Is Nakamura actually the best chess player in the world after all?!

I used to love to hate Hikaru Nakamura - I hated his showiness, the way he would play intentionally foolish openings (which I still really dislike), how he's American and so draws lots of American fans, how Americans are funny to hate on in general, and I'd mention how he's not even really American.... and so on. I would also say how he's nowhere near the top players and not even the top FIDE blitz player, Carlsen was. It was only online where Nakamura reigned, which everyone knew was meaningless. And even then it was typically bullet or playing without increment - stupid game controls like that that aren't really chess. So it was fun ragging on Nakamura. 

The thing is - Nakamura is now indeed the number #1 ranked FIDE blitz player in the world and has been since September 2019. And these are "real" time limits - with the shortest FIDE blitz being 3 2.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FIDE_chess_world_number_ones#Rapid_and_blitz_ratings

Now you might say it's still blitz, it's not the more "serious" classical or rapid chess, those are where all the serious stuff and the money is. 

But why should those time limits be considered more "serious"? Who actually even cares about those limits anymore other than people who play professionally? Even people like Kasparov seem to prefer shorter, blitz games when he plays these days. Long games are a waste of time.  

When's the last time you played a classical game online? Here you have clear choices to play classical, rapid or blitz... and almost EVERYONE plays blitz. So why would you measure people by a type of chess that you never even play yourself?! 

Long chess is boring. Nobody cares about it except the top professionals, especially the older dinosaurs who were trained that way and are scared by how the youth tend to do a lot better at blitz chess. Nobody at home is going to sit and watch a 4, 5, 6 hour chess game. Blitz chess is fun, blitz chess brings people to it.  

In the old days when they had analogue and less reliable clocks and there was nothing else to do all day, classical time limits made a lot more sense. Nowadays it should make way for blitz chess. 

Now here's another thing - humans are biologically wired to watch things move around quickly. That's just how we're designed. You can try and get all elitist claiming you're just impatient but that's just a case of the emperor's new clothes - the truth is that the normal human behaviour is to move things around quickly and it is not normal to stare at an inanimate position for 20 minutes at a time.  

When you have a super long chess game - a lot of people lose their focus. They lose their concentration. So you could argue long games are a test of concentration and focus rather than purely chess skill. 

In this way it could well be argued that Nakamura is the best chess player in the world. 

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Well I would consider long chess to not be in any trouble at say, master level and below. There are extremely clear benefits to having a lot of time there. The complaints tend to be for the highest levels, that it's hard for players to beat each other at long time controls. But then, draws have been common at the top levels for probably over a century as far as I understand -- Fischer thought chess was dead, but there were plenty of interesting developments in classical chess since then. The thing is, it's not surprising that at a certain level of play, the game will often be a bit of a grind -- I think that's more of a consequence of the difficulty of beating a bunch of other players who are devoting as much to the activity (in activities in general, not just chess) as you are than anything else. In elite men's tennis for example, you could look at that as a grind in the sense that, the server wins the game probably 80+% of the time, and it's not uncommon for there to be close matches with only one or two breaks, maybe even zero breaks of serve.

And while that can sometimes be tedious to watch (and perhaps play), it's ultimately not a huge problem for me. When two players are really good and know how to serve, yes it's going to come down to small margins. You may only get an opportunity here or there and you may have to take it, but that's because both players are elite and know how to avoid creating opportunities for the opponent, and so they are rare to come by. But in the meantime you enjoy the quality of play from both players, and the back and forth -- in other words, I look at an even game as usually not so much that there isn't much going on, but more that, both players are doing a lot, it's just that they're both doing it about equally well. So maybe both players are making really nice serves -- ok, I am happy to see really nice serves, and will be wondering about who will first be able to break against such nice serves.

