How Magnus Carlsen Learned From AlphaZero

have you ever wondered what would happen if you took the best chess player in the world and supercharged his abilities to the next level well in this video we're going to check out how magnus carlsen changed his playing style based on the chess computer alpha zero alpha zero was the creation of the google deepmind team essentially they coded a computer to have four hours to play training games against itself and ultimately they put it up in a match against stockfish the strongest chess computer at the time and alpha zero drew 72 games and 128 it didn't lose i'm gonna take you through five of magnus carlsen's games after the creation of alpha zero show you the incredible playing style that alpha zero brought to the table and how magnus implements it in his games against top players before that though you like my glasses i got some new glasses but you could tell me if you don't like them i'll go back to the old ones and also people i never asked this but 44 of you are not subscribed to my channel and we are trying to hit a million we are at 925 000. it would be an incredible milestone i work extremely hard i'd be extremely grateful thank you so much and if you're already subscribed or you're watching way in the future well i appreciate you very much anyway let's get into the games just going to quickly shout out new in chess magazine they're an awesome global publication they featured this story of magnus meeting alpha zero some of the games in this article are featured in this video and there's a link to this pdf in the description also there's a super awesome book by english grandmaster matthew sadler called game changer it's all about alpha zero and its development but for now let's jump into the games okay so in game number one magnus has white against chakriar mahmud yara from azerbaijan this is a game played in stavanger norway and this game is a kings excuse me a grunfeld defense with the queen's pawn d4 c4 and black strikes back with d5 now layer number one of alpha zero's playing style it loves flank pawn attacks it loves dominance center control and it negates the movement of the enemy pieces that is one thing that it loves to do it takes space commits its structure as long as it can shut down its opponent now here we have a mainline greenfield this is e4 takes takes bishop g7 okay seen many many many times before magnus plays bishop e3 this setup with bishop to e3 is a favorite of alpha zero it loves central stability but so far so good nothing crazy yet rook c1 knight f3 all normal stuff queen a5 and one thing that often times happens in grunfeld positions is that this a2 pawn is sacrificed so that white just gets a lead in development you'll notice magnus is checking all the boxes he has a massive center his p his opponent is just lagging behind the development enough and what magnus does here is he plays a fascinating move he plays knight to d2 to the untrained eye this looks frankly like bogus it doesn't make any sense but here's the amazing thing about this move first of all it reese it actually reinforces the center one thing that was not going on uh it fights for these squares there could be potential queen tramps in the future but more importantly it opens up these two pawns moving alpha zero loves belligerent attacks on the king is send especially if it can if if it can lock up the center and when shock brings his queen out here we see you know you would think you kind of play f4 or close up the center no we have h4 that was the other idea of knight d2 your bishop now opens up to h5 and you can just do this it breaks everything that we know about the game of chess but here's the incredible thing you would think that the point is to just destroy the structure around the king and it looks like that's the thing and you know you know uh we have we have mamijara playing kind of a counter-attack on the other side of the board but no it's actually not to chop down the pawn at all the point is to play this and if the opponent moves the bishop forward what you're gonna do is kick the bishop all the way back alpha zero freezes the opponents like it looks like you stop your own attack because where can you go but it sees deep into the future deep into the future and it and it realizes that by killing off the activity of your opponent's pieces it's worth the pawn and that's why the move queen takes a two way back giving up the pawn happened and the game that alpha zero played against stockfish looked like this so it was a little bit different this is now we're looking at alpha zero stockfish from their match but it does the same thing and it it it it won a beautiful game when you plug this position into a computer like ironic right uh it it doesn't realize how strong white's advantage is and i would imagine that in the game carlson mamijarov the same thing happened right and so what magnus does throughout this game is he he kind of tries to dominate this bishop and he actually ended up getting a very very strong initiative you'll notice his pawns completely lock out the bishop the knight cannot make any sort of forward progress to his position and he's better but of course even though you can activate your pieces and ultimately like try to take the position to the next level you're not always going to uh you're not always going to win he actually uh wasn't able to win this game because well that he's a human right the computer would be able to but look at this the justification of having this pawn on h6 uh shows in the following move knight to g5 look at this incredible move if pawn takes you have queen d5 check it's nearly made uh e6 you obviously are not gonna take but you will go here and uh you've got checkmate threats like lurking i mean this bishop is just awful like black is essentially playing the entire game down a piece and as you let stockfish sit on this position it goes