http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comment...e_world_chess/

It was pretty lame actually. Nakamura's was a lot more interesting. This is just my opinion, but I get too big of a PR vibe from Magnus' public appearances since the world championship. Everything is carefully arranged. /shrug - he's still amazing and I take notice of everything that he is doing.

naka ftw



i think naka sees his college peers as the same way magnus sees him

I thought the same thing. Naka's was way better. Even in Carlsen's reddit he was the most entertaining post.

"I can't be a part of this."

So good.

Magnus is young, talented, good-looking, and has a cool name that sounds powerful. I think he can grow the game a lot with young people and I think it's cool that he's trying to get his name out there and be accessible to his fans in this social media world we live in. Even if it is PR-polished. And if he doesn't have great people skills.

Naka can be the Mick Jagger to Magnus' Paul McCartney. I don't think the Stones ever beat the Beatles at music. But Jagger was still the cool badboy and Paul was the steady bandleader, media-darling, who laid down rock-solid basslines and grooves.

his app Play Magnus is pretty cool so far from the few times i've used it.

it was interesting that he said most games under 2000 elo are still decided by someone hanging a piece. I would have figured that was true only up to maybe 1700-1800 or so

Being 2850+, 1200s and 2000s all look the same to him.

This.

Seriously, it woulda been funnier if he said all non GM games are decided by ridiculous blunders or something. Not being able to differentiate between sub 2000 and sub 1800 when he's about to be 2900 is so unsurprising it's not even funny

Is his statement wrong?

Yeah it kinda is.

Technically speaking, he isn't wrong. Most games under 2000 elo are played by people in the 0–1500 range, after all. But games in the 1600–2000 range are rarely decided by moves that leave pieces en prise.

After watching this morning's candidate games, Magnus could've said "All games other than mine are decided by ridiculous blunders."

I don't know, not knowing the strength of players at 1800-2000 very well. I guess I'm not even sure what precisely "hanging piece" means. Does it mean only (a) pieces left undefended for capture in one move? Or (b) any pieces that end up being lost in a complicated exchange or tactical sequence?

I expect he meant to include any pieces that can get lost by a tactical sequence, and I think he's right.

First time Carlsen sounded prickish to me.

Couldn't you technically say every non-drawn match ever played is decided on someone hanging a piece? I mean not including games in which a huge blunder led to an even-material checkmate. Though I guess technically this is "hanging" a king.

Not sure why his statement is prickish. I'm not totally sure what hanging a piece means but I assume it to mean leaving a piece (be it a pawn) un or under-defended. That's like every W/L game almost.

no, I don't think so. Take the Anand-Topalov game today, the decisive mistake was certainly ...h6, which is bad not because it hangs material but because it leaves Black's king very exposed in the Q + B ending and White can use this to tie down Black's pieces and force a zugzwang.

However, plenty of top level games are decided by tactical errors which cost material. For example, see Kramnik-Mamedyarov from two rounds ago (Kramnik had a losing position but ends up a queen up because Mamedyarov thought he could allow him to queen a pawn and still mate him), or Mamedyarov-Aronian from round 2 (Mamedyarov gets his Q trapped in the opening).

It's possible for a game between weaker players to be decided by some positional nuance: a weak square, poor pawn structure, a badly placed piece. But even in a lot of games where this is superficially the case, it's only decisive because both players miss some tactical resource later on.

Well, hanging material definitely isn't the ONLY way to lose a game, so not EVERY game ends that way. For example I would contend that in this position:



The move 1. Rb7 does not hang any material. It certainly loses though.

A similar case of a losing move that doesn't hang material might be 1. Kb1 in the following position:



If you really want to parse semantics, though, perhaps you might argue that those moves "hang the king" by allowing mate (immediately in the first case, slower but no less forced in the second). If you're that much of a nitpicker, allow me to offer one final way a game can end with no material hung: resignation. It's entirely possible for a player to misevaluate a position AS losing, when it's actually not, and resign. That player DEFINITELY would have just lost a game without hanging any material. We've all had this happen to us, right? At least in blitz? Whether it's you or your opponent that benefited, someone plays a tactical shot that looks crushing, the other player can't find a way out and resigns, and then afterward you find there was a resource that totally thwarts the "tactic"?

And of course there's one more obvious option: the clock. I'm pretty sure that at some point in chess history, someone has probably flagged and lost in a game where they had not at any prior point hung any material.

In fairness to Carlsen...does anyone really know the difference between players rated 900 points lower than them? I mean, if you're rated 2000, do you really pay attention to the nuances that separate a 1200 player from a 1000?