Maybe you could compare a close match to a boxing match -- I don't know much about boxing, but it seems that it takes many punches before anything big happens -- for a while, both boxers are just trying to get a few more hits than the other. But eventually an explosive opportunity often comes along. This seems fine. The majority of the time, both players will have themselves well covered, because they are good boxers and they are wise, so you wouldn't expect someone to have an easy knockout punch right away -- good players rarely allow stuff like that. So to witness a grind is often a natural consequence of both players knowing what they are doing and needing to find ingenuity and patience to find an opening against what to the naked eye looks like faultless play. There can often be much tension in watching a boxing match, because even if no big hits are being made, at any point there could be a huge turning point and it's always on your mind.

So, sure, long chess can be a grind, but I don't think that's necessarily such a bad thing. Grinds are natural in a sense. Now, yes, in blitz chess, you can remove the grinding, but it comes at the cost of depth. Honestly... yeah, I would consider looking at something that was slow-going for a while but then something brilliant and deep finally came about, to be a more special experience than watching just pure fast-paced chess. I still enjoy watching blitz to some degree, but it loses a lot of what made it different from watching, perhaps, fast-paced video games, stuff like that. So if you like watching fast-paced video games, then blitz may be up your alley, but obviously there are a lot of people who came to chess for very different reasons and that seems perfectly reasonable.

Of course, I don't need long chess to be on all the time, much like I don't need there to be a Wimbledon tennis tournament every week. Long chess games are more interesting when they are only played on certain occasions, and require preparation and seriousness, but when such events, such as the WCC, do occur, yes, I enjoy them way more than watching blitz chess.

Anyone else see the irony of the posts? Long gamers will take the time to read long posts. Short timers probably won’t. 

I wouldn't really call this problem a design flaw because it's hard to see a clear alternative that doesn't change the nature of the game. For example if certain drawn positions are not supposed to be a draw, how do you determine that? I would find just claiming that being a pawn up for example in a drawn position should be considered a win to just be artificial, and much less elegant than letting whether or not a pawn can actually achieve the goal of the game to decide how the game ends.

So of course with chess, you need to assess players over the course of multiple games in multiple different situations.

In fact the analogies with tennis can continue, because in tennis, the game is divided up into sets and games. It's possible for one player to win all four of his service games where he won every point, whereas the other player won his four service games, but he lost two points in each of those games, yet the latter player ends up getting a break in the former player's fifth service game and ends up taking the lead in the match, even though in terms of total points he has lost more. But he won the points that mattered more. So in a sense, the player who lost two points in each service game played worse for those four games, yet the score was even. But, that's just how it is The game makes different moments have different amounts of meaning, and a player can play worse in certain segments but still be able to salvage things and maybe strike back at a different moment.

They actually tried a new form of professional tennis this year that you actually did try to just win the most points before the clock runs out. It had some other features too. I don't know... it was ok, but it did remind me of why the scoring in tennis is the way it is. It's more interesting and tense than simply racing to get the most individual points

Ah, I forgot to mention it, but yes, I have considered Chess 960 at long time controls to be a potentially promising idea. You get the deep thinking, but not in a position that has been so played out.

Short answer: No. He's one of the best, but not the best. But he is a great fighter, incredibly resourceful, and fun to watch. 

A lot of people complain that chess is supposedly "sexist" because male and female players have different titles and gender exclusive tournaments, but tennis is even worse because not only do men and women play on different professional circuits, but women only need to win 2 sets instead of 3, basically saying that women's tennis is not as entertaining to watch for a long period of time, or that women don't have the endurance and stamina to play as long as men.

Don't just snap at every piece of troll bait they throw in the water

"Real chess doesn't have time controls"

Real chess absolutely has time controls! Every important chess event since 1851 has been played with some kind of time limit and chess clock. All the world championships since Steinitz have been played with clocks and a time limit

The person with whom I was debating seems to have deleted his account But I'll just add a little more to my tennis analogy. Tennis of course does not have draws whereas chess does. However, the question of "who played better" can come up in tennis nevertheless, despite the decisive results. Someone could win a tennis match but lose, say 20 more individual points (although that would be very unlikely, but it's entirely possible), and the question can still come up "x player seemed to play better than y player, yet y player won, is this a design flaw?"