higher and higher in its evaluation and i mean magnus just is able to break apart kind of the barrier there but ultimately chakra was able to defend this position uh and a queen trade happened and even though magnus was dominant and and was restricting uh it was shock getting able to you know he was able to get rid of his bishop well some argument can be made like maybe magnus in this position bailed out uh maybe he could have just kept applying pressure without taking on b5 because bishop b5 allowed this kind of little trick with bishop takes g2 king g2 queen b7 and then this um but actually here the computer gives a hilarious variation which uh in the game you saw magnus go for queen f3 uh it gives d5 and i i would be willing to bet that alpha zero would play d5 and here's the point if you take the pawn you're not going to take my bishop so you take my bishop now i block up this and then i play this and something tells me that alpha zero would love this position with a capital l love it uh and actually stockfish prefers it as well so sometimes you can play like alpha zero early on uh but then you play like a human and that's where your kind of mistake pops in but again alpha zero would love this total pawn dominance super obscure position but the long-term benefit of the h-pawn attack the flank attack magnus does that all the time to his opponents and listen if you get a winning advantage in 20 moves at top level chess what more can you ask for okay game number two uh this is magnus with the white pieces versus russian grand master maxim matlakov uh this is played in douglas and isle of man it was the grand swiss the winner of this tournament actually wang hao ended up qualifying to the candidates and we have another queen's gambit by the way just as an aside alpha zero loves d4 c4 knight f3 it loves this it loves this okay with a capital l so the semi-slav variation is very tricky for black there's a lot of ways that black takes the pawn plays b5 negates development for the cost of a pawn but or to win upon but if you think about that that's exactly what alpha zero loves it loves and i keep saying that to give away a pawn for quick development bishop g5 one of the things about alpha zero is it goes for the sharpest variation every single time h6 this this this this is one of the craziest variations in chess b5 this is uh it can turn into a bot vinig the botfinix semi-slot has literally 40 moves of theory some of these variations and magnus goes for this position now uh ladies and gentlemen we're watching an alpha zero magnus carlsen video uh what move is magnus going to play here yes you guessed correctly h4 you have to attack you have a lead in development for the cost of one pawn you have to create flank attacks now of course matlock doesn't take he goes g4 attacks and now tries to trade this knight magnus slow plays the position bishop to e2 bringing another piece to develop targeting this okay now in the game matlakov played bishop b7 however here is an example of alpha zero stockfish once again inspired by this this is a whole point magnus learning from alpha zero uh and uh in that game that we got knight e5 bishop e5 rook g8 and you would think that being okay pawn down uh and already pushed my h pawn of course i'm not gonna castle but no the computer castle's short bishop b7 and the incredible thing about alpha zero sacrifices is that despite being upon down it slow plays the position and what it does is it sucks the life out of you g3 like look at this what is this it's preventing black from getting anything on the side of the board then queen c2 just slow improvement knight d7 slow improvement and potentially the most incredible thing here is watch this b3 b4 it moves the knight it gives its opponent a protected pass pawn but by killing the mobility that black has now you open it up and because you have such a strong center you're able to push through now when i say push through and breakthrough what do you think you think of course breakthrough with d5 no e5 seemingly a frozen move because how on earth are you going to break through the position now well you're going to win the dominance of the diagonal dislodge the positioning of the rook and go like this and this is how alpha zero suffocates its opponents to death it just doesn't let them move for example if you try to look for simplification i will play knight to c5 and i will kill your play your bishop is garbage now it will never get into the game now this is an aside but matlakov played bishop b7 let's watch how magnus is able to apply or attempt to apply kind of the same principles he plays b3 right he allows this b4 and now the knight is kind of always coming to c5 the tricky thing about alpha zero is that while you can get to a position where you look to be dominant just like we saw in the last game we're humans so just because you use the prep to get to the position sometimes the prerequisite to actually win the game is the fact that you you need to play like the computer so watch knight c5 takes takes magnus gives his opponent this pawn i mean it's not quite giving him the pawn but had matlakov taken and gone two pawns up we would have gotten this the queen would have moved then magnus would have played e5 for example if the bishop goes back to let's just say e7 looking to trade now we infiltrate we are controlling the opponent's play shutting down his bishops his rooks are disconnected his king can't move anywhere because of the queen the rook coming in and that's what magnus would have done that's why he played knight c5 because even for the cost of yet another pawn the activity of the enemy is killed now e5 bishop has no more moves bishop can only take on h4 but who cares about the h4 pawn rook d says okay take it go ahead go ahead take my pawn bishop c4 now i am two pawns down and you can take but if you take i have another piece coming so of course