Carlsen and Fischer: Two Different Kinds of the Best

Magnus Carlsen has been the highest-rated chess player in the world since 2011. His highest rating was 2882 in 2014, currently his rating is 2835. He became world champion in 2013 at age 21, successfully defended his title several times, and earlier this year, he declined to defend his title, which is to say: he's retiring as an undefeated champ. Going out on a high note. And good for him. 

Among many other world's-best achievements, Carlsen has the longest unbeaten streak in the history of elite chess, going unbeaten for 125 consecutive games from 2018 to 2020. For my readers who are not chess aficionados, let me clarify: Carlsen did not win 125 games. The majority of elite-level chess games end in draws. Over the course of 125 games, Carlsen had 42 wins, 83 draws and no losses. His longest winning streak during the unbeaten streak was 5 games. And winning 5 games in a row against the best chess players in the world is quite an achievement. 

As a wise man once told me, "Chess is a game of mistakes." If your opponent makes a bad enough mistake, and you know how to take advantage of it, you win. If you're aggressive and do something unexpected, maybe you'll shake up your opponent and win, or maybe it'll come back and bite you, maybe you'll over-extend yourself, and your opponent will keep their head, weather the storm, take advantage of your carelessness and beat you. Or maybe neither of you will make any noteworthy mistakes and the game will end in a draw.

A long time ago, before I realized that most Grandmaster games end in draws, I read somewhere that Bobby Fischer's playing style was to try to win every game. This confused me. I thought: why wouldn't you try to win every game? But most top-level players play a little differently: they try very hard not to lose, not to make any mistakes. If they catch a bad mistake by their opponent and win, so much the better.

Carlsen is an extremely precise sort of player. Very few mistakes. Very little rolling of the dice, compared to Fischer. Fewer Queen sacrifices. Less drama.

One of the few top Grandmasters who may have been even more aggressive than Fischer was Mikhail Tal, World Champion from 1960 to 1961. Someone, I wish I could remember who, once wrote that Tal "tried to win every game with every move."

That 125-game unbeaten streak by Carlsen is an amazing achievement, arguably the pinnacle of one of the best careers in the history of chess. But there is another streak in chess history which, in the opinion of many, is much more astounding still: in 1970 and 1971, in the process of beating all the other candidates and thus qualifying to take on Boris Spassky for the world chess championship in 1972, Bobby Fischer won 20 consecutive games.

Some will tell you that he actually won only 19 in a row, since one of his opponents, Oscar Panno, sat out the game in protest of his game against Fischer being rescheduled. I don't think Panno had a chance anyway and that people are giving him way too much credit. His major claim to fame today is this silly protest. 

But, po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to, 20 wins in a row or only 19, either way, no one else has come close to what Fischer did there. He won his last 7 games (or "only" 6, if you insist on seeing it that way) in a tournament determining who would be the final 8 players to fight it out for the chance to play Spassky for the world championship. 

With the chess world's minds already blown by this winning streak, Fischer went on to beat Taimanov 6-0, six wins, no draws, in the quarter-final match. And commentators, quite accurately, said that nothing like this had ever been seen. 

And then Fischer beat Larson 6-0 in the semi-final round. 19 wins in a row.

Then, in the final round, against Tigran Petrosian, who had been world champion from 1963 to 1969, Fischer won the first game. 20 in a row. Then Petrosian, very much the opposite sort of player from Fischer, all caution, sypremely solid, waiting to pounce on the opponent's mistakes, won the second game, and he managed several draws, but Fischer won the match 6 1/2 games to 2 1/2.

And then, in the famous world championship match in Iceland, in what was perhaps a severe case of nerves, or perhaps a bit of understandable burn-out after having played at an unheard-of level for a year and a half, Fischer lost the first 2 games. Many said at the time, well, that's it, that remarkable run is over. Being down 2-0 in a match where he needed 12 1/2 points to win and Spassky needed 12 to keep the title, looked to many like an insurmountable obstacle.

But Fischer won the match 12 1/2 games to 8 1/2. 

And that was the end of Fischer's chess career. He made demands for his next match which FIDE, the world chess governing body, were never going to accept. Fischer retired, without officially retiring. In 1992 there was a return match against Spassky which made both players lots of money, and made most of the spectators sad. And that was it, as far as Fischer professional chess career was concerned. 

But that run, from the 20-game winning streak to the lopsided end of the world championship match, is just so very far beyond unequaled. 

It was like the 1977 Sears Point AMA motorcycle road race. Kenny Roberts was so much better than everyone else in US road racing at that point, that no-one knew HOW much better he was: he would go out to a comfortable lead in each race, and then slow down to a comfortable pace, and as long as his bike didn't break, he won, no drama, easy-peasy. 

In 1977 at Sears Point, just as the race was about to start, officials noticed that Roberts' Yamaha was spraying oil from a busted gasket, and so, safety first, they moved him from pole position at the start to the last row, and we got to see some drama.

Roberts started last and four laps later, he was in first place. DiMaggio got base hits in 56 straight games. Mike Tyson laid out the next-best heavyweights in the world in one or two minutes. That's the sort of head-and-shoulders-above-everybody dominance Bobby Fischer displayed at the end of his career.

