A light hearted, unplanned and unadvertised naka-carlsen bullet match can attract a lot of viewers. They both stream, and lots of other chess streamers will switch to watching and doing commentary when these matches happen.
They'll play silly openings like the double bong cloud and have fun.
Carlson's into this new egaming vibe. He's good at it, and it's good for chess. Meanwhile, high-level classical is brutal. The level is so high that the game is hard to follow. It takes forever and is draining. Most games end in a draw.
I feel like Fide should focus more on rapid, and get more involved in the online scene. Maybe this is the opportunity.
I suspect the most anticipated, spectator matches of the future will be rapid matches and alt formats like team tournies (go Norway gnomes). They're just more fun for everyone but your cranky old chess instructor, and even she loves it in secret.
I'd bet a 20 game rapid series over 4 days between naka-carlsen would attract more viewers than the world championship.
I agree on fast chess being more fun, but hey now :)
But I’ve lost interest after Deep Blue event. Alpha Zero plays were fun to watch though.
As for computers, they've certainly changed the landscape tremendously, but it doesn't mean that players simply play like chess engines. You don't just get to transfer the chess engine heuristics to a human mind. Chess engines help players find ideas, refutations etc., and they're certainly significant when it comes to opening theory. The role of memorization in opening theory (at the highest level) predates computers though.
Computers have also levelled the playing field, improving (buzzword alert) inclusiveness. Players from countries with flourishing chess tradition, such as Russia, don't have the inherent advantage anymore. That's why the current top 2 (on the rating list) are from Norway and China, which would be rather unlikely a few decades ago.
I also stopped watching red sox games once they won the world series. Fandom is weird.
It's kinda fun to see this referenced recently in a television quiz show:
This cheapens the tradition and the prestige of the discipline. Chess has attained a revered status over the years. It's not perceived as a game like any other. That's why it's able to attract luxury sponsors, if nothing else. Shifting the focus onto the "double bong cloud drunk banter blitz" territory destroys this legacy. This casual, fun aspect exists and does very well independently of the official, suited up aspect. They are complementary. But I'd really think twice before trying to remove one of the pillars. Chess is the most known, researched and commented mind game on the globe, it doesn't suffer from niche viewership. There's no need to try and fix a problem that doesn't exist. Tradition and legacy is something no amount of online clicks could ever buy.
As for prestige and tradition... we shall see, I suppose. Prestige follows the prestigious. We are now entering terrify, with Magnus at least, where the best players don't want to compete in traditional matches and the chess watching public doesn't want to follow it anyway.
If you think FIDE involvement in rapid/online cheapens chess... then you'll eventually be in a world that has tradition & prestige on one side and popularity and the best players in the other.
[Citation needed] :) Says who? What exactly indicates the best players "don't want to compete in traditional matches"? What implies that Magnus forfeiting his title (having collected five) is a result of such general trend?
Either it's "best players", or only Magnus, in this specific situation, having already built a remarkable legacy.
> and the chess watching public doesn't want to follow it anyway.
[Citation needed] again : ) Because I'm not sure if the chess watching public KNOWS that it "doesn't want to follow" traditional matches. Regarding the previous world championship match:
"Total viewership for the event exceeded 12.6 million hours watched with a record peak streaming viewership for chess of 613,000 concurrent viewers making the FIDE World Championship in Dubai one of the most watched events in streaming globally."
https://kommunikasjon.ntb.no/announcement?publisherId=168238...
> In total, viewers of the World Championship spent more than 12.6M hours on broadcasts, which is twice as much as at the World Championship 2018. The average audience of the World Championship 2021 was 239.7K viewers, which is almost 2.5 times more than at the previous iteration of the tournament
https://escharts.com/news/fide-world-chess-championship-2021...
Guess the chess watching public didn't get that memo. Viewership can grow substantially, despite this era of shortening attention spans. I can't see a problem in need of fixing here, much less a trend going in the opposite direction that these numbers show.
> If you think FIDE involvement in rapid/online cheapens chess...
Involvement in and of itself, no. It has its place. And they're involved already. There are World Rapid and World Blitz championships. But these titles don't hold the same value as "the" World championship. Ask Abdusattorov ("who"? Exactly :)) if he wouldn't prefer to be the classic world champion.
