Today, as I expect most readers of this blog know already, Magnus Carlsen won the 11th game of his match with Viswanathan Anand to retain his world championship title. The final score of the match was 6½-4½ (+3 – 1 =7 for Carlsen).
What can I say? I think the primary reaction of the chess world this time was ennui. The question was not really whether Carlsen would win, but how much he would win by. For many fans it was too soon after the 2013 match to get excited, especially about another match between the same players. Thanks to Fabiano Caruana’s breakthrough tournament in the Sinquefield Cup this year, the match people really want to see is Carlsen-Caruana. (Admittedly, Caruana still has to prove that he can continue to play at or near his Sinquefield level on a regular basis.)
But that’s all for the future. The match we had for the present was Carlsen-Anand.
It was a somewhat interesting match for about three games. After Anand beat Carlsen in game three (something he had failed to do even once in their 2013 match), the match was tied and there was some hope that the psychological advantage had shifted. As I wrote in a previous post, from an objective point of view Anand had about a 10 percent chance of winning the match at that point, but because of the psychological factors I was willing to raise his chances to 20 percent. I thought he might be “looser” (in a positive sense) than Carlsen, willing to play as if he had nothing left to lose.
However, it turned out that Anand’s psychology cracked first. In game six he received a true gift from the chess gods. After Carlsen completely outplayed Anand in the opening, Carlsen made a tactical error that could have changed chess history. Anand could have won a pawn with a little combination of two in-between moves. With an absolutely free pawn, there is a strong chance that Anand would have won the game and gone ahead in the match.
But Anand didn’t see it. It’s amazing he didn’t see it, because … Nxe5 was a tactic that literally had to be at the top of each player’s analysis tree every move. The threat had been there for about six or seven moves but Carlsen had it defended, until suddenly he forgot to keep it defended. The best explanation I’ve heard was from someone on Facebook who said that sometimes you get so used to the fact that a particular combination is not possible that you take it for granted, and you don’t notice when it becomes possible.
I disagreed with the people who said at the time that it was an inconceivable blunder, that nothing like this had ever happened in a world championship match, etc. I later read an article that gave two excellent examples of similar double blunders in WC play. But there’s no question that this was a big turning point. It’s just too bad the suspense didn’t last for very long. Anand played a different move, and after two minutes when it seemed we had stepped through a wormhole into an alternate universe, we were back to the familiar one where Carlsen is king.
Carlsen went on to win that game, and after that it was pretty obvious that the match was his. In the last game Anand was finally provoked into playing pretty desperately, sacrificing an exchange for not much compensation. However, as usual (except for the fateful game six), Carlsen’s technique was spotless.
Another question that came up on Facebook was: Should the match have been longer? Would that have made it less boring, giving both players more incentive to take risks?
In general I am definitely a strong supporter of doing things the old way. I’d like to see a match of at least 16 games, and I abhor the active-chess and speed-chess tiebreakers. However, in this particular match, four more games would have made no difference and would have just prolonged the tedium. Now if Caruana gets to play against Carlsen, the more games the better!
Congratulations to Magnus Carlsen, who absolutely deserved to win this match. If I and the chess world have tended to focus too much on the one particular move when he could have gotten in trouble, it’s actually a compliment because he was so much in control the rest of the time.
