since you clearly like to go to amazing length in terms of nit-picking, where did i state that?

You state in one paragraph that the outcome (Gelfand) is ridculous. I don't think i'm stretching it too far that you would have claimed the same if Kamsky, Mamedyarov, Grischuk or Radjabov won. Then you are constantly saying that you hate the qualifying modus and would have loved to see Aronian. To claim that i'm the one shifting goalposts here is far from doing it right in terms of a discussion. Everytime i want a response to one of my posts you say that you didn't literally write something that i may have (and in fact have not) referred to in another part of my post. Discussion this way is rather pointless and annoying.

anyway, i don't care anymore.

You guys just need to play chess and make up.

I'll be the arbiter, if it's okay for a boorish American (EuroRounders FTW) to be one for this match.

First one to pick a number 1 or 2, then I'll randomize for colors.

just don't play the slav please

Finally got back here.....this WC match is well what I would expect from two older players. Do you think there is any excuse that a WC participant could miss getting his queen trapped like that? Makes me think of the Fischer game where he donked his bishop in game one.

They were competing for who could make the most moronic move and Gelfand wanted to top Anand's g5 from the previous game. Prediction: next, Anand copies Kramnik and allows a mate in one.

I don't know. Chess is a lot harder when Houdini isn't kibitzing for you.

Leko missed the trap as well in the live commentary and praised Qf6, before Anand unleashed gxh5!.

The eval monkeys often overestimate themselves, but it's also different commentating vs. playing in a World Championship match. That's really an inexcusable mistake for that player in that context.

Gelfand also scored 2-0 vs Aronian in the 2007 WC. At, ahem, 'classical time controls.' He finished 2nd behind Anand. In a double round-robin with the strongest players - Kramnik, Moro, Leko, Svidler.

[the time control was 40/2h, 20/1h, 15m+30sec/all]

He had to defeat Kamsky to get into the DRR, and he did +2/5 after Kamsky had upset Bacrot.

But let's ignore that because Gelfand is so WEAK AND BORING omgwtfbbq!

As noted previously, the Queen escapes with Nc6, dxc6 Qxc6. Ugly position, but much better than resigning or giving the Q up.

+1.

also, for those who still claim they want a return to 'old-school' Candidates Matches, with massive RRs, just look at Curacao, it's a joke. [the one 'crazy' thing Fischer was 100% right about.]

The top 3 finishers: Petrosian, Geller, Keres played 12 games, ALL draws, averaging 19 moves.[!!]
This was after Fischer had crushed the field by 2.5 in the IZ, going +13 =9 -0. [Amazing, ftr. Maybe even more amazing than the +15 =7 -1 in 1970, considering Panno resigned after Bobby tossed out 1. c4!]

So, Fischer, Benko, Filip have to go all out against each other and the 5 Russians to win, but the top 3 Russians could take it easy [Tal was sick and withdrew halfway thru]. That's why they switched to elimination matches and that's still the best method. Like everyone else, I agree on the need for longer matches at Classical time controls.

Serious question:
Is Nc6 a move that a human finds?

To me the move seems to be a bit "computery".

It's easy to find by the process of elimination. But it's still completely losing. Playing on would have made this match even more of a mockery. Of course it then brings up the question - what is the shortest decisive world championship level game ever played. Though that kind of begs the question of whether this match is "world championship level."

Finish programming the simulator:



These are the players results vs an AGGREGATED opponent. That is it is their expectation in a match against an opponent who is the perfect average of all opponent's they faced. This is not the players' results against one another. The goal is not to see how they would do if they faced one another, but how they would do against an aggregated opponent given their lifetime performance expectations and matches of varying lengths. Match performance rating is their normalized result over all matches where a victory count for 1 point, a draw 0.5 and a loss 0. Since both players have an expectation greater than 0.5, as the number of games per match approaches infinity - both players match performance rating would approach 100. Clarifying again - in an infinitely long match, both players would always win.

Ok, I hope all that's at least fairly clear.

The results give some great insight into how these short micromatches really do favor the weaker player due to variance. The weaker player obviously does not become the favorite but their inferiority is much disguised. And we're using these things to decide who should compete for the title of world champion. It goes a long ways towards explaining the frequently very unusual results we see at the end of knock out events.