What I'm saying is that this involvement should be kept in proportion, and pushing towards rapid/online, with the goal of attracting more publicity (which is already larger than ever before, the internet takes care of itself without the need for any official blessing), steers towards diminishing returns, while the long-term costs would tend to increase.
The first half of the match wasn't even close to a steamroll. It's just Ian broke mentally after that famous 6th game. The candidate tournament showed that he had more than recovered from that loss and I think he would be in a much better shape to challenge Carlsen again. Also, with Carlsen's current attitude, it is quite possible that he would be closer to breaking first. (One may assume he already broke since he gives up the title without a fight)
If nepo plays like he did in the candidates, I would not be so quick to favor magnus.
What about Fischer? The format was a little different then, but here was his route to the Championship.
1. Won the Interzonal tournament 18.5/23 (+15-1=7). The top 8 from the Interzonal then played a knockout series of matches using a bracket system.
2. In his quarter-final match of that he beat Taimanov 6-0.
3. In his semi-final match against Larsen he also won 6-0.
4. In his final match against former world champion Tigran Petrosian, he won 6.5-2.5 (+5-1=3).
In the 21 games total that his candidates matches lasted, he won 17 games, lost 1, and drew 3. If we include the Interzonal it is 32 wins, 2 loses, 10 draws. In the combined Interzonal and knockout matches he had a streak of 20 consecutive wins against the world's top players.
And then in the Championship against Spassky he won 12.5-8.5 (+7-3=11) (and one of those loses was a forfeit when he skipped the game over some complaint about the playing conditions).
Nepo's performance in this Candidates was pretty dominating, but doesn't come anywhere near Fischer's level of dominance.
TBH in that match Fischer started his shenanigans about demanding all sorts of things which most likely unbalanced Spassky - who was known to be somewhat lazy - so with all the political pressure and mind games he likely decided that he doesn't care enough.
The match was actually not that top-level chess as it is presented in chess mythology. Reshevsky [1] said the following things about it:
"True, there were several excellent games, but the match as a whole was disappointing. It was marked by blunders by both players. The blunders committed by Spassky were incredible. In two games, for example, Spassky overlooked a one-move combination. In the first, he was compelled to resign immediately, and, in the other, he threw away all chances for a win. Fischer was also not in his best form. He made errors in a number of games."
... and he is also very critical of how Spassky was prepareding for the match. So a well-prepared Karpov would likely have been able to dethrone Bobby, and I think Fischer knew it, and it played a big part in why he had forfeited the defence.
[1]: http://billwall.phpwebhosting.com/collections/The%20Fischer-...
granted it becomes more clear that fischer dominated in the quarterfinals forward, but it still is worht pointing out that his opponents weren't nearly as strong as nepo's opponents, relatively speaking
I imagine nepo's score would've been MUCH stronger if he was playing 100-200 ELO points weaker opponents all candidates. Instead nepo had 3 opponents with higher ELO and his weakest opponents ELO was only 19 points lower than his own...
in summary, I think you're correct and I was wrong, but I'm not so sure it's quite so clear-cut when you factor in other variables
Personally I am not interested in this championship match at all.
A fresh match with a new score could be very interesting.
I understand that Magnus glory hunting fans are everywhere and they love to pretend that once he had someone beaten, he'll repeat the feat with certainty, but have some more sense than that. More than one world champion has won the crown not on his first attempt, including one of the all-time greats, Kasparov.
That would look even worse for him, and be unsatisfying for his opponent and the public. In this case, he realizes he doesn't have the passion for this event any more, so he's doing the best thing for the sport and just letting two people who are still passionate about it compete instead of doing the mental-sports version of playing injured.
By resources i mean things like going into a position that gives your opponent an incredibly small advantage but is hard for them to play. It's one of the best ways to win games. it's hard work to find those lines, and he's been doing it for so long at WCC level it's not surprising that he's tapping out against someone he's already beaten. if you use a line in the WCC, it becomes very risky to use it again - because if your opponent studied it and plays it correctly then all you've done is make it even harder for you to win the game.
to reach 2900 he has to win games, not tie
That doesn't exist anymore, any game Carlsen plays is studied in depth by the world immediately, and especially by his opponents. Same for other top grandmasters.
