The original 12-game series has ended in a 6-6 tie with each player winning one game and the rest all draws. The last game had Magnus Carlsen playing white and observers had hoped he would go for a win against Sergey Karjakin but he seemed to be content to play for a draw after just 30 moves lasting only 45 minutes.
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World chess champion Magnus Carlsen won game 10 of his match against challenger Sergey Karjakin, evening the score at 5-5 following a marathon game that lasted 75 moves and over six hours. It looks like the toll of the tournament is wearing down the players since they each made mistakes.
Karjakin had the option of creating a draw via perpetual check at the 20th move and since he was in the lead in the 12-match series observers expected him to go for it. But he said after the game that he did not see it.
Today is a rest day.
Via Andrea James, I came across this clip of comedian Gary Gulman riffing on how the two-letter abbreviations for each state used by the US postal service came about. I sometimes get confused by them, such us not being sure if IA stands for Iowa or Indiana or AL is for Alabama or Alaska.
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Oliver Roeder summarizes the seventh game in the World Chess Championship being held in New York that ended in another somewhat boring draw after a little over two hours of play and just 33 moves. It looks like whoever wins a single game in the 12-gmae series will be the champion.
The eighth game starts this afternoon. But despite the series of draws, Roeder says that the tournament is drawing great interest, with people (and a lot of them young) forming long lines in the street in cold weather to get in to watch it live.
The sixth game in the best-of-twelve World Chess Championship match between champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Sergey Karjakin petered out in a draw yesterday, leaving the score tied at 3-3. According to the rules, the winner of a game gets one point while a draw nets each player half a point and the first player to reach 6.5 points wins the match. During each game many observers use a computer program called Stockfish to evaluate the moves of the players, and compare them compared with that of the best move by the computer and such programs seem to have become essential training tools for top players. The program app is available for free from the iTunes store and I have downloaded it and tried it out.
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I have railed in the past about the fact that some people take advantage of the fact that service workers are obliged to be nice to customers by abusing them. Via Rob Beschizza I came across this video of a woman who seems to have got offended by something one of the Subway employees said to her and started berating him using the most foul language (Be warned: it is really hateful), interspersed with calm requests for how she wanted her food prepared.
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The score between defending champion Magnus Carlsen and Sergey Karyakin currently stands at three draws out of the best-of- twelve game match but Oliver Roeder says that the third draw was unlike the boring first two in that it featured some unusual and exciting play in which Karyakin fought back after being taken by surprise by a Carlsen’s 10th move while playing white. But then Carlsen slipped up at move 71 and the game ended with the players agreeing to a draw after the 78th move.
It is interesting how computers are used by the spectators to analyze the best possible moves at each stage of the game. It appears that there are elaborate measures in place to prevent players from gaining access to computers when they take breaks.
As a break from political news, I was going to write about the world chess championship title match that is just beginning in New York between the reigning champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway and Russian grandmaster Sergei Karyakin. The first game ended in a draw. Carlsen is favored but Karyakin is no pushover, currently ranked ninth in the world after becoming the youngest grandmaster ever at the age of 12.
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