Weakest World Champion ?

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Elubas

Sep 27, 2014

#121

"If Carlsen had lost his match to Anand convincingly or even by a bit, I would say Anand was simply better than him, Carlsen just happened to be more consistent, do better against weaker players, was in better health, players blundered more against him, or a host of other possible variables to get his rating advantage."

What I find especially interesting here is that you would be so happy to make so many excuses for a consistently better rating, yet... I could apply this same logic if it turned out Anand did win. I could just say that Carlsen was having a particularly bad week, or that he "just happened" to fall into Anand's preparation.

The difference of course is that when I am pointing to ratings I am pointing to years of results in many different top level tournaments, (creating a large sample size and limiting bias) whereas the WCC is a one time event, against just one player.

"Hence it's easy for you to say it was obvious months/years in advance of the match, when in reality it wasn't obvious at all."

No, the match happened just as I predicted it; actually, Carlsen won by even more than I had thought, with +3 (I predicted +2 -- I was definitely trying to keep an open mind about the differences between match play and tournament play, but they did not really show in the match. The positions Magnus won were either worse or dead even). Of course ultra sceptics just want to insist that such a prediction was merely coincidental, and that it couldn't have been predicted by the ratings. An interesting fact: The performance ratings of Anand and Carlsen in that match were almost identical to their ratings at that time.

Elubas

Sep 27, 2014

#122

"The better player is the one who's in the same general rating group or above of the other player, who in a one on one match of a decent number of games wins more games than he loses."

This can lead to problems. So Kasparov beats Anand in a match (these all actually happened; these are not just hypothetical). Kasparov is better than Anand. Kramnik beats Kasparov. Kramnik is better than Kasparov (and thus also Anand). Anand beats Kramnik. So Anand is better than Kramnik and thus also Kasparov. Somehow Anand is both better and worse than both Kramnik and Kasparov.

fabelhaft

Sep 27, 2014

#123

"This can lead to problems. So Kasparov beats Anand in a match (these all actually happened; these are not just hypothetical). Kasparov is better than Anand. Kramnik beats Kasparov. Kramnik is better than Kasparov (and thus also Anand). Anand beats Kramnik. So Anand is better than Kramnik and thus also Kasparov. Somehow Anand is both better and worse than both Kramnik and Kasparov"

Yes, but it's very common that people want to have playing strength reduced to one single result at one single event. No matter how many years of very dominant world #1 results a player is having, as soon as he fails to win one single event this proves that he "just happened to be more consistent, do better against weaker players, was in better health, players blundered more against him, or a host of other possible variables to get his rating advantage" and actually never was the best player.

TheGreatOogieBoogie

Sep 28, 2014

#124

Rogue_King wrote:

Comparing ratings between generations is completely useless. Ratings are based on the players in the pool, the amount of players in it, inflation, the way ratings are calculated, and a host of other things besides playing strength. Ratings can only differentiate between players within the same pool at exactly the same time.

But even then ratings are not a good method of judging who is the best because they don't objectively evaluate solely playing strength. Ratings are in big part based on a players consistent performance. Someone could be 2950 strength in normal play, but if he was known to have periodic terrible migraines a couple of times a year that reduced his playing strength to 2550, his rating would settle somewhere far lower than his actual strength. Similarly if someone is a really strong player, but nerves, stress, or tiredness, stop them from playing well in all of their tournaments, ratings will never accurately show their true strength.

A similar analogy would be baseball regular season records. It's often not the best team that has the best record, but a good team with a very low number of injuries that takes the top spot. That's why baseball doesn't use regular season records to determine who wins the championship. They take the teams that have been shown to be pretty good by being filtered out through the regular season process, then have them play each other to determine who's actually the best.

Similarly with chess, tournaments and rating can be used to reasonably determine who the really good players are, but you need matches to determine whos the best, since purely statistical means like ratings or records aren't good enough. Thats why Carlsen just having the top rating wasn't a good enough reason to say he was best in the world, it was when he beat Anand the world champion (and number 3 rated at the time) that he showed he really was the best.

The problem though is match play and tournament play are different beasts. Match play essentially involves deep preperation against one person whereas tournament play you need to prepare for many different people.

"Thus the most recent world champs [over the board] tend to be stronger than those before. Carlsen is the strongest. The weakest world champ would probably be the very first world champ--who ever that may be. "

Agree.

"Let's put it this way: If knowledge equaled a good chess player, we might as well crown a chess book as world champion."

I cast my vote for the ECE! ^_^ Since it's a volume set instead of one book it might not qualify :( Meh, I'll vote for Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual then, though Muller's How to Play Chess Endgames is a strong contender.

Elubas

Sep 28, 2014

#125

lol, yes, thanks for weighing in Caruana.

meeatdust

Sep 28, 2014

#126

carlsen by 1000 miles!!!!!!~

MuhammadAreez10

Sep 29, 2014

#127

[COMMENT DELETED]

MuhammadAreez10

Sep 29, 2014

#128

chessmstrmate wrote:

DeepBlue Because it Never actually Played the Moves! it had a Human Operator!

Deep Blue wasn't World Champion. Wth told you that?

Aetheldred

Sep 29, 2014

#129

MuhammadAreez10 wrote:

chessmstrmate wrote:

DeepBlue Because it Never actually Played the Moves! it had a Human Operator!

Deep Blue wasn't World Champion. Wth told you that?

It's a joke, MuhammadAreez10

DemonicArchangel

Jun 11, 2024

#130

lolurspammed wrote:

Topalov, Ponomariov, Kasimdzhanov and Khalifman shouldn't even be in the discussion because they weren't "real" world champions, even though Topalov is a very strong player in his own right and is hanging around 2800 FIDE, and therefore would be stronger than many real world champions. However the weakest real world champions would have to be Steinitz, Euwe and Smyslov.

People that are saying Anand or Carlsen or Kramnik just because they're in the modern era need to realize that you can't speculate how good the old guys would have played if they were alive now and had computers. As of right now, Anand, and Carlsen/Kramnik especially, usually play nearly flawless chess, especially middlegame downwards. Kramnik is starting to slow down, but closer to his peak, and in recent years even, he has been impeccable. And well, Carlsen is the highest rated player of all time and untouchable by anyone not named Fabiano Caruana.

well now day's there are more position chess as Kramnik demonstrates and Magnus is really good at those positional sacrifices that are like engine moves, back in the day it a was like, throwing everything you got at your opponent. Smyslov was solid not that bad in my opinion.

EJEthanJ