After some chessing and chess-spiration (#1608022, #1608324), November is gonna be lit!
Beside the world chess championshipmatch between Javohkir Sindarov and Gukesh D , we have Total Chess -- a new tournament format launched.
This will be an important month for global chess, with the Total World Championship pilot, combining fast classical, rapid and blitz segments due in Budapest from 10-20 November. This will be followed by the Gukesh Dommaraju v Javokhir Sindarov Salesforce Fide World Championship match in Geneva between 24 November and 12 December, featuring 14 games of classical chess followed, if needed, by rapid and blitz tiebreaks.
The world No 1, Magnus Carlsen, will be the top seed and favourite for Total Chess and the Norwegian, 35, will be taking it more seriously than any event since he defended his world classical title in 2021.
It's the kind of tournament that Magnus wanted FIDE to turn the otherwise quite stale and boring 14-game, long time-control games of world championship into:
TOTAL combines all formats of classical, blitz and rapid_:
- Blitz(3-2) for setting up the tiebreak/group stage
- Group-stage (4 groups of 6, double round-robin) with "fast classical" (=45 min + 30 sec increment). Football scoring = 3 points for win, 1 for draw
- and then they proceed to a knock-out stage, combining 4 blitz(3+2), 2 rapids (15+10), and one fast classic (45+30): blitz win = 1 point, rapid win = 4 points, fast classical 8 points.
Yes, this insanely complicated and hard-to-understand setting might be a lot of fun. Fast games and slow games, lots of players, and plenty of incentive (points-wise) to go for a win.
I guess I'll make another Predyx market for this because, why not? Also, this is what we do around here in the ano 2026: #1608434 #1608645
Speaking of Predyx markets, when are these guys gonna man up and get their asses kicked by an llm.
I avoided that market because it's not clear to me what constitutes an LLM beating a grandmaster. ChatGPT can already beat Magnus, all it takes is a very simple tool call to Stockfish.
isn't that sort of what the point of such a challenge would be? Not just mimic Stockfish, but actually use the everyday retail usage models of Chat (or Fable or Opus, because they apparently grasp chess better) and see when they can beat a human
But every day retail usage can already to tool calls I think. So you'd have to get pretty specific about the terms of the challenge, which is why I'm avoiding that market
yea, true. Weird bet -- and it's too far into the future to tempt me, anyway.
I’m more concerned that they simply won’t hold a qualifying event. It seems pretty obvious that the capability will exist.
what, chess players? Predyx?
Kasparov was beating by IBM's computer almost thirty years ago; chess LLMs, the original neural nets, beat humans not long after that. Existing and popular general purpose LLMs like Gemini or Fable or Opus etc have gotten seriously good recently... but still just hallucinate insane (often illegal) moves on, like, move #25.
GothamChess's AI rundown battles were more fun a few years ago, when the machines could not grasp chess, but just argued back against the players: "No, of course I can put my queen there; No, you're wrong, I would like to just spawn a dead knight into the middle of the board"
https://beta.predyx.com/market/llm-beats-chess-super-grandmaster-by-2028?ref=PREDYXCP2908OJ&shareKind=market
that's way too far out to meaningfully do anything about. Are LLMs gonna get radically better? How fast? Will any chessplayer even bother beating them, will it be fun or exciting? Like, the IBM-Kasparov thing was cool but these days nobody cares.
Also, the specialized chess engined (Leela, Stockfish) are still gonna be vaaaastly better than the general-purpose LLMs, so what's the point?
The point is to settle this bet in my favor. That should be enough, shouldn’t it?
Why isn't Magnus in the world chess championship? Did he lose?
He chose not to defend the title -- "abdication" by the king, if you wish.
The public story is that it was because he found the format (120+30, + extra time + extremely well-prepared opponents, and every spice and wrinkle in every known opening well explored, so nothing exciting going on) not worth it. Instead, he wanted a mix of "fast classical" and much shorter time controls. (Informally, I suspect it was pissing contests in the FIDE org... chicken-racing e/o, them thinking Magnus couldn't possibly refuse to play.)
One case in point was his match against Fabiano from 2018: 12 straight draws in classical -- and you had to decide the classical chess champion in rapid tiebreaks anyway.
That's interesting. I didn't know we had some drama behind this.
the chessworld is one never-ending drama machine.
You heard of the cheating scandal, yes? The anal beads...?
I'm on Team Hans
Me too
Is Chess a sport?
yes, bitch.
They are competing. And it takes hard work.
...and these days, they are in the esports world-stage events, so... uh, obviously.
I do agree it is, it was only a question
it's the perfect avenue for all bad real-world influences: hate, nationalism, extreme emotions. Probs a bunch more
Place where cunts can be cunts and left alone
I don't know about you, but I'll always stand up for the cunts
Only the good CUNTS 😂
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Hikaru_Nakamura_%282016%29_crop.jpg
Look at these fine athletes, hard at work
exactly. More frequent (alas, perhaps not intensive) work than handegg players, DEFINITELY more than baseball (which is a joke of a "sport")
This is interesting information... Chess tournaments are going to be quite lively at the end of this year. This World Championship is shaping up to be interesting with the changes being proposed; the champion will be the most well-rounded player across these three formats. ✌️🤟🫶🫶💪💪