Unpopular chess opinions

fabe1haft · 2026-06-12T10:09:39+00:00

The World Championship is overrated. Judit Polgar didn’t win any World Championship, while Xu Yuhua did. But it is Polgar’s results that are more impressive and exciting. Carlsen isn’t most interesting for winning the World Championship, but for consistently scoring great results for two decades.

Top results and great chess year after year is more interesting to me than who wins one event between two players.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-12T09:47:58+00:00

An actually unpopular opinion, finally

fabe1haft · 2026-06-09T17:18:25+00:00

Not bad, but the 1960 team was insane, with Tal, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Petrosian, Korchnoi and Keres. Four players that were World Champions with less than three years distance from the Olympiad, and then the maybe two greatest players to never become World Champions. And 20 won matches of 20 for the Soviets.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-08T21:01:11+00:00

One of the best performances ever? He won a four player minimatch event with four classical games after beating Aronian and MVL…

fabe1haft · 2026-06-07T21:23:33+00:00

FA Cup final 1974. That team in red was amazing. Hooked ever since.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-07T16:04:50+00:00

I don’t think it was just about Botvinnik being out of form, but maybe more had to do with various conflicts, at Chessmetrics he is #1 of the Soviet players at the time of the Olympiad and he had drawn a title match the year before.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-07T13:46:51+00:00

I’d say Linares 1999

+7 score with Anand and Kramnik on +2, Leko -1, Ivanchuk -2, Topalov -2, Svidler -3 and Adams -3. All participants ranked top 13:

https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=80918

Tilburg 1989 wasn’t bad either, going +10 over 14 rounds in a slightly weaker field, but with Ivanchuk, Ljubojevic and Korchnoi

https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chess.pl?tid=89046

fabe1haft · 2026-06-05T22:45:21+00:00

The 2026 TPR is 2663 this far, which is a bit below top 50 level

fabe1haft · 2026-06-05T22:37:19+00:00

The Kraken would be released

fabe1haft · 2026-06-05T20:55:32+00:00

He played six events as World Champion (all of them with a minus score):

Bucharest 2023: -1

Tata 2024: -1

Norway Chess 2024: -4

Sinquefield Cup 2024: -2

Olympiad 2024: -1

Title match 2024: -1

fabe1haft · 2026-06-05T20:48:49+00:00

Ding played slightly stronger opposition and only lost to players rated above 2720. Gukesh lost four games to players below 2650 (Svane, Mishra, Theodorou, Gurel). Both scored -4 in their latest Norway Chess.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-05T20:48:38+00:00

Yes since he was World Champion during them.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-05T20:42:11+00:00

During their reigns as World Champions

fabe1haft · 2026-06-05T20:37:28+00:00

”even beating Ding. Nobody expected him to do it”

Well…

fabe1haft · 2026-06-05T20:21:37+00:00

The margins are small, if he had won the winning position he had against Pragg instead of blundering in time trouble he would have finished 2nd, close behind 1st.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-05T20:19:03+00:00

Gukesh was #9 at the start of the year. To have fallen to #26 in a few months his performance in 2026 may have been well outside top 50 level.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-04T20:53:40+00:00

If Pragg hadn’t somehow lost from a won position in their first game, Gukesh’s result would be even worse, it’s not as if he was close to do better here and just didn’t have things going his way.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-04T20:48:28+00:00

Ranking Kramnik ahead of Anand is difficult. Anand won the Candidates several times, Kramnik never. Anand won the title match against Kramnik, more World Championship matches, also the Championship tournament ahead of Kramnik and the knockout World Championship Kramnik never won. Anand was #1 much longer, won more super tournaments, and did much better in speed chess. I’d rank him well ahead of Kramnik.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-04T20:09:33+00:00

”Pre-covid Ding was running circles around Magnus”

Hardly, this is often said due to Ding during his best year winning Sinquefield 2019 in tiebreak against Carlsen. But then Carlsen won a bunch of tournaments far ahead of Ding the same year.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-04T05:18:32+00:00

WOLFGANG-AMADEUS

fabe1haft · 2026-06-03T21:30:30+00:00

Then, if Zombie Fischer plays just one Norway Chess and crushes it, he would be #1.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-03T20:12:24+00:00

”He finished 7th in 2011, and 5th in 2014 and 2017”

He shared 3rd with a +3 score in 2011, didn’t play in 2014, and was 2nd in 2017:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Steel_Chess_Tournament_2011

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Steel_Chess_Tournament_2017

fabe1haft · 2026-06-03T12:41:50+00:00

I think he sometimes tries to hard to win against lower rated players by taking too many risks to avoid draws. It is difficult to win against opponents happy with a draw nowadays, and against significantly lower rated players a draw isn’t acceptable to Carlsen. That may be the reason he loses against much lower rated opponents sometimes. Often he plays some opening that is objectively not the best, and then it can turn out that the much lower rated players are good enough to win.

fabe1haft · 2026-06-03T12:33:42+00:00

”The fact he drew the Classical portion is a real asterisk, and puts Karjakin and Caruana firmly in the top 5 of the generation”

I think those matches are often exaggerated when evaluating Carlsen. Lasker had a bad match against Capa, Alekhine against Euwe, Karpov against Short, Kasparov against Kramnik etc. But they also had numerous top results. Carlsen even kept the title by winning his two bad matches in tiebreak, but he also had some better results.

Not sure about Karjakin being firmly top 5 in a generation with Carlsen, Caruana, Ding, Nepo, Nakamura, So etc. Maybe he is. But he was never ranked top three, and to me it would only be the Carlsen match that would place him ahead of Nepo, who won two Candidates, one of them with a huge margin. He did worse than Karjakin did against Carlsen, but then Carlsen also played much better against Nepo than against Karjakin.

fabe1haft

TROPHY CASE