tournament is...Peter Svidler. Which is most notable in that it is not Fabiano Caruana or Hikaru Nakamura. On the other hand, the tournament is taking place in Russia, so there you go. Anyway, Svidler is cool and did well in the last Candidates, so there's nothing really wrong with his inclusion as such.
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Nov 6, 2013 02:42
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I am curious to see what the impact of Peter Heine Nielson not being the main second for Anand will be. Has it been announced who is on his team this time? E: and speaking of Ivanchuk, has anyone had a chance to go through the new game collection from New In Chess? I'm very tempted to buy it.
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Nov 6, 2013 10:03
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vyshka posted:I am curious to see what the impact of Peter Heine Nielson not being the main second for Anand will be. Has it been announced who is on his team this time? Anand is usually quite secretive about his team, although I think that Chanda and Wojtaszek are unofficially confirmed as replacing Nielsen and Kasimdzhanov. In searching I also stumbled over rumours about Caruana, Kramnik, and Giri. A few names always surface after the tournament, as people want to make sure they get credit for the winner.
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Nov 6, 2013 14:06
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What exactly does a team do to help prepare opening novelties against a specific opponent? Do general research on the opponent like playing tenancies? Or are there more nefarious things like espionage and counter intelligence? 
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Nov 6, 2013 16:18
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Matt Gaffney at Slate thinks there shouldn't be a chess world champion. What do you guys think? I was a little skeptical, until he brought up the comparison with tennis, which seems to be working pretty well for tennis.
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Nov 6, 2013 16:31
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totalnewbie posted:Matt Gaffney at Slate thinks there shouldn't be a chess world champion. What do you guys think? There has been some undercurrent of sentiment for this for a while now, especially as FIDE as mildly diminished the stature of the World Championship by holding a new one under a new format every ten minutes or so. It might be a bit of an outdated concept, and I'm usually not for doing things simply because of tradition. That said, in this case, the matches do tend to bring a ton of outside attention to chess when certain players get there (Fischer, Kasparov, Carlsen now). That's enough for me to lean on the side of keeping the World Championship around, but I think it's time for the chess world at large to acknowledge that it's just a title and doesn't necessarily tell us who the world's best player is. singe posted:What exactly does a team do to help prepare opening novelties against a specific opponent? Do general research on the opponent like playing tenancies? Or are there more nefarious things like espionage and counter intelligence? Basically what you'd expect: opening research, helping determine the kinds of positions you want to/don't want to get into with your opponent (as you said, playing tendencies), and acting as sparring partners. They used to also be a big deal in adjournments, but we don't have those any more. OrangeKing fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Nov 6, 2013 |
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Nov 6, 2013 18:24
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I mean, Shogi has several titles, title matches for each, etc...
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Nov 6, 2013 18:26
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No one outside of Japan (or even in Japan, really) plays shogi (seriously).
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Nov 6, 2013 18:31
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totalnewbie posted:Matt Gaffney at Slate thinks there shouldn't be a chess world champion. What do you guys think? I like the concept and it probably works if you pay attention to chess but a title/champion is easier to understand for anyone who doesn't have their finger on the pulse of the chess community. IMO there should be a chess season and a chess playoffs, maybe cheerleaders, mascots, t-shirt cannons, etc. If you're going to copy tennis you'd need to play on different surfaces and also force everyone to grunt when they make a move
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Nov 6, 2013 18:50
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Fight Club Sandwich posted:I like the concept and it probably works if you pay attention to chess but a title/champion is easier to understand for anyone who doesn't have their finger on the pulse of the chess community. IMO there should be a chess season and a chess playoffs, maybe cheerleaders, mascots, t-shirt cannons, etc. Have the 4 chess grand slam tournaments be a classical tournament, a rapid tournament, a blindfold tournament, and a chess960 tournament.
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Nov 6, 2013 19:14
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totalnewbie posted:No one outside of Japan (or even in Japan, really) plays shogi (seriously). What's your point? I was simply noting that there's multiple major more-or-less equal titles, as opposed to chess.
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Nov 6, 2013 19:27
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Oh, I think I just read more into what you said than was there.
