Carlsen-Caruana Game 12: Shocking and Disappointing

Today’s twelfth game of the world championship match — the last “slow” game — ended abruptly with Magnus Carlsen’s offer of a draw to Fabiano Caruana, in a position where Carlsen had (a) good attacking chances, (b) almost no chance of losing, and (c) a substantial time advantage of 30 minutes versus 10 minutes for 10 moves.

Until now, I have not joined in the complaints about a chess match where all the games had been drawn. If you watched the games, you could tell that they were serious battles. Game ten especially was an exhilarating high-wire act and near-death experience for both players, which I think may have had a strong effect on their psychology in the last two games. I don’t mind a draw when the game is hard-fought and is allowed to run its normal course. But in game twelve, that isn’t what happened. The fun was just getting started. We were all looking forward to seeing Carlsen play a genuine attack, and waiting to see if Caruana could pull off another Houdini act.

And then, whoops! Carlsen pulled the plug. It was as if we had set up the Christmas tree for Santa’s arrival, and then the power went out and Christmas was cancelled.

From a strategic point of view, it’s possible Carlsen buys into the conventional wisdom that he is a better fast player than Caruana. So basically his objective today was to draw, not to win, thereby sending the match to a playoff (where the initial time control will be game in 25 minutes). If that was his strategy, it is a very dangerous one. In statistical terms, maybe his expected winning percentage is greater in a rapid game, but the variance is also much greater. If there are chess gods, they will punish Carlsen for his hubris.

(I don’t know if there are chess gods. In the television game show Survivor, there are definitely Survivor gods. Any time you see a player get too cocky about his winning chances, it’s almost a guarantee that he is going to be eliminated at the next Tribal Council. But that’s partly because the producers edit the show that way.)

The alternative is to believe that Carlsen really didn’t think he had very good winning chances. That’s what he seemed to say in the postgame interview. “I think my position is not as good as it looks,” he said. But this is astounding. First, what does it mean for a position to look good but not be good? What if it looks good after five minutes of analysis? What if is still looks good after an hour of analysis? What if, in addition, it looks good after Alpha Zero or your favorite supercomputer says that Black is ahead by 0.8 pawns?

According to an article on chess.com, the world computer championship will be suspended for a day in order to have all the computers play games against each other starting from the final position. I don’t know what the point of this exercise could possibly be, except to embarrass Magnus Carlsen. But perhaps he should be embarrassed. There is a standard we hold world champions too, and it’s higher than the standard for ordinary players. To be a true champion, he owes it to the chess world to be fearless, to show us how we should all play this kind of position.

This morning Gjon Feinstein and I hosted our fourth world championship watch party. I have been so thrilled by the interest and enthusiasm of our young listeners (today we had four kids and one adult). When the previous games ended in draws, we were able to explain to them why they were draws, and the kids learned from that. But this time, I couldn’t explain anything to them. It was the first time in this match that I felt embarrassed.

Of course, I understand the argument about pressure. None of us can imagine, supposedly, the pressure these two players are under, with the world championship depending on every move. But the argument cuts two ways. World Champion. Higher standard. What makes you worthy of the title is the fact that you can cope with pressure that ordinary chess players can’t even imagine.

Matches and games like this one always lead to a chorus of people on the Internet suggesting gimmicky and contrived ways to cure chess of its supposed curse of draws. I almost always ignore these, because they’re worse than the disease they are trying to cure. The problem isn’t with chess, it’s with players who don’t want to fight, and no gimmick will solve that problem. And it hasn’t even been a problem in this match, until game twelve.

Still, if you want to talk about changes, here are my thoughts.

1. Give the champion the draw advantage. No, no, no, no, no! This is what Bobby Fischer fought against. It creates an unfair fight, where one player only has to score 6 points and the other has to score 6½. Unfairness is a worse sin than boringness. Some people say that the champion has “earned” the right to have draw odds — but that’s nonsense. Botvinnik shouldn’t get draw odds against Fischer because Botvinnik beat Tal. Different opponent, different time.
2. Speed playoffs followed, if necessary, by Armageddon. That is the current setup for this match. I see the speed playoffs as a necessary evil, but Armageddon is a completely unnecessary evil. It once again sacrifices fairness to obtain a falsely decisive result. We try to even the odds in the Armageddon game — we give White a time advantage and (of course) a move advantage, but give Black the advantage of playing for a draw. This is wrong because, first of all, it distorts the strategy of chess, and second, because we have no idea what is the right balance to ensure fairness. A 5-minute to 4-minute time advantage? Or 5 minutes to 3 minutes? The balance may be different for different players. And what if, as in this match, Black actually has equal or better chances to win? This throws off the whole Black/White calculus. This actually happened when I played against Juande Perea for the Santa Cruz Cup many years ago. We played six playoff games at increasing speeds, and Black won every one. Under the circumstances, whoever drew Black for the Armageddon game would be a huge favorite. Juande and I decided to “just say no.” We didn’t play the Armageddon game and we agreed to be co-champions. Which brings up another possibility…
3. Just declare Magnus and Fabiano to be co-champions. You can call this the Mackenzie-Perea solution. It’s completely fair for now, but the trouble comes in the next world championship cycle. Who does the next challenger play against? Should we have a three-way round robin? [Actually I kind of like this, except from the logistical point of view — a three-way round robin takes three times as long as a two-player match.]
4. Go ahead and have a speed playoff, but with the stipulation that no player can repeat the same opening move as White that he has used before. Of the suggestions I’ve read, this seems the most intriguing to me. The idea is to force players out of their preparation — eventually they are going to be forced into unorthodox openings like 1. b4 or 1. g4. The good thing about this idea is that it is not in any way distorting the game of chess. It also tests the players on the whole opening repertoire. The bad thing is that it doesn’t address the fundamental issue, the players’ willingness to fight.
5. In case of a tie, decide the world championship by a vote of the living ex-world champions. Okay, I can hear Fischer screaming over this one, because in his era the Russians would always win the vote. Probably you should exclude ex-world champions who come from the same country as one of the two competitors. This solution might in fact address the real issue better than any of the others, because if the players knew that their games were being judged by a jury consisting of Anand, Kramnik, Kasparov, and Karpov, they might try a little bit harder to play beautiful and fighting chess.

In sum, all of these “solutions” have substantial problems. The one change I would definitely recommend, which as far as I can see has no downside, is to lengthen the classical part of the match. Even a 16-game match would, I think, feel quite different. It gives the players more time to experiment with their openings, and you wouldn’t have the sense that a single loss might decide the whole match. Plus, chess fans would get more games to watch!

For now, all of this discussion is academic. On Wednesday, we will have a very exciting round of playoffs, and at the end of the day we will at least have a consensus “first-among-equals.”