▲ 18 r/chess
Intransitivity in chess. Some trivia.
Some weeks ago there was a nice post by someone searching intransitivity in chess. That got me interested, because it felt that it obviously could happen but I couldn't find quick data on it.
I checked randomly among elite players and I found the following datapoints. If you know more, please share. One could even have a challenge for the longest intransitive chain (involving top50/top100 players).
Triple 1
- Classical games: Vladimir Kramnik beat Levon Aronian 9 to 4, with 27 draws.
- Classical games: Sergey Karjakin beat Vladimir Kramnik 6 to 1, with 13 draws.
- Classical games: Levon Aronian beat Sergey Karjakin 12 to 5, with 19 draws.
Triple 2
- Classical games: Levon Aronian beat Anish Giri 8 to 0, with 23 draws.
- Classical games: Anish Giri beat Ding Liren 5 to 2, with 23 draws.
- Classical games: Ding Liren beat Levon Aronian 3 to 0, with 16 draws.
Triple 3
- Classical games: Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa beat Magnus Carlsen 3 to 1, with 4 draws.
- Classical games: Richard Rapport beat Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa 4 to 0, with 1 draw.
- Classical games: Magnus Carlsen beat Richard Rapport 4 to 1, with 2 draws.
(caveats: those are all time stats, so one may have time periods where there was no intransitivity. Further the data is not correlated with ratings, that is, some lower rated players that consistently scores better against an higher rated one)
u/pier4r — 1 month ago
▲ 22 r/chess
Youngest to qualify to candidates (or equivalent tier)?
So I searched a bit and I got:
- Fischer: 15 years old (Portoroz Interzonal 1958 -> 1959 candidates , that is also how Fischer became a GM)
- Magnus Carlsen: 15. World cup 2005 -> candidates 2007.
- Gukesh D: 17 (fide circuit 2023)
- Pragg: 18 (world cup 2023)
- Alireza: 18 (grand swiss 2021)
- Spassky: 18 (Gothenburg interzonal 1955)
- Kasparov: 19 (Moscow interzonal 1982)
Is that correct? Does anyone know of some earlier qualification?
If the data is true, that would be 5 out 7 are WCh, 4 out of 7 had the #1 in the rating lists (Spassky during the unofficial list in 1967).
u/pier4r — 1 month ago
▲ 10 r/chess
Unique players who ever appeared in top 10 (all time) — Open. Checking the legend from India.
source (https://fideratings.com/rating-stats)
u/pier4r — 1 month ago
▲ 126 r/chess
The lowest rated still active GM is Pushkov, Nikolai, 79 y/o , with a rating of 2056. (for now at least)
At his best he was #186 in the world (in 2000, with a rating of 2562)
Kudos to him that he still plays.
(stats found through this https://fideratings.com/player/4117131/nikolai-pushkov , nice website but not mine)
u/pier4r — 1 month ago
▲ 389 r/LocalLLaMA
Unpopular(?) opinion. The distillation claim is overblown.
There are people on twitter/X saying that Chinese models are as good as they are only due to distillation (source: https://x.com/scaling01/status/2079332469501727052 ). I don't buy that even for a minute.
While the investigation is interesting, one can see that GPT models do not really "like" themselves, and that is unlikely (at least for 5.4 and 5.5). Especially as Opus and Gemini models like each other. (here I use "like" for "they are not that surprised by the other model writing style")
Further if distillation would obliterate moats so easily and quickly (Fable is available since June after all), then every company with enough resources would reach Fable levels. One could counter argue "but western companies respect IPs". And there I say "please", they don't care about IP rules, see how they use everything available for training without paying enough royalties. I believe that they even use anonymized user prompts (as proving that an AI lab used a specific anonymized prompt would be pretty hard, if one doesn't have access to the training data).
Even if the western labs would respect IP, then all non-western companies would be already at Fable levels anyway.
Last but not least, the amount of content online that is AI generated is also growing, and scrapers never stopped. That could also play a role (using outputs that humans selected to be published online). How much data online has claude vibes? I mean look at linkedin alone.
u/pier4r — 3 months ago
▲ 57 r/chess
Kamsky vs Shirov rating chart
The two were prodigies in the early 90s (together with Topalov, Polgar, K. , Leko). The Kamsky took a pause after 1996 (he played two FIDE WCh but without much preparation) to study at the uni and came back around 2004.
Interesting is that Shirov had a great run few years ago, reaching again 2700 at 49.
u/pier4r — 3 months ago
▲ 50 r/chess
What's up with Dubov?
Every now and then one reads those hot takes about Dubov (or from Dubov himself).
He is very talented; if he would put the hours, then no one would have a chance; only 10 min prep and so on. I mean of course all GMs are very talented, but he should have something extra. I mean to be fair he is a rapid WCh and he was on team Carlsen in the past WCh, that means something.
Anyway, I was surprised to see him being around 2650 at the moment (IIRC he was often around 2720, top 30).
Does anyone know why he went down so much compared to his usual level? He is still only 30.
u/pier4r — 4 months ago
▲ 17 r/chess
Results Asian Individual Chess Championships 2026
source: https://s3.chess-results.com/tnr1399377.aspx?lan=1&art=1&rd=9&fed=CHN&turdet=YES&flag=30&SNode=S0
The tournament was not Tier 1 or maybe even not Tier 2 (debatable though). Nonetheless in Asia there is a lot of competition and underrated players (players from India, Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Iran, Vietnam and so on that play few FIDE rated tournaments)
I was surprised to see chinese players performing that well compared to other nationalities as the feeling was/is that the game is getting even less attention (the community is already tiny compared to other games) despite Ding and Wei Yi recent performances (one being WCh, the other winning notable tournaments).
u/pier4r — 4 months ago
▲ 12 r/chess
Did anyone under 17 ever match (or surpassed) the result of Leko in Dortmund 1995?
Dortmund 1995: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chesscollection?cid=1040478 Leko was 15 he got 3rd against a strong field.
From my searches, with the following conditions: many top 20 players in the tournament (as opponents of the player), the player is under 17, player get to top 3; I got the following.
- Fischer Zurich 1959. Fischer got 3rd and the field was hard, Fischer was also under 17
- Kasparov Banja Luka 1979. Kasparov 1st. The field was maybe a tad weaker than Dortmund 1995 but Garry got 1st and was under 17.
- Kamsky Tilburg 1990. The field maybe a bit weaker but Kasmky got 1st.
- (added thanks to a comment) Carlsen Linares 2007.
- (added thanks to a comment) Polgar Madrid 1992.
Is there anything else? I could find close results but normally the players were older than 17.
E: tournaments should be OTB classical.
u/pier4r — 5 months ago
Nepomniachtchi (3-time):
+13 -2
Ratio: 6.5
Anand (2-time):
+7 -3
Ratio: 2.33
Karjakin (3-time):
+11 -5
Ratio: 2.2
Giri (3-time):
+8 -4
Ratio: 2
Caruana (6-time):
+21 -11
Ratio: 1.909
Mamedyarov (2-time):
+6 -4
Ratio: 1.5
Nakamura (4-time):
+13 -9
Ratio: 1.44
Kramnik (3-time):
+10 -8
Ratio: 1.25
Svidler (4-time):
+7 -6
Ratio: 1.16
Grischuk (2-time):
+4 -5
Ratio: 0.8
Aronian (4-time):
+11 -15
Ratio: 0.73
Radjabov (2-time):
+4 -9
Ratio: 0.44
Firouzja (2-time):
+4 -10
Ratio: 0.4
Topalov (2-time):
+2 -9
Ratio: 0.22
u/TokemonX4 — 5 months ago