matlakov doesn't take the bishop he backs up and now he wants to play h5h4 so magnus just improves the position of his pieces and matlakov is playing without two pieces he's up two pawns but he's playing without two pieces that is the way the computer look at this f4 move look at this f4 move you can take on passage sure oh sure but then i'm activating my rook so what does matlakov do he takes this way but i'm still i've traded one of your attacking pieces one of your active pieces but i have a new one and throughout this game magnus kept on applying the pressure he went on to win on move 80 because he's a human being and he kind of you know made some inaccuracies in a crazy position plus with time trouble but you can see like how crazy this is he's just two pawns up but he is totally negating the bishop and the rook it's not nuts like how does this work and and we can watch as the game develops montlick kind of goes for a little bit of counter play and trades off the pieces um magnus ultimately had to be super precise as matlakov got his his pieces here uh he played queen f5 he was completely winning i mean it's just incredible look at this these pieces just aren't moving king d8 and i believe the inaccuracy happened eight days before i think was the inaccurate move i think magnus had to just go for the hunt here with queen f 8 rook f7 king here and then queen e7 was the key move this is uh this is what he had to do with the queen patrolling everything and you just you can't even if you get checked and checked you're safe for example uh for example even here maybe you can play bishop f1 probably is better rather than running out with your king so magnus should have done this and then played bishop f1 but the reason he played a takes before it's move 35 and on move 35 there is time trouble and that is where mistakes are made by human beings but up until that point he was playing like the computer everything about this game was alpha zero inspired now we're in 2020 and i will show you another example of this kind of similar attacking style uh against the nishigiri you will notice we have the exact same three moves against e6 alpha zero really likes to go knight f3 uh against uh g6 alpha zero of course goes knight c3 inviting the grunfeld and all those different ideas but because we have e6 we have knight f3 and anish went for a semi terrash this is all theoretical so the next like 15 moves of tag then the trade in the center another trade in the center known to be a very solid line for black black trades a lot of pieces castle says okay i'm slightly passive but i will hold the position and i won't lose um and this is uh this is an online game from the chessable masters it's actually funny when i was a baby on youtube i made a video of this game it has like 40 000 views um and this is how the game went okay they played a bunch of like natural looking moves and here magnus played rookie three okay with rookie 3 you make your intentions very very clear to your opponent you would like to move your knight at some point play rook g3 and checkmate or rook h3 and checkmate like it's very clear what you want so a niche plays knight f6 now the thing about knight f6 is it attacks the pawn on e4 and if white were to push this pawn then this would allow black to plop to d5 if black wins control of d5 this is not alpha zero style this is just very good for black black now owns the center has an active queen an active rook this bishop will be active anytime i move my knight it's not what we want so magnus plays d5 now this kind of idea has been seen before after pawn takes his idea is not to take back it's to play e5 that's his idea this has been seen before by humans but it gets a little alpha zero little infusion later so pawn attacks night yeah uh and the night moves the knight comes here and magnus just makes a very calm move queen e1 and now a niche good luck because the thread first of all is rook takes and then i can maybe take the queen i also have this pressure but there is something much worse coming i will rotate my knight to that square okay the square that i freed up when i sacrificed my pawn so alpha zero upon sacrifice yeah negating the activity of the bishop and then let the fun begin a6 to prevent knight b5 ladies and gentlemen we are watching an alpha zero game drum roll please here it comes pawn to h4 this move seems to be completely stupid actually because why what are you trying to do are you trying to prevent the knight from coming to g5 because it never had any intention to do that in fact what are you doing about this well if you take there is of course f3 so you actually would be losing the pawn um now then i can go to c5 i don't understand what's so good about this just knight c5 here well the thing about this is that this pawn uh forces the knight this way and in the future we'll play h5h6 and essentially what the computer would say here is i have the time to do it because i killed your activity by killing your activity i've realized that you can't actually do anything to your position so a niche plays rook v8 we have this and now magnus just can get away with playing h5 you can just play this move uh before he even plays knight f5 or queen g3 and threatens mate like he can just play h5 but in this game it's worse to play h6 you can play h6 but you shouldn't because you cannot get your knight to f5 that's the problem and you're not going to make me because you won't i'm going to stop that by playing queen e7 so instead magnus plays knight f5 d4 rook d3 and now anish tries to come back but the problem is d4 is lost now anisha's idea here was that he would take on b3 he would take on b3 magnus would take back maybe we would have some game but magnus says well first i will go here creating this attack and uh then i will take you cannot take my knight because you're pinned rook d8 and now a beautiful move e6 and uh queen is