That’s true. And there’s something else I think some of us either forgot or deemed unimportant, which is that Gukesh doesn’t play rapid or blitz at the same level as he does classical, unlike Ding (or the old Ding, anyway). Ding has been great in time crunches so far in this match (which has no increment for the first 40 moves), and Gukesh hasn’t.
ETA watching Hikaru’s recap now, and he makes the point that in a couple of matches Ding has taken long a single long pause in the second time control, and then essentially blitzed out a series of good follow-up moves, putting additional pressure on Gukesh.
4 - 4 after another roller coaster in which each player had a stronger position at some point.
Something I find slightly annoying in all this is the live commentary, as well as the post-game videos (i.e. by Hikaru or Levy), where they exclaim over missed opportunities and make it sound so bad on the player’s part. I’m re-reading Kasparov’s series on the world champions, and almost all the games played have those sorts of misses…it’s just part of the intense pressure of play in which many of the games have novelties being sprung on the players, time pressure, etc. But in the modern era that little evaluation bar goes up and down and they get excited.
And that’s one thing I like about Judit Polgar’s commentary. She was looking at a position the other day where the eval bar was equal, and she just shook her head and said, “no way I would want the Black side of this position, all the opportunities are on White’s side.” She doesn’t put much weight on evaluation unless it’s indicating a tactical opportunity.
I’ve been using the chess24 live stream VODs as my source, skipping ahead during very long thinks and ads, using 2x speed at times, etc. I can feel like I’m experiencing the tension live while staying very time efficient. The commentators there (today was Leko and Naroditsky, but it rotates also with Polgar and Hess) tend to be on the sensible side regarding what represents a real advantage or not, regularly acknowledging that computer lines and evaluations can be very distinct from practical play.
Chess Network remains my favorite.
Quite the opposite of sensationalism, his videos tend to put me to sleep, but in a good way
One of the things that he noticed that some of the other analyses didn’t is how many “only moves” there were in the match. While they may have missed some opportunities for advantage, they dodged a lot of (complex) bullets.
That’s interesting. One of Carlsen’s criticisms in his post-game debriefs (including today) has been that at moments when Gukesh has had a time advantage, he has pursued concrete variations that narrow Ding’s path and leave “only moves” that are essentially forced, but less difficult to find. “Maybe one-and-a-half of the moves he had to play today were hard.”
To be honest I find it a little distasteful that Magnus is doing commentary at all.
I mean, I get his reasons for not wanting to take part, and my opinion remains that the world championship is horribly broken. It makes me wonder whether if we had not had the great Spassky v Fischer match up, the chess world could have moved on by now to a format that would be better for spectators and participants. e.g. No reigning champion advantage, the candidates becomes the tournament to decide the next champion, with a few games head-to-head of the top 2 at the end of the tournament.
But, in the meantime, with FIDE attempting to press on with this, Carlsen’s very existence kinda delegitimizes the whole thing. And any time he points out some error of either participant, it’s a slap in the face. Just IMHO.
I think Carlsen is just bored with Chess. Look at his games. He challenges himself with less than optimal openings. Plays drunk online.
As for the championship it should be a knockout tournament. Play once as white and once as black, both as . Tie break is total time left on the clock from both matches (more time left wins the tie break). Win and move on to the next round.
If he’s bored with chess then he shouldn’t be commentating on the world championship.
It’s just weird…has anything like this ever happened with another game / sport? The top player not retiring but deciding not to compete in the biggest tournament.
And when I say “shouldn’t” I just mean IMO what he should do. I don’t mean anyone should try to bar him doing it.
Yep, but as I say, I’d also like to just see it merge with the candidates. A group or round robin stage followed by knockout rounds, and the final head to head can be knockout too.
We’ve had a full-on knockout tournament, and (once) a knockout double-round-robin, and the latter was okay, and the former pretty terrible (IIRC correctly, it’s been a while).
Ding seemed determined to take this to the tiebreak, playing safe in positions where he had some advantage. A pretty dangerous game to play though, and now he has a herculean task. Knowing your opponent needs a win in the last 3 games is a great position to be in. Gukesh can afford to play as dryly as Ding as done, but with the bonus that his opponent will be trying to force things.
Can someone help me understand Ding’s clock management? He burned an amazing amount of time early in game 11 (not the only time he’s done this), leading to where at the end he apparently had less than 8 minutes (of 120) left to complete 13 moves.
This seems to massively increase the chance of making the sort of blunder that lost him the game: If he’d spent even a little while contemplating that move he probably would have spotted the problem - but that time loss would have increased the already high chance of his flag dropping before move 40.
Why would he let himself get into this sort of trouble?
He does seem to be burning too much time early, but it’s not so unusual for players to spend lots of time when they get to the end of their opening preparation.
Even in this game the time management was pretty similar between the two players. After 5 moves, Ding had used over an hour and Gukesh less than a minute. But after 12 moves the time had equalized, after Gukesh spent an hour on one move. They both had about 15 minutes left on move 24.
I’m kind of hoping Ding can come back, although I don’t have anything against Gukesh. Ding did come back at the same point in the last WC, and also beat Hikaru on-demand in the last round of the candidates to qualify into that WC in the first place.
Yes maybe unbelievable is the wrong word, given the circumstances. Playing in time trouble, at the end of a 4-hour game, at the end of a 14-game match, is pretty different than me commenting from my office chair . But it’s really hard to overstate how straightforward the calculation is that this position Ding went for is losing for him.
. But it’s really hard to overstate how straightforward the calculation is that this position Ding went for is losing for him.