Many observers overplay the importance of one match loss. More than one chess champion title was taken by a challenger who had lost in the previous attempt [1] - and considering there was just a handful of champions, it is a lot.
[1]: Spassky and Kasparov have lost in their first attempts against Petrosyan and Karpov.
Magnus specifically mentioned Firouzja as an opponent that he would consider playing the WCC against[1]. So while not the most important factor in his decision, the fact that Nepo won the candidates again and was the last challenger before Magnus made the Firouzja statement seems relevant. Also relevant is that the candidates tournament concluded on July 5th and Magnus released his withdrawal now in the same month.
It seems to me like the challenger being Nepo was the last significant piece of information towards his decision. How specific it is to Nepo or a more general feeling of Nepo being one of many people he doesnt feel any personal benefit from playing against, who knows.
[1] https://chess24.com/en/read/news/magnus-carlsen-unlikely-i-w...
That is not how it works, and not how it is supposed to work. This is hubris and disrespect to all chess players in the world. For more than 100 years champions changed each other in title matches (well, before Kasparov's limitless ego created a decade of turmoil in Chess), with just one exception by Fischer, and now Carlsen 'doesnt feel any personal benefit'. :ThumbDown:
So it isnt the most important reason, but nepo being the challenger didnt offer anything to change his mind like he was hoping the result of the candidates would.
It’s a mix of having a new perspective, dealing with stress, and having time to heal etc. This is one of the reasons most sports have an off season. Even if basketball could easily be played year round, the game would suffer.
He's just not playing in the FIDE World Championship because he dislikes the process.
Surely, if one can quit without it being considered breaking, resigning while on top is how.
IMO, it's less the intent that you have when you quit - the intent is almost always at that point that you don't want to be there any more doing the thing. The more important part is the intent that led up to the moment where you quit.
In some ways, it's similar to quitting any job. If you just have a bad day or week at work and put in your resignation with no other plan because you just can't stand coming in to work again, you "broke". If you're still working, but interviewing elsewhere, get another job, put in your notice and walk away with something else lined up, it's a bit different.
Yes, every championship title eventually goes to someone else.
The classical World Championship matches have never been entertaining to watch live.
In fact they used to take 2 days for one game.
> No one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive and all games ended in a draw.
Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw. It's not a game of "risk" in classical time format. You can take risks in blitz and rapid, but in classical you have (almost) all the time in the world to calculate the line you're playing.
> Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw.
I don't think that's solved, actually.
Antichess at least is a solved win for White
I usually don't follow chess, but I still end up watching the WC matches on Norwegian TV. They manage to make it interesting and exciting.
The guests will typically join in on the discussion of the positions, and as such often serves as a proxy for the viewers by asking questions like "but why doesn't he just do X now" and similar.
It doesn't always work but overall I think it's been a positive addition to their broadcasts.
While this is highly likely and essentially agreed upon by all experts on the matter, it's not proven yet.
(If they had to bet, I think all experts would bet on “it’s a draw”, but some experts won’t be wanting to bet, even if they think that’s almost certain)
> if offered a quick draw, black will almost certainly take it
[citation needed], and 1200 elo games on lichess aren’t a valid citation
While Alpha Zero is good, this is not very good proof. Alpha Zero is not perfect, so if there are tiny ways to win that Alpha Zero misses, it will miss it on both sides (being the same engine), so would never explore that path.
It's like claiming inbreeding will result in perfection :)
Can you cite this?
I can't see anything on this.
It's not something a chess champion would know on their own for instance.
Basically you have to get a good understanding that the advantage of being white can't be leveraged enough to win.
Obviously it can't be proved, but to even get an idea will be very mathematical or computational.
If you hang with the right crowds (for example people into software correctness), PSPACE completeness is easy and you even solve undecidable problems every day.
It can simultaneously be true both that NP-hardness matters, and that constant-sized problems can be hard.
In other news, no point in needing pi, because perfect circles dont actually exist in the real world.
Even 52! comes pretty close to it, and that’s just one deck of cards.
Saying there are merely “more” states is almost insulting to the depth of a chess game :)
70% draws is a very small number, really. Not conclusive at all.
> In fact they used to take 2 days for one game.
