Various World Championships

There's not just "the" world chess championship.

While we are of course looking forward to the world chess championship match between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren next year, other world championship events are going on as well. The World Junior Championship finished recently (the results were given on this blog), and while it’s not yet the Women’s World Championship we’ve been following their Candidates matches.

But there are currently four events that can be thought of as world championships in their own right that are or are about to be underway right now.

1. The TCEC Superfinal. Don’t be confused by the event that calls itself the World Computer Chess Championship. That’s a nonsense event because the engines aren’t all using the same hardware, and very few engines participate. It helps the winners sell some product to people who don’t know that the best engine is Stockfish - which is free - and who don’t know about the TCEC. (Spread the word.) Just about all the best engines participate, and do so on a level playing field. (Where possible. Leela Chess Zero is designed to do its best on a GPU rather than CPUs, so adjustments must be made there.)

   Back to TCEC. As usual, it’s a Stockfish vs. Leela superfinal, and at this point Stockfish - again, as usual - is giving Leela a smackdown. Stockfish is up 37-27 in this 100 game match, leading 14-4 in wins. The format is the usual one: the engines play without opening books, but are forced to play lines that have been predetermined by the organizers, with each engine getting a chance to play the starting position of the line with each color. All four of Leela’s wins came with White, and three of them were in lines where Stockfish returned the favor in its white game. Eleven of Stockfish’s wins went unavenged in the games with reversed colors, and, interestingly, Stockfish has even managed to win twice with Black.

   Here’s one of Stockfish’s wins, an attractive and accessible victory, with the white pieces.

2. Coming up in 10 days, the FIDE World Team Championship. The title is a little grandiose, perhaps, for an event with only 12 teams, but those teams represent at least most of the elite: USA, China, Uzbekistan, India, France, and Azerbaijan, for instance. (There’s also Ukraine, the Netherlands, Poland, Israel, Spain, and South Africa [presumably there as African champions?]) The bad news is that most of the teams aren’t bringing their best players. (Board 1 for the U.S. is Magnus Carlsen’s favorite player; Duda isn’t playing for Poland, the Uzbek team doesn’t have Abdusattorov, no Harikrishna, Erigaisi, or Pragg for India; no Ding or even a single 2700 for China, etc.) Azerbaijan and the Netherlands do seem to be taking it seriously, so look to them as the likely favorites.

3. Coming up in a few days (opening ceremonies on the 14th, play starting the day after): the World Senior Championships for 50+ and 65+. Interestingly, John Nunn, who is now 65 (yikes), is the highest-rated player listed, regardless of age. (There are 50+ year-olds who are higher-rated than Nunn, of course - Anand, most obviously - but they aren’t participating.)

4. Finally, while it’s not exactly a world championship, Olympiads (as implicitly suggested in the second item, above) often have a better claim to being the real world team championship than events that have it as their official title. And so I bring to your attention the sufficiently complete 21st Correspondence Chess Olympiad, won by Germany. (By “sufficiently complete” I mean that although one game hasn’t finished, it won’t affect the battle for first.) When I saw the headline, before I read the article, I was going to joke that they won one game, while every other game in the event finished in a draw.

   It wasn’t quite that bad - but it was close. Germany’s board one drew all 12 of his games, their board two…drew all 12 of his games, and likewise with boards three and four. On board five, a quasi-miracle happened: eleven draws…and one win! On board six, something apocalyptic: nine draws and three wins. To be fair, one win came on time in an equal position. It’s easy to make fun of this, and probably appropriate, too, but I’ve followed enough top-level correspondence chess over the years (and have a several friends and friendly acquaintances in the racket) to know that the games are often not only deep but beautiful, and they are a rich lode of opening information. The drawing percentages are absurd, but the games are worth examining anyway.