hanging rook is hanging king is locked down on the back rank and this pawn is just constantly hovering around here and he wanted a few moves later he won it even in flashy style you know like this rook is here to be captured but the pawn that makes the the walk and the king is safe everything is saved the pieces coordinate beautifully rook h4 uh intending of course knight takes h4 i don't know some blockade and magnus just in fancy style place king g3 uh not even taking the rook because you cannot stop this or this or or night age six mate there's everything it's all lost so pawn sacrifice in the center of the board rotate your pieces around that pawn push your flank pawn infiltrate attack like lights out but all these games have been with the white pieces ladies and gentlemen what does alpha zero have to bring to the table when you are playing with the black pieces well it's an armageddon game in norway chess magnus carlsen has the black pieces versus wesley so and he himself wants to engage wesley so in a groonfeld once this whole place f3 it's kind of an anti-grunfeld line and it's trying to force your opponent into a king's indian defense because if you play the grunfield now i'm gonna play e4 and then knight c3 you'll notice that in most grundfelds this knight gets traded for this night so this is kind of known as a neo-grunfeld and white gets a very nice big center healthy center alpha zero would love this center but guys we're talking about alpha zero like so what is alpha zero going to bring to the table here according to theory a few moves get played for example e5 is a move to try to jump the knight into the middle but we need flank pawn attacks right so f5 and here what white has always done historically is block the center block up the center okay and for example if black plays like bishop to e6 to kind of fight for the light squares that doesn't actually stop anything because there is just d5 say how is that possible well just count the attackers and defenders right so that doesn't work and then for example if black plays knight before uh to try to put something on d5 that happens and usually what white does is try to play h4 h5 maybe f4 knight f3 and kill you so alpha zero often times will sacrifice material in the name of activity f4 and magnus plays it against wesley so alpha zero has played this move now this is the fascinating part all computers say nah there's there's no way there's no way this is any good i just take the pawn and then i crush you with h4h5 this is the line they analyzed with alpha zero knight b4 h4 bishop e6 lighting up my own attack okay h5 you ignore it you play c5 they take you you ignore it again queen c7 pawn takes pawn king h8 black is down three pawns three puns but you've activated one two three four five six and maybe seven all of your pieces are about to be involved all you have to do is play pawn takes pawn for example let's say black plays pawn takes pawn queen c5 white is lost sorry uh what if white plays pawn takes pawn it's lost here because you you can't prevent all of this like this initiative with all these pieces king is hiding behind this pawn totally safe incredible so magnus must have had this prepared so what did wesley do hey guys got alpha zero behind him goes back but you know still magnus then proceeds to second night uh and of course if you take which is possible magnus has the rook coming in very very inspired play uh according to stockfish there is a way for for for white to stabilize here and not get a completely lost position but it's it's it's not easy it's definitely not easy to do there's like all sorts of tricks if you take i have a one then i take your rook it's game over so uh in the game wesley just played this and then magnus kind of went for it for a hunt over there and it was a wild game and actually magnus was a lot better um they ended up drawing which i think still was good for magnus because in armageddon games as long as black draws black wins that's what armageddon is in chess black has less time but if black draws black wins the armageddon that's just one of the formats but yeah there you go even with black flank pawn attacks sacrificing potentially up to three pawns for activity alpha zero is an absolute lunatic and this final example will prove it okay we're back to the white pieces this is against uh levon ranyan uh this is zagreb croatia 2019 classical chess tournament listen you gotta copy the openings alpha zero plays this is the regosin defense of the queen's gambit the client we've seen everything we saw c5 we've seen grunfeld's and this one is uh again a bit weird opening i'm not gonna spend too much time on the opening but this is kind of like the main position okay let me actually include queen d2 and bishop takes pawn uh very weird i know queen is next to the king it's adorable uh it's not really the way most chess positions are supposed to look but it's it's weird it's in balance there's bishop knight versus bishop knight both sides have a knight in a dark sword bishop traded uh and black plays rogue d8 now the threat of rook d8 is very simple you are pinned and so e5 right uh so you have to move out of the way and now black plays bishop d7 to try to play knight c6 trade activate the bishop everything is good of course if i ask you here what is the most natural looking move for white ladies and gentlemen not the alpha zero move what is the most natural looking move for white of course it is short castle do you don't even think it's short castle i mean what else can you do yeah so this is where i introduce the final part uh one of the kind of crazy things about alpha zero's playing style it really values something called king mobility in fact alpha zero really doesn't like the castle if it doesn't have to it likes the fact that there are open squares near its king i don't know why i don't understand why but here magnus castle's queen side