Come now. The WCC matches were entertaining to watch for chess enthusiasts. Even when games took two days, people would sit and analyze each position, and that was without computers.
They still do that, of course. Although chess computers have taken some of the fun out of the analysis, I've been to several live viewings of the recent WCCs at chess clubs and bars, where a local GM would sit and comment on the position and take questions and suggestions from the crowd.
But the WCC matches have become less entertaining for chess enthusiasts, since there is so much defensive play. There isn't too much to analyze in yet another Berlin game.
It's entertaining when someone makes a horrible blunder, but not in the same way – there's little to analyze in a position that's blundered.
So I'd argue the classical WCC used to be entertaining to watch live for chess enthusiasts, but now they're less entertaining for chess enthusiasts. For "regular people", they've never been very entertaining, except when there's a spectacular blunder, which has never been very entertaining for chess enthusiasts.
True, but that doesn't mean that you can't treat chess like other sports and try to incentivize wins - for example giving win/loss/draw a 3:1:0 point ratio. The world championship is not a good format to decide "who's the best at chess", and anyway we already know who that is right now. Might as well treat it as a spectator sport and add some drama in my opinion.
1. Classical game, win = 5 points.
2. Rapid game, win = 2 points
3. Blitz game, win = 1 point.
4. Armageddon game, win = 0.5 points.
This point layout might backfire and make the classical games even less interesting because the huge edge for winning is probably going to motivate extreme do-not-lose style play, which trends towards draws. But, nonetheless, wins in classical should be weighted well above the tie-breaks.
The easiest way to illustrate this is with openings, though it applies throughout the game in different ways. Against e4 the Najdorf defense was once the opening of champions, being a major part of the repertoire of players like Kasparov and Fischer. In modern times it's an increasingly rare guest at the highest level. It's not because it's considered unsound or even slightly dubious - it's a rock solid opening that gives black real winning chances. But the problem is it also gives him real losing chances. It's complex, difficult to play, and if you get outprepared by your opponent you may lose without him even having to make a single move himself, which is really one of the worst feelings in the world.
So instead the meta has largely shifted to openings that are more about minimizing risk where black, more or less, aims for a draw - and usually gets it. Changing the risk:reward ratios in a sufficiently extreme way is most certainly capable of changing the meta.
I am not good at chess but would it help if win as black was rewarded more than win as white?
One tie break system, armageddon, does break the symmetry by giving black draw odds (he wins if the game is drawn) but less time in a blitz game. But it's very poorly regarded and generally only used as a this-game-MUST-have-a-decisive-result last resort.
Even the best human players are nowhere near perfect play.
Chess engines have proven that even players that are 1000 Elo stronger than the best players alive today can lose. Just look at how each new version of Stockfish absolutely trounces the previous version.
Stockfish 7, released 6 years ago, is nearly 500 Elo weaker than the newest version, Stockfish 15.[0] That's the difference between Carlsen and the weakest grandmasters.
0. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/64992190/179047597...
Chess is only solved for positions with 7 pieces or less (and some configurations of 8 pieces [2]), so we're far from knowing best play from the 32-piece starting position.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang
[2] https://www.chess.com/blog/Rocky64/eight-piece-tablebases-a-...
White cannot have a tiny tiny edge against perfect play.
Either it is possible to force a win against perfect play, or it's not. So white is either winning or the game is a draw (or black is able to force a win against white's perfect play, but that's a whole different level of unlikely).
When talking about perfect play, terms like "tiny edge" lose their meaning.
However the consensus guess is that perfect play yields a draw.
Just like we can efficiently find approximate solutions for the traveling salesman problem (that are at most 50% longer than the optimal solution), these heuristics have not much to do with the optimal solution.
> I could imagine that a perfect play completely contradicts common chess theory.
So can anyone. Nobody knows what perfect chess play is. Our best guess though is that whatever your opponent plays you can always force a draw before they can win.
Unfortunately it leaves us in the position of not having much to go by, if expert experience doesn't help analyze the game.
I wonder how different a chess engine and optimal play look for the reduced sized boards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four#Mathematical_solu...
