Monday
Jan012018
Magnus Carlsen's Day 2 of the World Blitz Championship
Monday, January 1, 2018 at 1:35PM
As promised, here are Carlsen's games from the second day of the World Blitz Championship. Except for a poor game against Vladislav Artemiev (which he won anyway), his play was exceptionally good all day, and not only in contrast with his play on day one. These are respectable, even impressive games by almost any standard!
Reader Comments (1)
Someone asked why I didn't label Ding Liren's 41.b6 an "outright blunder", since it moved the evaluation from equal to lost. I did have some slight reservations when I wrote it, but upon reflection - and still now - calling it a "blunder" seems too strong. It doesn't hang anything directly, it takes quite a few moves for the situation on the board to become clear, and the best moves aren't obvious. There's also a bit of grading on a curve: what might count as a blunder given classical time controls shouldn't be seen as severely in a blitz game - especially when the players are living off the increment.
If one wants to reject the idea of "grading on a curve", and then furthermore wants to say that any error that takes the game from equal to lost is a blunder, then every single game that is won on the board involves a blunder. For an omniscient player there are only three possible evaluations: White is winning, Black is winning, or the position is drawn. If we assume that a chess game ought to be drawn with best play, then to omniscience the game is drawn until it is lost. The move that changes the evaluation would automatically count as a "blunder" by the critic's definition, no matter how far short of omniscience we fall. If he wishes to bite that bullet, then fine, but for the rest of us it's a judgment call. And in this case, under the circumstances, one question mark seemed sufficient.