alpha zero really likes breathing room for its king because i guess it feels like it's not cramped and it opens the board up for more dynamics alpha zero is a kind of a belligerent drunk guy yeah um knight c6 and now we see the point we see take stakes ladies and gentlemen we're watching an alpha zero video h4 of course even in in the eye of potentially trading rooks it doesn't matter because i will take and then my rook is going to come and i'm going to punish you here uh queen f6 rook h3 and b5 now here magnus played rook g3 check and he got some very interesting and dynamic position but uh here the analysts of the of of the game were like hey maybe magnus could have gone full alpha zero and played h5 oh sorry he could have played h5 invited b4 just played it h4h5h6 in the middle of the game just push the pawn why king safety big weakness but light squirt pawn and you have a light squid bishop so in all end games because you kill their mobility of their king the bishop will have some sort of target for example let's say we had a big simplification here this endgame is very very clearly better for white for example you just can't you can't take my pawn because if you do there is rook to g3 but even if you don't blunder a bishop in one move and i go here and you play like oh no that would hang a bishop you try to go for a bishop trade uh i will take you cannot take because backrank mate courtesy of my h-pawn and if you take like this now you've split pawns you have four pawn islands four pawn islands that's very bad in end games you cannot have pawns so split you need pawns to be cohesive and together so magnus had a chance to go really full alpha zero but again you know he has it's human nature but do you notice what magnus is doing here my dude is playing tetris with his rook again instant replay boop boop boop boop like what what if i had a seven year old student that played like i'd be like bro what are you doing but it's magnus carlson so i have to sit here and be like oh that's so don't move a rook four times in a row in the game unless you're magnus carlsen um but this is this type of stuff that alpha zero does like look at this he somehow got his damn rook to f4 and he's pushing the flying pawns and and and magnus throughout this game was kind of applying this degree of pressure g5 bc3 look at this bishop c2 look at this rook f6 look what he's doing to live on he just completely allowed at full access to this side of the board and just plugs the queen out of the game now granted the queen ended up getting back into the game and magnus continued to apply this pressure creating all sorts of checkmate threats clamping down on that side of the board because it's uh it came out of a super theoretical variation kingdom by the way the king moves out of the pin black is never fully lost like it's still very complex aronian does a good job creating counter play but magnus was constantly constantly badgering him with all sorts of different threats look at this pawn attack if you plug this into a machine it's like 0.4 it's it's always trying to tell you that this is never actually fully winning and ultimately once the players made it past the time control it did get into a drawn rook end game but let's be serious one man was having fun playing this game and it was not levon ranyan okay it was magnus carlsen so that is a brief summary of how alpha zero inspired the play of magnus carlsen i should say if you've made it this far in the video thank you very much as always you are very much appreciated that alpha zero didn't just inspire magnus carlsen it's inspired damn near the entire chess world i mean i wouldn't recommend that 1200s play h4h5h6 in every game i feel like you'd hang like three pieces while you do that but the truth is that this is an incredible game changer in fact there is a book out by grandmaster matthew sadler called game changer you should feel free to check it out i've actually i've got the book on my phone and i read through it when alpha zero first came out there's a lot of videos out on alpha zero at the time of recording i don't have alpha zero versus stockfish as a video but if you're watching way into the future that video does exist i already have the thumbnail for it so i plan to record it in the future um many other computers have been uh have been coming out as a result of alpha zero leela is one it's an incredible powerhouse and there's a lot of others this kind of self-training mechanism for me as a chess player i don't think chess is doomed at all because the truth is i generate some ideas in my preparation from alpha zero and leela and some of these engines but just because the computer's 3700 as you saw from some of these games just because you get the prep on the board does not mean you will navigate the position correctly i am just fascinated that the game of chess can constantly develop if you go back 50 years we know so much more now about chess than 50 years ago the average eight-year-old chess prodigy knows more openings than they did 50 years ago can you imagine 50 years from now it's gonna be crazy so i wanted to share this video with y'all uh because it's just interesting to see how chess computers improve the top level guys and just how much better they can actually get with already the tools that they have now and the training partners that they have now but as always ladies and gentlemen uh if you enjoyed the video you know what to do uh you heard my early plug please do subscribe as we try to approach a million let me know as always in the comments uh if there's a topic that i haven't covered yet uh some games i haven't covered yet and you know i read through them and we'll see you in the next video get out of here

Channel: GothamChess

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Id: I0zqbO622rg

Length: 29min 33sec (1773 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021