Motorcycle Road Racing

I was having a terrible time finding facts and figures relevant to this blog post, so finally I just gave up, and so this is going to be more about some personal experiences of mine as a racing fan than about racing per se. If you want some facts and figures to fill out what I have to say here, all I can do is sincerely apologize. Short of some large university library which might have back issues of Cycle magazine going back to the mid-1970's, I don't know what would help here -- and no, I don't know of any library which has those back issues in the stacks.



And so, for example, I can't tell you which AMA road race it was in 1977 in which Kenny Roberts went from last to first in the first 4 laps. Normally by that time in AMA's 750cc premier-class road racing, Roberts would qualify in pole position, zoom out into the lead immediately, settle into a pace which was comfortable for him and faster than anyone else, and win the race easily. He'd win unless he had mechanical trouble. Impressive, but also, since no one was challenging Roberts' dominance, also somewhat monotonous. Before the start of this particular race, Roberts was sent from the pole to back of the starting grid because his bike was leaking oil. And after 4 laps, he was in front. And Cycle magazine proclaimed that those 4 laps demonstrated that Roberts was -- beyond a doubt - the best motorcycle road racer in the world.

That pronouncement showed the provincial outlook of American motorcycle road racing at the time. Maybe Roberts was the best in the world, but an AMA -- American Motorcycle Association -- road race wasn't going to prove it. Then as now, the world class of mororcycle road racing is that organized by the FIM (Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme), with races all over the world contested by riders from all over the world. Now and then an FIM rider participated in the AMA's most prestigious race, at Daytona. Giacomo Agostini, one of the FIM's all-time greats, won at Daytona in 1974. Roberts left the AMA for the FIM beginning in 1978, and won the world championship in 1978, 1979 and 1980 -- but it wasn't completely lopsided. It's not completely unreasonable to contend that Barry Sheene might have been as good or better. (Sheene himself was never the slightest bit shy about saying so.)

In 1978 I stopped following road racing. I turned 17 in 1978, and it had become clear that although I liked watching road racing, I was no kind of fast rider myself. I can do some things really well, others I can't. Racing a motorcycle might be one thing I can't even do as well as average. Also, lack of skill aside, I was getting too big for road racing. There haven't been many champions over 6 feet tall.

Maybe Roberts was the greatest ever, but you can't say it's beyond a doubt. Not at all. But he did change some things. In the mid-70's he started to freak people out by dragging his knees around corners. He put big pads made out of duct tape on the knees of his racing uniform. Eventually all road racers were dragging their knees, and all road racing uniforms had built-in knee pads. In the 1970's, there was an obituary in Cycle for a road racer who'd died in a crash. The writer talked about the first time he'd seen this racer, when he was "dragging his elbows" around a corner. Back then, "dragging his elbows" was a euphemism and an exaggeration of how far this guy leaned the bike over.

Toward the end of the 2012 FIM road racing season, almost 35 years after I'd stopped following AMA road racing, I tuned back in, this time to the FIM premier world class, now called MotoGP, and saw that now sometimes the riders literally drag their elbows through some turns. I saw that world-championship racing had gone from 2-stroke to 4-stroke engines, I heard about this guy named Valentino Rossi who'd won 9 world championships and was very popular. Very soon Rossi became my favorite rider. What can I say, he's extremely charismatic. He's not movie-star handsome, he kind of looks like a happy puppy with a pop-eye and matted curly fur. He always seems to be in a good mood. His face and hair and voice and personality are somewhat like those of a younger Roberto Benigni.

And although he's 35 years old and 35 generally seems to be too old for this sort of thing, Rossi is still one of a handful of the fastest riders. But, you see, there's this kid Marc Marquez. At the beginning of the 2013 MotoGP season, seconds before the race started, the announcer said to keep an eye on Marquez cause he was special. Turned out it's been really easy to keep an eye on Marquez cause he's usually out in front or close to it. He won the 2013 world championship, youngest-ever top-class champ, and a week ago he clinched the 2014 championship with 3 races left in the season. Earlier this year it seemed like Marquez was just going to whup ass unmercifully. He won the first 10 of the season's 18 races. But, he's crashed in 3 of the last 4, so hold on, this still might be a contest. There's Rossi, and then there's Gorge Lorenzo, a 2-time champ, and then there's Dani Pedrosa, who's finished 4 seasons in 2nd in MotoGP and has about 3 times as many race wins as anyone else who's never won the season championship. The Repsol Hondas ridden by Marquez and Pedrosa have orange wheels, might sound silly to you if you're just reading about it but it looks wicked cool. After a couple of seasons out of contention it looks as if the Ducatis might be as fast now as the Repsol Hondas, and the factory Yamahas ridden by Rossi and Lorenzo.

Or faster. Ducatis are wicked cool. They're Italian, and they're desmos. Desmodromic valve drive was still fairly new in production vehicles back in the 1970's, introduced to the wider world by Ducati, and the Ducatis still are almost the only desmos around. That's wicked cool. Look Ma, no valve springs!