Marathon sports contests

Last week I went with my wife to a quilting and crafts expo in Reno, which gave me a lot of time to kill, and so it happened that on Thursday I watched the end of the longest match in tennis history. For those of you who pay even less attention to tennis than I do, I’ll fill you in on the details: in a first-round match at Wimbledon, John Isner (rated #23 in the world) defeated Nicolas Mahut (rated #148 in the world) by the absurd-looking score of 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68. The ultra-long fifth game was necessitated by the rules of Wimbledon, which do not allow tiebreakers in the fifth set.

Of course I, along with about a zillion other sports fans, started wondering what were the longest marathon contests in other sports. Books have been consulted, lists have been compiled and posted on the Internet. Most of the lists (such as the one at this page) mention the following events:

• Longest professional baseball game — Pawtucket Red Sox 3, Rochester Red Wings 2, 33 innings, 8 hours and 25 minutes, 1981.
• Longest major league baseball game in innings — Boston Braves 1, Brooklyn Dodgers 1, 26 innings, 3 hours and 50 minutes, 1920. (Amazingly, even some regular 9-inning games take longer than that nowadays. They played fast back in the old days.)
• Longest major league baseball game in time: Chicago White Sox 7, Milwaukee Brewers 6, 25 innings, 8 hours and 6 minutes, 1984.
• Longest NHL hockey game — Detroit Red Wings 1, Montreal Maroons 0, 6 overtimes, 1936. (Because of tie-breaking procedures in the regular season, marathon games like this can only happen in the postseason.)
• Longest NBA basketball game — Indianapolis Olympians 75, Rochester Royals 73, 6 overtimes, 1951.
• Longest NCAA Division 1 basketball game — Cincinnati 75, Bradley 73, 7 overtimes, 1981. (Like the previous one, this was played without a shot clock. The possibility of stalling made multiple overtimes a little more likely, so perhaps one should give an honorable mention to the game Syracuse 127, Connecticut 117, 6 overtimes, 2009, which took place with a shot clock.)
• Longest professional soccer game — In soccer you have only 30 minutes of overtime, and then a shootout. So the record is meaningless; there have been many 120 minute games. What wimps!
• Longest college soccer game (U.S.) — Indiana 2, Duke 1, 8 overtimes, 2 hours and 39 minutes, 1982. After two 15-minute overtimes, the college teams continue playing 5-minute overtimes until a goal is scored. (At least they did in 1982.) After the sixth overtime, the coaches voluntarily agreed to start playing 10-minute overtime periods, to bring the game to a conclusion faster. Finally Indiana scored with 44 seconds left in the eighth overtime. (See account here.)
• Longest American pro football game — Miami Dolphins 27, Kansas City Chiefs 24, 2 overtimes, 1 hour and 22 minutes, 1971. As marathon records go, this one is completely underwhelming. During the regular season, pro games are limited to one overtime. In the postseason they play until someone scores. Only four games have ever needed a second overtime, and this one took the longest.
• Longest pro tennis match — Isner versus Mahut, of course. 183 games over 11 hours and 40 minutes.

Most of the articles I have seen online have overlooked the tremendous potential for marathon games in chess. (This CNN article is the only one I have seen on a “mainstream” sports website that mentions chess. It also mentions some great examples from table tennis and wrestling. Unfortunately, the article botches the chess example rather badly, so I’m not sure how much you can trust the other ones.)

So, to add to the above list, here are some mind-boggling stats, the first two coming from Tim Krabbé’s records page:

• Longest chess game in moves: 269, Nikolic ½ — Arsovic ½, Belgrade 1989.
• Longest chess game in hours: 24 hours and 30 minutes, Stepak 1 — Mashian 0, Israel ch. 1980.
• Longest world championship match: 48 games, Karpov 5 — Kasparov 3 (match declared incomplete), 1984.

As Krabbé notes, the second record is safe for all eternity, now that sudden-death time controls are de rigeur in international chess. The first record may not be safe forever; it was threatened in 2007 by a 237-move game between Alexandra Kosteniuk and Laurent Fressinet. Both of these games went to the same problematic endgame: rook and bishop versus rook.

