Thread by @NotBrunoAgain

So something extremely funny happened in chess this week and I think it's worth sharing with non-chess people.

Magnus Carlsen, the world champion and likely strongest chess player of all time, is currently grinding to try and achieve the record of becoming the first human with a 2900+ Elo rating in chess.

This is extremely, extremely difficult. Elo ratings are adjusted after each win/loss/draw based on the relative strength of your opponent. Magnus is world #1; all opponents are lower rated than him.

So the only way for him to gain rating is to win games, and he doesn't get very much rating out of a win. A loss causes a devastating rating drop because he's losing to a weaker opponent.

Even draws are very bad in Magnus' situation, because drawing a weaker opponent results in losing rating (after all, if you draw against someone lower rated, that's evidence suggesting that you are closer in strength than the rating system thinks)

So Magnus is like a starving wolf: He has to string together a bunch of low-quality meals to stay alive. Every individual game has taken on an outsized importance because of this.

Now, in chess, there are a bunch of opening lines that are known to just be draws with best play. The most infamous of these is the Berlin Defence, a line where basically both players exchange their queens and half their pieces in the middle of the board early on.

So a couple days ago Magnus sits down to play Sergey Karjakin, a very strong grandmaster who was also one of the contenders Magnus beat in one of his various World Championship wins

Sergey has the white pieces - in Chess, the expectation is that white is playing for a win. But Sergey chooses to go into an extremely drawish line of the Ruy Lopez, and the game ends in a repetition of moves (Draw) on move 15.

This is not where it gets funny. Where it becomes fucking hilarious is that Sergey just, uh, tweeted this out right after the game

https://twitter.com/SergeyKaryakin/status/1486330741223002117

Now, Sergey is not a prolific tweeter and I am happy to believe that this is just trolling after the fact

But of course, predictably, chess people went fucking ballistic over it, as you can see in the replies

OTOH, maybe Karjakin really did judo Magnus into a draw out of pure spite and if so, well, dudes rock

Part of why this is such a good jape is also that it turns on Magnus' own playing styles. Most GMs trying to play for a win with the black pieces would not go for 1. e4 e5, which gives white a lot of opportunities to force a draw

The traditional way to try and win with black would be to play the sicilian (1. e4 c5) but there are other options. but Magnus' entire deal is that he goes for those very equal positions and then beats you upside the head with the tiniest positional advantages.

So Karjakin is taking the off-ramp that leads to drawing Magnus but he's also taking advantage of the fact that Magnus is not, at any point, making an effort to pull the wheel *away* from that off-ramp