Magnus Carlsen is World Chess Champion

Reading more about this match and Magnus in general, I learned of a measure termed &quot;Nettlesomeness&quot; which has been used to measure which players do the most to make their opponents to make mistakes. Magnus, with his highly creative style of play and unexpected moves, not surprisingly ranks the highest in this measure.<p>He seems to have this remarkable gift of making moves which aren&#x27;t just strong, they get inside his opponent&#x27;s head and cause them to either overthink&#x2F;break down. I&#x27;m interested in the technical details behind this metric. Has anyone heard of it before?<p>Regardless, congrats Magnus. You are truly a generational talent, and I&#x27;m excited to see what your win will do for the game.<p><a href="http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/nettlesomeness-and-the-first-half-of-the-carlsen-anand-match.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;marginalrevolution.com&#x2F;marginalrevolution&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;net...</a>

Congrats Magnus Carlsen! You finally unseated our beloved Vishwanathan Anand and made the beautiful game even more beautiful.<p>Allow me to go on a tangent to let me tell my personal story with chess. I began playing at age 7 when my elder brother borrowed a chess board from a friend. It was a nice break from the physical altercations between us(read mat fights). My maternal grand ma called it &quot;Satan&#x27;s Game&quot;. And my mother toed the line. Why? I don&#x27;t know the exact reason, but I guess it was an amazing time sink. Or maybe they both had watched this Hindi movie by Satyajit Ray: The Chess Players(<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076696/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0076696&#x2F;</a>). When the game s between my brother and me became violent(You moved it when I was off to the toilet...) it was banned from our home. But we didn&#x27;t give up. Our summers were spent playing chess in a nearby mango orchard or the graveyard a mile away. The chess board made out of paper with plastic pieces was the only &quot;toy&quot; we never broke. Those were the best days of my life. And it&#x27;s still safe 20 years later. With every piece intact. What a game.

&lt;blasphemy alert&gt; Does anyone know some good alternatives to chess, as a game that mixes deep thought and aesthetic variety? I tried Go, but found it somewhat boring compared to chess, because of its uniformity (which, on the other hand, has the advantage of beautiful simplicity and symmetry.) On another note: it is unfortunate, in my opinion, that chess has a special standing among board games. I would love to see some more variety in world-class intellectual matches, similar to what exists in physical sports. Something like a &quot;board game Olympics&quot;.<p>Edit: Thank you for all the useful replies! In reply to some of you, I am a complete beginner at Go. Maybe the word &#x27;boring&#x27; was not carefully chosen. As a programmer, I should have known better - that things may seem boring (tiresome?) until you become more fluent with them. I should certainly give Go another shot...

60 minutes from last year. pretty cool stuff right here <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc_v9mTfhC8" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Qc_v9mTfhC8</a>

I&#x27;m super excited to see the impact this will have on our noble game. I think it could see a real surge in popularity in the years ahead. And at the age of 22, Magnus is only just getting started.

It&#x27;s quite fun to see the media attention he has gotten here in Norway. For the last few weeks the sport segment of most news show spent as much time devoted to chess as football, which is not something i ever expected to see.<p>I&#x27;m not much a chess player myself but it still very satisfying seeing so much attention brought to a intellectual sport. I hope at least some of it will stick around.

I am Norwegian and fucking proud of it right now, due to Magnus Carlsen.<p>He comes from a Nation consisting of 5 mill. people, compared to Anand&#x27;s billion people.<p>This is probably the greatest sports achievement our country will ever make, as there are really no comparable sports achievements in the world, not now, anyway.<p>IMHO: They should knight him the second he gets of the plane when he returns home. Because no other Norwegian has ever accomplished anything close to this, with regards to bring honour to our nation.<p>Gratuler Magnus!

