Every engine is saying that KE2 is half a pawn better than any other move here. Is there a way for me to get an English language explanation of why this is so?

White wants to play Bxg6 and take the h-pawn, but if he does it straight away black gets counterplay with rad8, rd1+

If that's the real reason though, we have to explain why Ke2 Rad8 doesn't just transpose for Black (presumably white can't take on a3). So there is probably a more concrete justification, but the short hand waving answer should be that the king is better placed on e2, avoiding checks and coming up the board, while Black lacks good moves.

Double blunder in a WC match, that was crazy. Anands second considering the second match when he overlooked Qb7.

Round - thanks, but I was more asking 'Is there a computer program that will in general elucidate why one more is better than another move?'

Hmm.. interesting question. I assume you mean 31.Ke2 ?

I think it comes down to White just not having another useful move. Bxg6 fxg6 Rxg6 Ba4 and Bxh6 Rh8 both allow Black to get good counterplay. Otherwise Black is playing Ba4 next and the only try for White is to reply Be4+ Bc6 Bxg6 fxg6 Rxg6. With the K on e2, Black's counterplay is too slow, but if 31.Ke1, Black has Rd1 after Rxg6, 31.Be3 allows Rd3.. so it just seems like Ke2 is best by process of elimination.

Pretty sure there is nothing that can do this. But any engine hugely speeds up the process of a human answering this question: you can try similar alternatives, find the computer refutation, and then find why that refutation doesn't work against ke2. Will try this tomorrow when I'll have access to an engine.

can someone tell me in extremely layman's terms how those 2 moves today were so mindblowingly bad?

I've read articles, and even looked at the board before and after and I can't see enough moves down the line (maaybe a 2nd level thinker in chess), I assume it's just positioning?

that doesn't seem enough to warrant the reaction so I'm just curious..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iYnLmJJlAw#t=17m07

Both players missed a tactic. The moves weren't mind-blowingly bad.

Ehh. They were pretty damn awful.

My mind was certainly not blown.

wasn't the reaction I got. wish the business insider guy wrote an article for this match, checked earlier.

grandmaster said he thought the moves were a transmission error on the site or something.

watching carlsen hesitate when he wrote his own move down when he noticed his mistake (that I still don't know why it was lol), and then put his head down onto his arms on the table when anand apparently equally ****ed up...I just wish I knew why :-)

Meh, overreaction. As Kaspy says:

Pretty understandable, especially in context.

since I recognize some of the names posting recently as SEers, would one of yall be awesome enough to explain how they are thinking in the first say, 3-4 moves each?

I'm a complete noob, learned to play as a kid, dad never let me win, made me want to win, never win anyway. :-/

the idea of competitive chess is altogether sexy to me the same way poker and sports betting are. I just don't have the memory nor the capacity (probably more drive) to study anything nowadays.

when I play kids at school, we basically make the first 5-6 moves in a minute or two total until we get where we want to be, then I just try to grind them down, get 2 for 1's, trap a piece or two, and then inevitably take 15 moves to get them when they only have their king and a pawn left.

anyway, when they're talking about openings and opening defenses...how ****ing far down the road are they basing their early moves, like the 2nd-5th moves?

and at that point, is it just kinda like "whose brain has more RAM/storage space" until they get far enough in that neither has ever played a game *exactly* like this and now have to revert to thinking on the fly (carlsen) vs studying the opening 10-12 moves (anand)?

finally, how many moves in do they (or any of you that play) have to go before they get to a point where they've never played a game with the exact same moves before? 8? 10? less?

seems like once you figure out a winning defense as black, you'd use it exclusively every time you faced the white opening. and that makes me think that you wouldn't encounter too much variation after the 1st move in the following 3-4 moves since I assume everyone will take the same line bc they came to the same conclusion as to what will work...

I know that people will change bc of that, but...

yeah so now you can see how out of my depth I am. this definitely interests me, but unlike poker/sports, there aren't many "play bad, get there" games in chess...

obv wtf do I know, but why would this match be more stressful than any? from what I've read anand isn't even the toughest matchup for carlsen.

It's for the world championship.

