Kramnik doesn't deserve to be in the Candidates if only because of that one game vs Tarzan.

Yeah, Tarjan played great to get the win, but there's a difference between him laying a "beat down" on Kramnik versus taking advantage of Kramnik's obvious draw contempt.

That Tarjan win was cool because it undoubtedly improved my Kasparov number drastically

+1

When Nakamura is trying to flag someone in blitz on his chess.com stream, I notice that he is madly hammering away at either his mouse or his keyboard. There are way more strokes/clicks than actual moves/premoves being played. Why is this?

I am wondering if he is somehow queuing up moves so that he not only premoves once, but goes 2-3 premoves deep. If this is possible/legal in the software, that seems pretty beast when there is no increment.

I figured it out... he was just lagging on his hotel internet and repeatedly re-entering the move because it was being slow.

Lag cheaters suck.

Online he can only j’adoube his pants.

LOLOLOLOL

Tuma itt

Nice, that's nice.

Interesting game in the Ivanchuk vs. Wei Yi match.

Wei Yi spent 34 minutes with 42 remaining and played 18.-Rxe3. Any specific ideas on what Wei Yi miscalculated (or hallucinated)?

Awesome site I never new of. Thanks for the link!

I don't think Wei Yi hallucinated anything. I mean, Ivanchucks King is on d4 with no way back, surrounded by 5 black pieces. It's absolutely amazing that there is no way to mate it. I wonder if Ivanchuck saw all that or just got kinda lucky

https://2700chess.com/games/bai-ding...ina-2017-11-04

Insane game.

Pretty sure Ding can just retire now.

King was very active on d4. White's just up a piece.

Jerry did a video on it:

https://youtu.be/VBUM_t4ba5Q

It's a great game for sure, but to put it in context, Ding beat a lower rated opponent, so no not a "game of the century", maybe a candidate for game of the year.

First time in this forum and I don't play chess, but this is a fantastic article about Magnus playing an amateur who had one month to learn the game and try to beat him. Really entertaining.

It's a crap article. Sensationalized bs of the feelgood self-improvement snake-oil variety.

The article is kind of fluff but sort of interesting and I didn't know about the Play Magnus app (sick brag: I just installed it and beat 5 yo Magnus in 5 moves).

My one criticism of the guy's approach is that if I was going to play Magnus and have any hope of catching him off-guard, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't go for a Ruy Lopez for which I'm sure he knows every reasonable variation 20+ moves deep.

If he wants to catch Magnus off guard, I would suggest checkers.

This article is so awful that I am legitimately upset after reading it. This dude is a charlatan, and I cannot believe that the WSJ gave him this fawning feature article.

I might be the worst chess player in this thread,* and I would crush this dude. His chess is abhorrent. The article talks about how bad 12. Qf3 is. It even correctly points out that it's not bad because it loses a piece to a tactic, but it's bad because it doesn't accomplish anything even if that tactic isn't there. That discussion was good, though it made it sound like Magnus's 12. ... Qh4 was some very subtle GM move. Even I would find that, seeing the threat of Qxh2#, which is the key threat in the tactic Magnus uses to win the bishop. Anyone who plays chess would see that. Anyone who bothered to try would be able to calculate that simple tactic.

But the article doesn't even mention that after that tactic, the dude just sits back and lets Magnus capture a rook, then walks his king and bishop directly into a fork for no reason whatsoever. In short, he doesn't just lose because he blunders, he blunders while he's just moving pieces around aimlessly, revealing his utter cluelessness.

Basically, I'm pissed at the hubris necessary to even attempt this stunt. Who thinks they can be world class at anything in 30 days? I'm actually offended by the disrespect there. And I am stunned that the damn Wall Street Journal gave it any coverage, let alone the full feature fluffer treatment.

The dude's algorithm idea is truly awful. He's basically trying to invent the kind of chess program that was used in the 50s by Alan Turing, memorize some of its results, and then use that to beat the GOAT. This plan is asinine, and I would laugh in the face of anyone who presented it to me. The fact that he couldn't even pull off this dumbass plan makes me think he's completely full of crap in general.

The other "extreme learning" things he has done are not at all impressive, and some of them aren't even learning.

Basically, this dude seems like a fraud, and the WSJ treated him like a genius. And his chess is truly awful.

*~1300 rating on chess.com

lolwat