In general, there’s no guarantee of first mover’s advantage. For example, Hexapawn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexapawn) is a win for black on some boards (https://web.archive.org/web/20050330222720/http://www.chessv...). Versions that are more complex than chess and are a win for black may exist.
The scenario we're positing is that perhaps, in fully-solved chess, white is actually in zugzwang, where every initial move is actually bad for them.
If there were some way for white to hand the first move to black, then clearly this would be the best solution.
But all the take-back solutions (e.g. move the knight forward and back again) actually give black two moves, which is a different situation.
And the stutter-step solution of white moving a pawn only one space instead of two doesn't work because that's simply refuting the premise that white is in zugzwang.
Not always. Almost always.
Generating a full game tree would be a truly daunting undertaking, and I can't even fathom how much memory would it take.
So until proven otherwise it's still possible that its theoretical win for white, theoretical draw or theoretical win for black as i understand it.
Zugzwang means that you would be better off not moving any piece on your turn letting your opponent make two moves in a row. There are a number of endgames that depend on getting your opponent into a position where he has only one legal move and by making it you can then play the winning move. If your opponent could instead skip his turn you have no ability to win the game.
I would say no by contradiction. Let's assume black could win without zugzwang. Then white would win (and in particular not lose) by skipping the very first move and then playing blacks strategy (because now black has to make the first move and by white skipping the first move, the colors swapped).
If white would not skip the very first move and play an arbitrary move instead, white loses and black wins.
But this is the very definition of zugzwang! Thus, black can only win because of white's initial zugzwang, which contradicts our assumption.
> Then white would win (and in particular not lose) by skipping the very first move and then playing blacks strategy
I understand the other comment, that there do exist setups in which colors can be effectively switched by e.g. 1. e3 e5 2. e4, but that requires cooperation on black's part. How does white "skip" the first move? Thanks in advance.
Edit: it may be that the statement "without Zugzwang" implicitly (or perhaps by definition) means you are allowed to skip moves? If so, that clarifies my confusion.
When black has a winning strategy, black already applies "zugzwang" for white's very first move: Black only wins because white has to make a move. If white could skip, black would not win.
> Edit: it may be that the statement "without Zugzwang" implicitly (or perhaps by definition) means you are allowed to skip moves?
Yes. It's not well defined, but I'd say a non-zugzwang win is a win (or rather a winning position) where you would also win when your opponent can skip their turn. A zugzwang win is a win that is not a non-zugzwang win.
So chess being a win for one side is equivalent to starting position being zugzwang for the other side.
It's obvious now, but so interesting to me, I never thought about it that way! Thanks for taking time for explaining yourself.
1. e3 e5 2. e4 whatever
And you effectively have a king's pawn opening with colours reversed
Does this strategy necessarily leads to provably losing position?
Unlike tic-tac-toe we're not certain if it is a win or a draw for perfect players.
The chess analogue to this would be that there is a single opening move for white that a perfect player can guarantee a win from, or maybe a limited set of opening moves.
In fact, there is a variant of chess where this the case, namely "pawns-only chess", where 1.b4, 1.c4, 1.f4, and 1.g4 are winning for white, whereas all other first moves are a win for black with perfect play.
https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/8755/is-the-result...
All three formats are thriving with some superstars playing all three formats and official World Championships being played in all three formats
(For those who don’t know cricket: if your opponent is outscoring you heavily, there’s no way to win the game, but by playing defensively, there still is the possibility of “not losing” the game (called a draw. That’s different from a tie, where both teams score the same number of runs. Ties are extremely rare (about 1:1000 matches. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tied_Test), draws fairly common (about ⅓ of all test matches)). Part of the charm of test cricket is that trying harder to win a game also increases the risk of losing it, so teams have to make educated guesses as to whether to pursue that)
Not enough monetary incentive either, it doesn't pay as well as T20.
Second problem is bowling doesn't pay as well as batting. And that brings only batsmen centric view to the game, which is boring to watch after a while, even in T20.
This eventually happened in ODI's as well. It just all reduced to batsmen playing purely for records. Competition dried out.
T20 suffers from the same problems, and is a big reason why people are so burned out. I have barely watched any cricket in years.
In matches where is there is a good pitch, and something for the bowlers, the test matches are super interesting to watch.
