When Carlsen had the white pieces, the games featured the Petrov defense, the Catalan or, broadly, the Queen’s Pawn game. They carefully (and secretively) plan their opening moves, and their responses to their opponent’s opening moves, and so on, often as many as 20 moves into the gnarly branches of the impossibly complex tree that is a game of chess. Here is how the sands ran through the players’ hourglasses in that classic game - high-dosage, buzzer-beater drama, time-released over hours.Īt these rarefied levels of play, much of the match comes down to the players’ meticulous preparation, which they undertake in close concert with powerful machines. After the 40th move, they get an hour added on, and after the 60th move, they get 15 minutes added on plus a bonus 30 seconds for every move they make afterward. Players in the world championship begin the game with two hours on their clocks. And time pressure saw both players make their first real mistakes, injecting some human fallibility into the proceedings and stirring up human drama. Game 6 was the longest game in the history of the world championship at 136 moves over nearly eight hours. The most interesting seismic swings, though, came in the jewel of the 2021 match, the instant-classic Game 6, during which the computer twitched violently up and down - and up and down and up. But Nepomniachtchi’s blunders broke our chart again and again, skyrocketing the evaluations in Carlsen’s favor in Games 8, 9 and 11. In many games, these numbers hovered around zero, representative of that sparkling, accurate and dead-level chess. Computer engines evaluate chess positions in equivalents of pawn margin - positive numbers here are good for Carlsen and negative numbers good for Nepomniachtchi. Below is a snapshot of the match after each of the 572 moves in those 11 games, calculated by the computer chess engine Stockfish. The match was scheduled as a best-of-14-game contest, but Carlsen wrapped it up in 11 games, securing the 7.5 points needed to clinch the championship. The match also generated a lot of data! We’ve charted some of it below. It also featured a few inexplicable blunders, and just three bad moves saw Nepomniachtchi’s chances slip quickly and irretrievably away. The contest featured some of the best chess ever played by humans, nearly flawless even when examined by modern, superhuman machines. It was Carlsen’s fifth victory in the world championship, a title he has held since 2013, and the match went a long way toward cementing his status as the greatest chess player of all time. ![]() ![]() 1, defending his title against challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi of Russia. ![]() The 2021 World Chess Championship ended last week with Magnus Carlen of Norway, the world No. This article is part of our 2021 World Chess Championship series.
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