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CNN Fake News About World Chess Championship
Magnus Carlsen retained his championship today. CNN reported:
For most of November there was deadlock. Twelve games, 12 draws, a too-close-to-call psychological battle conducted before a devoted global audience locked at 6-6. And so, in a soundproof studio in a grand Victorian building in central London, the world title was decided by a series of quickfire tie-breakers for the first time in the competition’s official 132-year history.
As Casey Stengel said about the Mets, “Can’t anybody play this game.” This is the fourth time the world chess championship has been decided by rapid games (2006, 2011, 2016 and 2018). I realize that chess journalists are rare, but CNN can’t get the basic facts correct. Perhaps fake news is too harsh a term for the mistake in CNN’s article. Would they prefer that I call them incompetent.
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Richard,
Wow. I wasn’t aware of this. I haven’t followed World Chess since I was young. This sounds like the style of play going back to the old Russian model before Bobby Fischer came along. The Russians played hyper-conservative extreme defensive chess that produced endless draws. Of course, Fischer was the most aggressive player in the history of the game. He would lay in the weeds a bit and feel out the competition. Then he would break out into a completely innovative attack. He drove the Russians crazy.
Quickfire tie-breaker sounds like an excuse to produce results from those who don’t really have the creative urge to innovate.
Regards,
Jim
My husband is planning to speak at a public hearing tonight.
I warned him that no matter what he says, the reporter there will be able to make a hash of it and mis-report it.
It is almost like a requirement that there is at least one wrong fact in every news story.
Since the world chess championship was reunified in 2006, the matches have consisted of twelve regulation games. There has been no advantage to the champion (it used to be that the champion retained the title in a drawn match). If the match is a 6-6 tie, they play four rapid games. All four matches that were tied were settled in the rapid games. If it still was tied, they would go to speed chess.
Most people think that twelve games is too few. A longer match would encourage the players to be more aggressive since one loss would not be a disaster. Some people think that the tie breaker should be played first. The player who lost the tie breaker would know that he had to win the regulation (slower time control) games.
I simply can’t believe that CNN promotes fake news or is incompetent. Maybe we need some rapid game play offs, perhaps with the Onion?
There is no competition that is ever improved by shortening/quickening play to achieve the final result.
Richard,
I really don’t think this makes any sense, especially at the highest level. If football goes into sudden death overtime it’s still football. All of the normal rules are in play. However, cutting the amount of time for each move down by a factor of 10 or more changes the entire personality of the game. This is more a short-term memory trick chess act than the ultimate game of strategy that chess has been for hundreds of years. You can play chess or you can play speed chess but you can’t play both and call it the same game.
Let the champion hold the title in case of a draw. Let challengers really work towards a superior ability if they expect to take the title away. That is what you assume being the World Champion is about.
Regards,
Jim
Over the years, it’s been my experience, whenever I’ve read an article in the news about an event or a topic about which I actually had some personal knowledge, the article always had substantial errors in it. So I’ve had to assume that articles that I didn’t know anything about also contained similar errors. Apparently there’s been fake news all along! Nobody knows nothing. Sad!
I attended game 3 of the 2016 championship in New York. A Danish reporter told me that Carlsen would be happy with a 6-6 tie since he was much stronger in rapid chess. A champion should want to wipe his opponent out on the chessboard. In the 1960 world championship between Tal and Botvinnik, the crowd got so excited about Tal’s aggressive moves in one game that they had to move it to a quieter location. There was no danger of that happening this year.
Richard,
Gee this has the feel of like college boxing compared to a heavyweight prize fight. If I remember correctly Fischer beat Spassky in the standard (at that time) 24 game month long to the bitter end royal battle. Bobby started slow but then he broke through and ran a string of wins so Spassky could never catch him. That was a world championship. Speed chess is a carnival attraction. Trying to draw your opponent so you can win with speed chess is really weird.
To quote the President, “Not good.”
Regards,
Jim
This post is a hidden Rico-gem.