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Nov 6, 2013 20:33
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Wimbledon is the tennis World Championship 
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Nov 6, 2013 22:25
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I'd want him to win anyways, but an additional reason I'm in camp Anand to win is so all these idiots bloviating about how the championship is either illegitimate or meaningless because the top-rated player doesn't hold it have their heads literally explode.
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Nov 7, 2013 00:05
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I think the author of the slate article reads too much into people's standing in the rating list.
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Nov 7, 2013 03:37
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silvergoose posted:What's your point? I was simply noting that there's multiple major more-or-less equal titles, as opposed to chess. Go does this too, so yeah, it's another way of organizing things for sure. New topic! Chess billboards: have they gone too far?!? 
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Nov 7, 2013 06:40
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Not that I know anything about tournament purses but isn't it gonna be super lucrative for Carlsen to milk the WC for years to come? I'd imagine eastern bloc money men would pay more for the prestige of a WC match than a newfangled grand slam.
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Nov 7, 2013 13:46
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gret posted:Have the 4 chess grand slam tournaments be a classical tournament, a rapid tournament, a blindfold tournament, and a chess960 tournament. I'd really like to see some master chess960 games.
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Nov 7, 2013 23:14
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crimedog posted:I'd really like to see some master chess960 games. There used to be a Chess960 World Championship, but it hasn't been held since 2009 as far as I can tell. That year, Nakamura beat Aronian 3.5-0.5. Aronian and Svidler were champions in years before that, so that's a pretty high level of Chess960. There was a big tournament in Mainz too, but that looks like it's defunct as well.
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Nov 8, 2013 00:15
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(1) I found the official Apple app for the championship. I edited it into the OP. (2) Anand has anounced his four official seconds. Chanda and Wojtaszek were there as speculated, as were Krishnan Sasikiran and Peter Leko. This is being played in the media as psychological warfare.
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Nov 8, 2013 01:38
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Hand Knit posted:
I find Indian news coverage of chess to be over sensationalized, if that's possible.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:31
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Well that was uninspiring..
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Nov 9, 2013 12:03
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worst opening game ever. It can only get better. props to Anand though.
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Nov 9, 2013 12:04
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A car alarm went off at just before 6 am this morning, and I decided that I'd get up and watch some chess. It was just in time to see Carlsen and Anand to agree to a draw after 16 moves! Back to bed now.
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Nov 9, 2013 12:04
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1.Nf3 d5 2. g3 g6 3. Bg2 Bg7 4. d4 c6 5. O-O Nf6 6. b3 O-O 7. Bb2 Bf5 8. c4 Nbd7 9. Nc3 dxc4 10. bxc4 Nb6 11. c5 Nc4 12. Bc1 Nd5 13. Qb3 Na5 14. Qa3 Nc4 15. Qb3 Na5 16. Qa3 Nc4 1/2-1/2White Paper posted:worst opening game ever. It can only get better. props to Anand though. Anand never seems to be awake game one, but I'm surprised that Carlsen didn't push.
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Nov 9, 2013 14:14
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Dull as gently caress but the result is decent. I want Carlsen to have to work for the championship not brush Anand aside like some have predicted.
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Nov 9, 2013 14:21
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Hand Knit posted:1.Nf3 d5 2. g3 g6 3. Bg2 Bg7 4. d4 c6 5. O-O Nf6 6. b3 O-O 7. Bb2 Bf5 8. c4 Nbd7 9. Nc3 dxc4 10. bxc4 Nb6 11. c5 Nc4 12. Bc1 Nd5 13. Qb3 Na5 14. Qa3 Nc4 15. Qb3 Na5 16. Qa3 Nc4 1/2-1/2 Isn't white worse there? I'd certainly rather have black's side.
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Nov 9, 2013 20:09
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BurningStone posted:Isn't white worse there? I'd certainly rather have black's side. I just want to quote Nakamura from the Anand-Gelfand match: "I must be a very bad chess player since I keep liking Anand's positions and he keeps offering draws instead of trying to win."
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Nov 9, 2013 20:13
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