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OT - World Chess Championship 2018
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: OT - World Chess Championship 2018 (Stick)
Date: Friday, 30 November 2018, at 11:49 p.m.
I agree with most of your points but there are a few other things that should be taken into consideration.
1. Overall rapid and blitz ratings, which are accumulated over games played over a variety of opponents, don't necessarily accurately predict the odds for a head-to-head match. Carlsen's 3-0 victory might seem to confirm that he was an enormous favorite for rapid chess, but I think that if you look at the games carefully, it wasn't quite the blowout that the raw score might seem to indicate. Caruana had winning chances in the second game, and in a not-too-far-fetched alternative universe the score might have been 1-1 after two games. There's no doubt that Carlsen was still the favorite going into the tiebreak, but the point is that the odds aren't necessarily what you'd predict from mindlessly plugging in some numbers into an Elo formula.
2. The issue isn't so much that Carlsen was playing for a draw in the 12th game, but that the precise situation in which he offered the draw was—to borrow an analogy from backgammon—almost too good to double. There was no way that Carlsen was going to get into trouble in the next few moves, because White had no active threats. By playing a few more moves, Carlsen would have given Caruana the opportunity to blunder in time trouble, with almost no risk. (If the argument to head straight for the tiebreaks is that Caruana doesn't play as well with limited time, then that argument can be turned around to argue that Caruana's chances of blundering in time trouble were considerable.) Of course, there is a slight risk—if Carlsen waits too long, then the crisis might pass and Caruana might refuse a draw and Carlsen might eventually lose. But given the uncertainty about the tiebreak odds mentioned above, I think a good case can be made that Carlsen's best chance to win the match was to make at least one more move rather than offer a draw when he did.
Of course, Carlsen should be the best judge of what his best strategy is. But in addition to the above considerations, there is another reason why the draw offer was surprising: It's not like Carlsen to do such a thing. Carlsen is known for playing for a win when a draw suffices. Look at the third tiebreak game—a draw would have clinched the title but he played for a win anyway. Chess coaches always warn players not to let the fact that you only need a draw to lull you into playing too "safely" and making weak moves, because then you can even lose. Carlsen's decision to play ...a5 instead of ...b5 looks for all the world like an example of this kind of psychological trap. Objectively, even if a draw is a satisfactory result, ...b5 isn't any riskier than ...a5.
In summary, if indeed Carlsen's best "move" was to make the draw offer when he did, then I think that it strongly suggests that his psychological state during the 12th game was weak, much weaker than it usually is. (In fact, he basically admitted as much after the game.) In my view, and I think in the view of a number of other commentators that I heard, this was why the reaction to the draw offer was incredulity.
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