Magnus made a blunder that should have cost him 2 pawns plus some positional disadvantage. It would have taken him from being about a pawn ahead in the game to being about a pawn and a half behind (iirc looking at the engine numbers). That may not sound like much to you and I in our games, but between players of this level it's huge.

But what I believe made the reaction go nuclear was when Vishy failed to pounce on the blunder because he was focused on his own plan and made his next move very quickly. If he had stopped to examine the board for a few minutes he would have no doubt seen it. And once he realized what he had missed it pretty much shattered his confidence and Magnus proceeded to take him apart.

The reaction is also fueled by the fact that a win with black would have completely shifted the match to Vishy's favor.

it happen anand will get back to carlson soon

i'm not sure what point you are trying to prove here. the moves didn't cause the world to explode, and yeah, blunders happen occasionally, but they were clearly both objectively horrendous moves for masters to play, let alone super GMs. of the two i think vishy's is more forgivable given it's totally unexpected. obviously if you give the position after carlsen's move as a tactics problem to a 1400 player he will get it in about 10 seconds.

Not sure why you are having trouble understanding this.

If you knew more about the etiology of blundering, you wouldn't find it so mind-blowing; it would all make perfect sense. Think more deeply about the position and the moves that came before -- about what lines and ideas Magnus could have mixed up (that, along with what Vishy discussed in the press conference, was the "context" I was referring to). You might find the conference itself insightful in that regard.

Obviously I didn't say the moves weren't "objectively horrendous", lol.

It's a gagillion times more obvious that this is a very poop way to measure the inexplicability of a blunder. Beside the point anyway.

alright. i guess in your mind there is a chasm between 'objectively horrendous' and 'mindblowingly bad', in mine, there isn't

i've seen the conference. regarding thinking about the position, both players and everyone watching were acutely aware of the inbetweener move the knight was threatening to land (no doubt one of the reasons why carlsen backed up the white bishop in the first place). so to then step back into that trap a few moves later i do consider horrendous/mindblowing/insertyourownadjectivehere.

Pretty interesting video in the middle of this article that shows the key moments as the blunders were being made:

http://en.chessbase.com/post/sochi-g...sed-big-chance

If only Vishy were better trained at reading tells

There's no chasm; the terms exist on wholly different planes. "Objectively horrendous" measures the magnitude of a blunder's severity, whereas "mind-blowing" refers to its level of inexplicability, in the sense of "omg how the **** does that happen?"

The opening sequence 1. h4 2. f4 3. Kf2, for example, would be fecal and "objectively horrendous" regardless of which non-feline players it came from, but I couldn't describe it as "mind-blowingly bad" if a total novice played it. (Not the best example since it'd be an obvious joke if anyone half competent played it -- but the distinction should be clear.)

Kd2 a4, I totally got it. I didn't get the universe-is-collapsing feeling of Kramnik's infamous missed mate-in-one, or the head-shaked wtfs of Inarkiev's missed hook-and-ladder, or anything close. The whole thing made perfect sense to me.

That type of "blunder" happens in top level chess somewhat regularly afaik. Not super commonly but a lot of games are played and those things for sure happen. It's much less common for the other player to then miss the tactic.

I am not super sharp on my world champ match history but I'd be surprised if that's even top 10 world champ match "blunder". Surprising, somewhat shocking, but these things definitely happen.

Btw, I had to look for a few minutes for the tactic b/c the position looked dry as hell to me when I was playing through the game (initially, without annotation). I haven't played in a long time but my rating was just under 1800 fwiw. In game, I'd like to say I'd see that tactic almost 100% of the time but tbh, it's nowhere close to that. So saying a 1400 player would find that in 10 seconds is weird to me. Maybe within a tactics problem set but in game 1400s would miss that left and right. They probably wouldn't even be making the Ke2 move to begin with b/c they'd have no idea wtf to do in that position and just start spazzing their pieces around.

Also, one could possibly argue that Carlsen's opening choice in game 3 was more shocking overall. Blunders happen but Carlsen went into an opening with sharp theoretical lines, something he basically hasn't done in the last few years at all. I'm not sure how big of a deal was made of that, it can be chalked up to trying something different and those theoretical lines were supposed to equalize "easily" but that was more surprising to me once I understood what those theoretical lines entailed (I don't play any of the related system so had no idea to start with).

nice