Does Karjakin even have a "puncher's chance"?

Like the last two posters' nicks start with "Ki". Coincidences all over...

The use of the term "chance" has been very vague here.  Chance is best understood as probability, which works best for large populations of data points.  Applying probability to a singular event is not very meaningful.  I say "singular" because Karjakin's recent intensive training, and the extremely high stakes, make extrapolation from the data set of previous encounters seem dubious.  Especially when that data set of prior encounters is fairly small.

If Karjakin wins, many of those who predicted that Carlsen would win by a large margin will say that Karjakin's chances were in fact truly low, but something unusual or mysterious happened, instead of just admitting that they mis-guessed Karjakin's chances.

RIP Karjakin

Yes, a chance to get punched out.

I did like the match, and the playoff was very exciting. Sergei admitted in the pressconference that he prepared in the wrong way for the play off. He looked at openings, in stead of playing fast games to adapt to shorter timecontrols. Congratulations Magnus with your birthday and WC victory!

Well like I said, you, generally, can't truly know whether the chances were misevaluated. You're right, I could have mis-guessed, but it's also possible that the prediction was pretty reliable, but it still allowed for some possibilities that happened to occur. That's why when you favor someone you don't expect to be right 100% of the time. That doesn't mean that the information you have doesn't tell you something.

I wasn't using the data set of previous encounters, myself. I was more taking into account the rating system, and how, for example, it predicted very accurately the results of the previous two WCC events. And I didn't see much reason to think Karjakin would give Magnus any particular stylistic problems, though that could be because of my ignorance of Karjakin. I've seen lots of his games briefly, and they didn't stand out to me as any particular style. So I felt like Karjakin was just a universal player, and so I didn't expect anything too crazy to happen. Someone like Aronian, let's say, has a much more eccentric style, which could make the ratings less reliable as a predictor, but not so much for Karjakin.

But people were saying that Karjakin was a very good defender of worse positions, and that did seem to shine through for him. I suspect that I over-predicted Magnus a little bit, but not that much. Magnus generally has no problems with finishing off games accurately, he's the most accurate player out there. And he has the patience to finish people off -- his style is grinding after all. So when he had all of those winning chances in some key games of the match, it seemed reasonable to predict that Magnus would win those positions, but he didn't. I would say that's strange, a possibility reserved in the predictions, but not a likely one.

"Applying probability to a singular event is not very meaningful."

I would tend to disagree, generally. If you applied some accurate probability to many single events on many occasions, you'd probably have aggregate results reflecting that probability. If on ten separate occasions I predicted a 70% chance to occur, that would probably create about 7 scenarios in which I was right. So feeling confident makes sense since, who am I to say that one of the 3 times in which I'll be wrong will be this one? I'll probably be surprised about 3 times, but right the other times.

Unless you just mean that the WCC is a totally different animal. It kind of is, but not by such a huge amount. We can at least go by Magnus's past results where he successfully translated his overall strength into match play, and that was against a more experienced match player than Karjakin.

Karjakin gave Carlsen a run for his money. But, Carlsen was in his element in the shorter form of the game.

So he did have a "puncher's" chance, whatever that exactly meant. 

<Clear throat> Well... Hmmm... Well Magnus did win by two game margin, so I guess you are right.

That's both incredible and irrational?

ed1975, its difficult to adjust to correct speed after a lot of games at a different time control. Magnus hit a very good rapid-speed instantly, while Sergei missed and got into time- trouble all the time. I think Magnus started to play lot of rapid or blitz already before longchessgame 12, and had been working several days before the playoff at a good rapid-speed . To find that fine pace was much stronger than rehearsing openings. Magnus was a lot better in the playoff because he had the good pace, while Sergei got time trouble in difficult situations.

Karpark?

Magnus looks a little bit stronger than the rest. i hold him as a 60 percent favourite to defend the title until he meets equal strenght.  There is a player out there that might be more talented, but he is only ten years old.  In 2022 he will be 16. They call him Praggo.

Note that I did say before the match started, even if it got into a rapid playoff, Carlsen has a large edge in that as well, perhaps even more so than in classical time controls! And sure enough, Carlsen easily won the tiebreak. So realistically Karjakin would have had to get a +1 score after the 12 games to win the championship. So it very much helps that Carlsen is also very good in short time controls.

And for the record, the last 4 WCC's have been won by the rating favorite. Three Magnus matches, and the Anand-Gelfand match.

Have you admitted you were wrong yet?

Sure, I'll admit I was wrong. But I think you seem to care too much about that. It seems like people like to just make predictions because they feel good about themselves because they were right or something, when all it really means is, you guessed and were right. Why be ashamed or proud of guesses, for the most part?

But I don't think I was wrong to expect him to be beaten comfortably, possibly by a lot -- it's just that, your expectations will be wrong sometimes even when they are reasonable. That's what I actually meant by "crushed." It was casual hyperbole. I know that there is always someone who will hate it when a person does that, but then, it's a pretty common thing in real life, isn't it? People tend to exaggerate a little, and be a little loose. Let's just be happy that I didn't say either player sucked or something like that. It was simply about how the two players stacked up. Really, both of these players are incredibly good, as are all the 2700 players. That's not lost on me at all. Karjakin is merely less of a chess god than Magnus, yet in some sense they both have godly ability.

But, fine, we can decide to hate each other because of predictions. Or, we can actually get along as human beings, and enjoy each other. I actually want to have fun with you, even if we had a different prediction. Perhaps you, on the other hand, just want me to be wrong, and enjoy it when that happens. We're different in that way, then.

But yeah, there is a lot to be said about underdogs being underestimated. I think that happens a lot. Sometimes, I'll put more faith in the underdog than most other people are. But sometimes, I'll put faith in the person expected to win. Just because this time I didn't side with the underdog doesn't mean I don't understand the concept that there can be bias towards the favorite (or the underdog, for that matter). Sure there can. I considered that in my prediction. I asked myself, do I have real reasons to expect Carlsen to win by a lot, or am I just arbitrarily favoring him so much because I like him? So I dug for real reasons. I'm quite aware of how we want to be sceptical of our beliefs.

Sometimes, though, even after scepticism, you still side with the favorite. That was the case here. The point of scepticism isn't to favor the underdog, the point of it is to just make sure that, whatever side you did choose to favor, you did so with a lot of consideration. And I did. I of course could have spent eight hours a day making my prediction, but all in all, I definitely thought about my prediction quite a bit, and it happened to be that Carlsen would win pretty comfortably. It, indeed, happened to be wrong.

I think that the match just happened to be one where the better player underperformed quite a lot, Carlsen missed wins in game 3 and 4 that he usually finds, and overpressed in a way he usually doesn't in game 8. If they play the match a few more times my guess is that Carlsen usually would win it with a bigger margin, but in one single event it is always difficult to predict with any certainty what will happen.