So for instance, we can see in a 4-game micromatch Kasparov loses the match 16.4% of the time against his aggregated opponent. In a series of 3 4-game micromatch knockouts, his odds of being knocked out by the final would be simply: 1- (1-.164)^3 or nearly 42%. So he would win only 58% of the time. On the other hand, if he played a 12 round event against his aggregated opponents we can see that he would only lose 9.78% of the time. A massive disparity caused solely by this knock out format.

I hope the math clarifies my position and problem with these events.

yeah the kingcrusher youtube found nc6 and it looks very enginish find.

great response by vishy all things considered.

There was a nickname for that process even. It was something like going thru the Russian mill. Most high ranked non russian players at that time had to go thru several rounds in a row against rested russian GMS (short draws were the reason for the rested comment)

I'll post again on this subject because i find this analysis very interesting. Let's bury the personal animosities, i apologize for everything that might have insulted someone. From no one, everything that strikes someone wrong is purely unintentional.

Imo it (slightly) misses the point of the debate. We are talking about the chance that the candidate's event produces the player with the highest current expectation (let's call him the best player at the moment of the tournament) as challenger and comparing matches to RR. Your analysis compares several mini-matches to one longer one.

So you should include tiebreaks (let's assume for a moment that we play 4-game tiebreaks with the same per-game expectation, then another (blitz) and then, for the sake of the analysis, we throw a coin). And obviously not losing the 12-game match against the aggregated opponent (which i assume models the RR) doesn't mean you're the challenger (someone might still score more points).

DIR, that's very interesting math, thanks for posting.

Where did you get that chess expectation calculator program? That looks like it would be fun to play around with.

There was never any animosity, at least not on this end. I just love debating.

I didn't include tie breaks because there is no reasonable way to do so. Classical chess performance expectations are a terrible indicator for precise expectation in faster time controls. For instance, Gelfand draws almost 52% of the time in classical, but in rapid/blitz that figure is undoubtedly going to be just a fraction of that. In any case with comparably rated players, fast time controls and very few games being played (as few as two in the tie breaks) - the tie breaks are going to end up being extremely close to coin flips in which case the data would not need to be changed at all.

Prior to having my soul removed by online poker I was a software engineer. I still remember a few tricks. Send me a PM with an email and I'll send you the source/executable, or if somebody has some webspace I could upload it there. You'll need .NET 4.0, which you probably already have. If not, it's available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/downl....aspx?id=17851

Returning to the chess games being played... I like the opening in the 9th game. I used to play this way with Black and it's actually fairly tricky. Notice how Black exchanges on c3 without being forced by White's a3. Many White players (at my level, not Gelfand's) play a3 automatically, which actually loses a tempo and gives Black a good game.

if i have a bit of time soon i'll try to make a rudimentary monte-carlo simulation of a match-type qualification process and a RR-type one. With ELO numbers and draw percentages based on time control as input this shouldn't be too difficult. I'll hazard a guess that with comparable number of total games the strongest players should come through with reasonably close percentages. Note that i said "games" instead of rounds, a format with 8 players and matches of 6, 8 and 12 games features less games than an 8 player DRR.

A slight increase in upsets (and some upsets imo aren't bad at all, just not too many) can imo be tolerated to compensate for the inherent disadvantages of RR tournaments. The big advantage of match-play is that a players' success depends only on his own games.

Really interesting game, I think. It's probably drawn, but if I was white I wouldn't accept that until every last possibly avenue had been explored, and that's a good way to overextend and soemhow lose it too.

I go to the official website for the stream

http://moscow2012.fide.com/en/live?g=20120523

I see the houdini analysis of the game but the video is an art discussion or some other topic than chess

It would be trivial to factor in the tie breaks. I feel as though I'm repeating myself, but the reason I did not factor in the tie breaks is because elo is not an accurate predictor for rapid and most certainly not for blitz. Not only is the variance of results massively increased, but strength levels in blitz/rapid often vary somewhat wildly from strength levels in classical.