Part of my interlocutor's argument was that in chess the better player doesn't necessarily win, because they might draw instead. But the cases of the "better player" not winning isn't exclusive to draws, because it's also possible that the person we feel played better ended up losing, as can happen in chess and tennis. It's a valid concern to want our rules to reward things that we think should be rewarded, and punish things that we think should be punished, but that can be a very subjective matter, and oftentimes I think we would be better off just embracing some of the consequences of the rules. There are going to inevitably be situations where one side seemed to "deserve" to win but didn't, but that is also part of what makes the game interesting, that things don't always turn out as you assume that they should, that things are more complicated than that.

Again one of the big issues with trying to change the rules of a game is that it's very easy to mess with the spirit of the game that way. For example, some people want stalemate to be a win for the person who initiates it, as it would presumably decrease the amount of draws by turning a prior draw condition into an additional win condition. It just seems like a superficial solution to me, because you take away a part of the game we know well, and we make checkmate less unique when it comes to how to win, all simply to reduce the draw percentage to something that we merely feel is better somehow. I would rather just appreciate the game for what it is, high draw percentage or not, rather than take away part of the spirit of the game, as the latter comes at a high price. It's not that I am against it 100% of the time, but I think that people misevaluate whether what they are giving up is worth the perceived superficial benefit.

Especially considering that that perceived benefit is often speculative -- for example, if stalemate was a win, perhaps grandmasters would simply play even more conservatively than they already do if they want a draw, and you might get even duller games as a result. I don't find that to be a crazy possibility, and there could easily be other possibilities, and it looks less and less attractive to make such a large change to a game just based on speculation. I would, in all likelihood, rather simply enjoy the occasional endgames where there is a clever stalemate motif that draws the game, rather than have a dumbed-down game simply so that we can say one of the players won (whether that game was high quality or not).

If the game is to be changed, I think it is better for that to come from the players themselves, not from us changing the rules. If the players decide to play different openings, the game may change, as it has changed in the past. I understand that it's tempting to try to take the matter into our own hands and "force" the players to change by changing the rules, but I think that option is a lot less good than it often appears to be.

I read long posts but am a blitz player myself

"because you take away a part of the game we know well, and we make checkmate less unique when it comes to how to win, all simply to reduce the draw percentage to something that we merely feel is better somehow."

And as I reread that, a thought just came into my head. It's going to sound crazy, but I am just kind of thinking out loud, and not really sure what to think of it yet. The thought was this: maybe you can argue that draws are good in some contexts. Obviously this is a very strange subjective take, and I don't necessarily believe that, but I could see how someone might argue for it. After all, chess is often supposed to be a polite game, with players shaking hands and stuff, and when players draw, there is often a peaceful feeling to it, and there is a certain comfort to that. It's like a mutual understanding that they both were able to solve the problems that they needed to solve. It's of course a very different kind of thrill from someone winning and another losing, but different isn't necessarily bad. The peacefulness, again, might not be such a bad fit for chess, as it can be a quiet, thoughtful game, and a peaceful draw doesn't disturb that kind of atmosphere.

It would be this strange mix of competitiveness and congruence perhaps. That both players do want to win the game, but they also might come to a point where they recognize that they have come to a point where they can't make progress. There can be a sort of mutual respect in that, some kind of dance, where you played certain moves, and they responded with moves in kind that were a worthy match to that and answered the questions and challenges you posed. In that sense it's like you both won. It's like you both played an equal part in creating an entertaining draw, and neither player feels bad about it.

I don't know... don't people in general often complain that people are too cutthroat with each other? People often say they want less competition and more cooperation. Maybe draws in competitive games is one way to give a more cooperative vibe. It would be a nice break from the fiercer, bloodier competitions out there, perhaps. Anyway, just a different, fresh way of looking at things that could be worth thinking or at least casually wondering about.