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Chess
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As always, there's more to all of it than the shallow news headlines will bother to tell you.
Ding went into such time trouble because he thought the position was lost, so he was looking for any way to save a draw, perpetual checks or repetition. He thought he had nothing to lose by burning all the time. His problem was misjudging his position as worse than it was, not directly the time itself. Remember the players don't have that computer evaluation bar. Magnus didn't blow away Nepo last year. That match was closer than the score looked. After Nepo lost game 6 mostly on one mistake, he had to take chances and create sharp positions to try to win a game to equalize. He could have played for draws to keep the match score close, but that wasn't what he was trying to do, he needed to create high variance since losing any more didn't matter when he'd be sunk anyway. Ding isn't really third best in the world, or at least we don't really know that. The same effect of game results skewed for meta-reasons happened in the Candidates tournament. Everyone, particularly Caruana, was taking chances on sharp games in an attempt to catch up to Nepo at the top of the standings, since nobody knew yet that second place would matter because Magnus was withdrawing. Ding didn't take these chances, but he became the beneficiary of some of the risk-taking, winning three games in late rounds against all-or-nothing opposition. (April 19th, 2023, 10:18)T-hawk Wrote: Ding isn't really third best in the world, or at least we don't really know that. The same effect of game results skewed for meta-reasons happened in the Candidates tournament. Everyone, particularly Caruana, was taking chances on sharp games in an attempt to catch up to Nepo at the top of the standings, since nobody knew yet that second place would matter because Magnus was withdrawing. Ding didn't take these chances, but he became the beneficiary of some of the risk-taking, winning three games in late rounds against all-or-nothing opposition. That's true, but the FIDE rankings (utilizing the ELO system) do have them second and third as of today, although when the candidates was played in June last year, Ding was actually second while Nepo was "only" 7th. Magnus's experience is worth a lot of ELO points, and I do think he would win handily but unfortunately we'll never know. Darrell |
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I am once again asking for the quote of the month to be changed as it is now a new month - Mjmd |