As for the third record, it would also seem to be safe forever, because the Karpov-Kasparov match sounded the death knell for the “first player to win six games wins the match” format. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, the CNN article gets the facts completely wrong, so let me correct it. Karpov jumped to an early 4-0 lead (after just 9 games!) and then seems to have been seduced by a foolish plan. He apparently wanted to win the match by a Fischer-like score of 6-0, and so he started to play conservatively, just waiting for Kasparov to make a mistake.

It almost worked: after 17 straight draws, Karpov did indeed win the 27th game, to go ahead 5-0. But then Kasparov won games 32, 47, and 48, and FIDE President Florencio Campomanes (widely seen as a crony of Karpov’s) decided to terminate the match in order not to jeopardize the “health” of the players.

Unlike many of the games and matches listed above, this one was truly historic, in the sense that it had repercussions that are still being felt. Kasparov’s resentment of Campomanes probably sowed the seeds for his decision to bolt FIDE and form the Professional Chessplayers Association in 1993. This created chaos in the traditional world championship cycle that has only recently resolved itself, and we still do not have anything like a well-run, predictable procedure for determining the world champion.

Anyway, returning to the original topic, it seems to me that we should have an “ultra-marathon” category for sporting events. I would say that a contest becomes an ultra-marathon when it is three times longer than the “normal” length for that sport. By this definition, the Isner-Mahut tennis match was an ultra-marathon. The 33-inning baseball game was an ultra-marathon in innings, though not in time. The hockey game fell just short of ultra-marathon status. The so-called marathon games in basketball, soccer, and football are not even close.

By contrast, the records for chess go way beyond ultra-marathon status. The 269-move chess game was more than 5 times as long as a “normal” game (taking that, somewhat arbitrarily, to be 50 moves). The 24-hour game was also roughly 4 to 5 times longer than “normal.” The Kasparov-Karpov chess match was only twice as long as “normal” for that era (defining “normal” to be 24 games). However, by contemporary standards, when a “normal” championship match has been redefined to 16 games or even 12 (as in Topalov-Anand), a 48-game chess match is starting to look like an ultra-marathon, too!

I personally have never played an ultra-marathon chess game. My longest game time-wise was an 8-hour, 106-move battle at the U.S. Amateur Team Championship in 1982 or 1983 against Herb Hickman. I lost a Q+RP versus Q endgame. To Herb, who was an International Master of correspondence chess, eight hours must have seemed like nothing! The game started at 8:00 pm and went until 4:00 in the morning. Again, because all tournaments these days use sudden-death time controls, I doubt that I will ever play an 8-hour game again.

My longest game in move count was 115, against Chris Mavraedis at the Peoples Open in 2002. He beat me in a K+B+N versus K endgame that I darned near managed to draw by the 50-move rule: I resigned (because of a mate in 2) on the 45th move. The longest game that I have ever won also came down to the same endgame. I beat Jacob Berger at the U.S. Championship Qualifier in 2008 in 104 moves, using up only 36 moves on the 50-move-rule “clock.”

As these examples show, ultra-long chess games tend to come in certain “notorious” endgames: K+R+B vs. K+R, K+Q+RP vs. K+Q, and K+B+N vs. K. However, I did once manage to play a 197-move draw against Fritz 7, the computer program, in a game where I had two bishops against Fritz’s two rooks, and both sides had all their pawns left. By move 50 I had completely blockaded the position. Of course, this is an anti-computer technique that Hikaru Nakamura perfected, but in this case I just stumbled into it. All I had to do was move my king back and forth for about 150 moves.

Fritz 7, however, did not understand blockades and fortresses. It twice ran the move count to nearly 50 before playing pawn moves (which reset the “clock,” but only made its position worse because it lost a pawn without unblocking the position). Finally, on the third time through the 50-move “clock” it realized it couldn’t pitch any more material without serious risk of losing the game, and so it allowed the draw.

Of course, human versus computer games do not count for world records or ultra-marathon status, because computers are so stupid. Any human would have agreed to a draw back at move 47! Actually, it would be more accurate to say that any good human player would not have allowed me to blockade the position in the first place.