I’m not a chess buff, but it was an interesting read.
Maybe they should simply use the soccer tie-beaker rules. Or dueling . . .
Come on. Keep playing until someone wins two games (alternating white and black). If it’s getting late, continue the next day.
Game 1 went 7 hours. The 12-game match was held over nearly three weeks. I don’t think your plan would work.
We saw game 12 end. It was puzzling–Carlsen was fidgeting while Caruana thought and thought. Then, out of nowhere, Carlsen offered the draw, despite having (according to the computer analyzing the game) a 1/2 pawn advantage. Doesn’t sound like much, but he could have worked his way to a win. Carlsen is definitely the better fast (1/2 hour each side) game player, as demonstrated by his three game win, so we figured he just took the easy way out. I’m not impressed. Looked lazy. Or maybe he had to go to the bathroom…
Hello Richard, so glad to run into another chess enthusiast!
In a fluke, Caryn came up to see me working madly on a rush portrait painting job while I was also following the World Chess Championship on a computer screen in my studio. She happened in on the infamous game #12, watching Caruana’s intense facial expressions with eyes darting around the chessboard, just five minutes before the startling draw was agreed to.
As for the fake news, this is small potatoes compared to the howlers that CNN has produced over the years. Perhaps they were conflating the real anomaly of this match, the fact that this is the first time in chess history where all the regulation games were drawn, with the anomaly of the recent tie-breaker system. I don’t fault them too much since most of chess coverage in American media (which isn’t very much) is woefully primitive and uninformed. Did you know that the recently deceased Charles Krauthammer was a member of the Chess Journalists of America?
For those of you who don’t know, two years ago the U.S. team won the Chess Olympiad (yes, there really is such a thing!) for the first time since 1937(!), after which the Soviet Union dominated for some six decades. At the most recent Chess Olympiad last month, the U.S. team took the silver medal.
I was waiting for Donald Trump to invite the U.S. team to the White House just like he does with basketball and football champions, but alas it never happened. You would think that this would be a great PR victory, showing off to the World that the U.S. is not just a bunch of gun-carrying, crude sports-worshipping troglodytes, with no intellectual or cultural prowess. And these guys really are World Champions, unlike the fake titles we put on our other glamorous sports championships, whose players are often made up of either spoiled or criminal millionaires.
I painted caricature pictures of the contestants in the two previous World Chess Championship Matches. This year I have been overwhelmed by real paying jobs so I didn’t get a chance to paint Caruana or Carlsen in time for the match. Here is my first painting of Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian, when he won the World Championship back in 2014. I put this image on tee-shirts and sold them to our local chess junkies.
Hi Steven,
Great to meet you. That’s a wonderful caricature. It reminds me of the Chess Life & Review coverage of the USSR v World match in 1970 which had wonderful drawings of the players. I have one minor quibble. The U.S. won the 1976 Chess Olympics in Israel which were boycotted by the Soviets. It’s almost certain that they would have won had they competed in the Haifa Olympics, but it still counts as a U.S. victory.
You are certainly up on your history! I am aware of the Haifa Olympiad, but I don’t count it. No other top countries showed up. It is sort of like the asterisk after Roger Maris’s home run record in which he bettered Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs, but in a longer season.
If you get Chess Life Magazine, then you would have seen some of my work on the covers nearly twenty years ago. I painted four of them. After that, the new editor at the magazine wouldn’t let me do any more, for which I have been constantly annoyed! He finally retired this year and I have been meaning to contact the new editor. Here are a couple of examples:
2nd example:
That’s great artwork! I’m an expert on the history of GPS and most articles about it contain glaring errors. Here’s my recent review of a new documentary.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3596/1
Ya know, I read something you wrote about the origins of GPS a while ago. If I remember correctly, you posted a topic that had to do with some early computer research you did at case Western Reserve University in the 1960’s or 70’s. It just so happens that my wife works at University Hospital in collaboration with Case Western U. I think it was in that post that I followed a link to some of your history on the creation of GPS technology.