After spending the last 18-months immersed in the professional StarCraft 2 scene, I can totally appreciate a lot of the meta-stuff around Chess now. I always enjoyed Chess, and was not too bad at it (compared to those around me, certainly nowhere near even an amateur-pro!), but for some reason SC2 &quot;clicks&quot; better for me (I think being addicted to Brood War while spending 6 months in South Korea probably has something to do with it).<p>The discussion of &quot;mind games&quot; {&quot;nettlesomeness&quot; here) is something that SC2 has an obsession with, and certainly can play a <i>massive</i> part in pro tournaments, and I&#x27;d never considered it applying to chess... but now that I think about it, everything in SC2&#x27;s meta really came from Chess to begin with, only applied in real-time with 300+ actions per minute and hundreds of pieces with few illegal moves. And yet I struggle more with grokking the advanced strategies of Chess than I do for StarCraft!

This is actually a good example of why I&#x27;m not particularly interested in chess anymore-- a game that&#x27;s that heavy on draws and where so many of the situations are adaptations of well-known positions simply isn&#x27;t that thrilling. I really enjoyed chess when I was a kid, but the better I became and the more I learned about it the less I found it a compelling game.

I&#x27;m not a particularly good player, but the match was rather boring IMO, other than game 9, which Anand cut short with his blunder. I wonder if the dull first game, described by Anand as a &quot;satisfactory draw with black pieces&quot;, set the tune for the remaining games.

Press conference is live right now for anyone interested: <a href="http://chennai2013.fide.com/fide-world-chess-championship-2013-live/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;chennai2013.fide.com&#x2F;fide-world-chess-championship-20...</a>

Brilliant! Magnanimous. I am a Vishy fan, but this match was really one-sided when Vishy faltered at critical moments. Does it mean age matters? Will Vishy rebound? I hope so, but perhaps it&#x27;s the sad reality that I acknowledge -- better player won and the problem with the chess world (the number 1 elo-rated player was not the WC for so long) got corrected.<p>Where do we go from here?

It seems like the official commentary is of sub par quality. According to the &#x2F;r&#x2F;chess subreddit, this commentary is pretty good and fun: <a href="http://www.twitch.tv/chessnetwork/profile/pastBroadcasts" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twitch.tv&#x2F;chessnetwork&#x2F;profile&#x2F;pastBroadcasts</a>

Now what the heck happened in the end? Anand gave up a knight advantage, purposedly for a clear cut draw. I have no clue why he did that this time.<p>He took queen with queen, clearly, knowing it would be lost to king, and then again the pawn with knight. He had a knight, of all things!

Cool, it was held in Chennai, my home town. I remember some of my friends along with others (25 at a time) lining up to play Anand at the same time about 15 years ago. Anand was a Grand master at that time. Who else is from Chennai here at HN ?

A well-deserved win. Can&#x27;t wait to see what else Magnus goes on to accomplish.

You can watch IM Danny Rensch &amp; GM Ben Finegold review the game right now on <a href="http://www.chess.com/tv" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chess.com&#x2F;tv</a>

Honest Question : So now Chess will be more fashionable game?

I wish they gave the girl announcer access to the laptop as well so she could describe what she&#x27;s saying using the screen just like the guy can.

As someone who played chess as a child but gave up after high school what are some apps that would get me back into the game?

But has he played Judah Friedlander?

Move #14 (Nxc6) does not make sense. Why did Magnus do that?

Is the site down for anyone else?

Chess is amazing it blows my mind why simple tools and games like this are not incorporated in some &#x27;fun&#x27; way into the education system. By &#x27;fun&#x27; I mean that if children were told to play chess they would not. A system would be need to be designed so that they look forward to chess class as they do for PE and art.

Magnus seems more like a guy I could invite over for a couple of beers. No offense on Anand he seem to be more like a KOOL-AID type of kid and always a boy scout but a douche!

Of course he won the name alone speaks for itself &quot;Magnus!&quot; Just fucking HUGE at anything you can think of! Compared to Viswanathan which sounded like a vegtable ready to be consumed or a rubbing oil or even like a dip for your prata.