2016 World Chess Championship

The World Chess Championship begins tomorrow in New York City. Magnus Carlsen (2853) and Sergey Karjakin (2772) will face off in a 12-game match. The Norwegian is the favorite due to his extraordinary rating; 81 Elo points separate him from the challenger. However, short matches are prone to upsets. I'll spare you from my usual rant that the match is not long enough.

I ran 40,000 simulations in my standard statistical model. The methodology link below explains how it works. Basically, I estimated the probability of a draw from a large database. Then I plugged that into Elo's formulas to find the probability of a win. Repeat for 12 games:

Carlsen wins: 82.795%
Draw: 8.595%
Karjakin wins: 8.61%

Methodology

Drawn matches are resolved by rapid games. These are hard to predict since (1) there is not such an abundance of data on rapid games. There is a handful of top rapid tournaments each year, but that is nothing compared to my 1 million+ game database of classical games. The second reason? Because rapid tournaments are fairly scarce, the rapid ratings from FIDE might not be entirely reliable.

We are very excited to introduce a new statistical model. The older one relied in part on Elo's theoretical formulas; this one is entirely data-driven. (It's an ordered logit in which the independent variables are a 10th degree polynomial of year, white's rating, and black's rating, in case you were wondering. Not entirely sure how to express that in plain English). The results after 40,000 simulations:

Carlsen wins: 78.74%
Draw: 9.8425%
Karjakin wins: 11.4175%

Karjakin's chances are slightly better here. The probability of a draw in each game is nearly the same in both models (Old: 48% New: 46%). The main factor is Carlsen's expected score, i.e., how many points per game he will score on average. Elo's formula yields an expected score of 64%. In the data, it seems to be closer to 60%. In either case, Carlsen is heavily favored to win. It's hard being the underdog when you're rating is 81 points less - even in a short match.