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Why Duda didn’t win the Blitz Event

The last game example looks like a clear case of collusion. Either that or Andreikin wanted to show Carlsen that he is a moron can lose as many tempi as he wants in this position and still win.

World class players are not used to criticism, but this was just flat out ridiculous. Besides that, these brain farts cost Duda $10.000. Don’t forget that we are not talking Kreisklasse here where players pick their moves by rolling a dice, Andreikin is rated 2793 in Blitz.

Fake News in Chess?

 

Back in the day before Chessbase and before engines became strong, the average player had to rely on opening books. There were a few popular studies on openings by Euwe, Pachman, the russian Black Book Series, and of course there was the famous Encyclopedia of Chess Openings. What they all had in common were mistakes, and also some strong novelties were simply held back by professional players. Some GMs may have even published wrong analysis. That led to the funny scenario where one could score a lot of points because the opponents were simply repeating refuted lines. Since the Informant came out twice a year, there was a window of half a year to exploit the desinformation.

Nowadays with TWIC and Stockfish we have pretty much a level playing field in chess. Even amateurs can find out the tuth on their own by simply exploring positions to very end. In my opinion this is one reason for Elo-inflation. Virtually everyone is much stronger these days, because virtually everyone has access to all the information. The worst openings have vanished from practice and so have the easy victories. Good memory has become important.

Drawing a Conclusion

Remember this little scandal about the “leaked” preparation?

It is pretty safe to say by now that Caruana never intended to play 10…Re8. Why is this interesting? Well, both camps must have found the refutation, because otherwise it makes no sense for Caruana to send the fake tell and for Carlsen to go for that line.

Note: It didn’t appear in the Caruana-Nakamura match in London either even tough Naka was playing the line on a regular basis.

And there it is…

Today my analysis of 10…Rd8 in the QGD was confirmed by the Challenger in a more or less meaningless rapid game. Ramirez said on air that this had had been played in a correspondence game before, so my discovery was not a novelty after all.

 

On a sidenote:

How about Roulette?

Carlsen plays the Drawmeister against Caruana and tricks him in the rapid games. Nakamura plays the Drawmeister against Caruana and tricks him in the rapid games. Do you recognize the pattern? Back in 1983 when the candidates match Smyslov vs. Hübner was drawn, the outcome was decided by a roulette ball. Now that is pretty lame one may argue, but it certainly has it’s advantages. Guess what, the Drawmeister becomes risky all of a sudden. If you have a 50% chance to get eliminated you can’t raise your overall chances by drawing games anymore. This may not be an ideal solution for a World Championship, because someone holds the title already, but it should work in regular tournaments.

QGD: Caruana’s 10…Rd8

After I read this article on chessbase.com I decided to take another look at this seemingly weird move. In order to discover the secret you have to click through every possible line, even if the engine considers it as dead lost. The key is once again to circumvent the horizon problem. Here is the surprising result, and since all the experts stay quiet on it, I assume that this is a world premiere:

It’s quite sad that Carlsen was such a favorite in the tie-break so that he could basically skip the entire classical part of the match.

How to draw AlphaZero

This story has popped up on Reddit today. Four british players held AlphaZero to a draw with white by exploiting the fact that it only plays the “best” moves, which apparently leads to the Berlin. What a surprise, or not? Well, that’s exactly what this website is all about. White has at least a draw and he can force it in all major openings! With black it’s indeed a different story. They managed to hold in the King’s Indian where AlphaZero chose a line that was popularized by Sokolov in a match against Van Foreest in 2016.

The final position is a fortress, which is shows the second weakness of chess engines. Nice coincidence for a 2-game match.

Not only that engines only play the highest ranked move, which leads to horizon problems, they do not understand that a variation leads to a fortress early enough either, which is also a horizon problem. Humans on the other hand know what they are aiming for, so they can work their way backwards. Engines just make strong moves, while humans can use imagination to their advantage. For imagination to become a strength it requires some sort of knowledge though. If you don’t know what a fortress is, it doesn’t help to imagine the position where black is roughly a pawn down.

For the record: I can hold AlphaZero to a draw in Tic-Tac-Toe.

Best by Test

Here is some interesting data from the Leela Network. Page 23 from the supplementary data sheet of the AlphaZero Paper is also quite stunning. For example it tells us that this is a forced draw:

To put it mildly, I am not entirely convinced. There is a similarity to using an engine in correspondence chess. If you just play the top recommendation you won’t get far. It is well known that engines, even neuronal nets, have horizon issues that can be exploited.

Another missed Chance

Caruana’s team prepared a win, but Fabiano couldn’t convert it. That is what happened on the surface. In reality this game provides some insight in Caruana’s thought process. Instead of trying to create own threats, he was more concerned about stopping Carlsen’s threats. This works in positions with a static advantage, but apparently his advantage wasn’t static enough. Needless to say, he was a pawn down at that point. Note: Steinitz Rule 7.