That entails analyzing all of their games and finding defenses and weaknesses. But also trying to find new novelties in the openings etc. And since the opponent will do the same, you yourself have to prepare defenses for lots of potential new openings 16 moves deep or so. It's an insane amount of studying.
Of course, that pays off for future games outside the match as well. But when you know your challenger will spend half a year on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to beat you, you probably have to do the same. So have to say no to everything else.
Remember for the best players in the world chess is their full time job. They spend 12 hours a day on the game. They are earning enough from tournaments to support life.
This of course gets unwieldy very fast. 16^5 is already over a million different games.
Though, like you said, the vast majority of those moves will be somewhat nonsensical though.
This is balanced by the fact that the sheer number of possible lines is huge. Too big for any human to "remember" them all.
It's also not enough to memorize "good" moves from an engine perspective. "Good" engine moves and "good" human moves are different things.
An engine might see a move as "good", because it calculated 50 moves down the line and found an advantage. This means that you'd have to play the next 49 moves in a very precise manner to reach this advantage. One way to think about it, is that there are multiple positions that are analyzed as "draw" by en engine, but 9 grandmasters out of 10 will see one side winning. That's because one side would need to play perfectly, while the other side has much higher tolerance for mistakes (engine assume perfect play on both sides).
TLDR: engine is fair game, during preparation. It's a big deal, it transformed high level chess, but it didn't break the game, and is unlikely to do so.
They need hundreds such ideas for a match.
The ideal at top level is to get to move 20 or so with a slightly better position, essentially all of your time (because you've been playing memorized moves), and your opponent already having used most of their time.
Yes. Their upcoming opponent's past games (including analyzing them for strengths and weaknesses), and engine lines mostly.
It sounded sort of like a side mind game that Carlsen plays on his opponents. It made it clear that Carlsen really studies his opponents and not just their past games.
These changes increase the stakes, incentivize offensive chess, allow the sitting WC to play all the best players rather than one, reduces the time commitment to a single event for the challengers, and allows the WC to partake in the most prestigious tournament.
Is it because its stressful, and demands too much work and prep from participants.
Just asking as competitive sport at the top level be it chess, football, or even swimming for that matter demands lots of work and a kind of work ethic not easy for most of us.
The Candidates tournament has some seemingly arbitrary qualifications that players must meet, and you could argue that the format doesn't necessarily produce the strongest player to challenge the world champion.
The World Championship match itself is problematic because it gives the defending champion a fairly huge advantage, in that they retain the title if they can draw out the match, although more recently it goes to rapid chess tie breaker rounds. So in practice the Championship is decided by these tie breaker rounds, which doesn't really seem appropriate.
Given the prep time players have and the engines available, players go into these matches extremely well prepared and draws over the board are quite a typical outcome unless someone makes a mistake.
I believe Magnus wants the Championship to become a knockout tournament to reduce the advantage that so much prep time can give. There is a big difference between prepping for a field of 12 players versus prepping for a single opponent.
This has not been the case for quite a while. All of Carlsen's matches (Anand, Anand, Karjakjn, Caruana, Nepomniatchchi) had tie breakers in the format, to determine a guaranteed clear winner. The Karjakin and Caruana matches were decided in this way.
An athlete can spend all day in the gym and then grab a shower and roll into bed. They may be sore as hell from head to toe but they will be so exhausted they can just pass out and get a great night's sleep. They also get the benefit of endorphins which make them feel good and rewarded for doing their exercise.
On the other hand, a chess player spending all day going over variations and practicing is going to have a difficult time sleeping with all of those lines and positions flying around in their head. They will be mentally exhausted but still active and alert. It is an absolutely miserable experience. So to prevent it you need to cut back on the hours which means spreading out the preparation over many days/weeks/months. It can also get very boring because you don't get the same rewards you get from playing and winning games. The only reward comes when you finally get to the WC match and then you actually have to win or it's utterly heartbreaking.
This is time that could be spent playing tournaments.
This would be okay if the world championships was every four years, but it's every two, so a large fraction of Carlsen's time is spent preparing for this one match that everybody knows he's going to win anyway.
It's similar to the way that many professional teams are reluctant to allow their players to play in the Olympics (in e.g. Basketball, Ice Hockey, and Olympic Football is completely neutered). Carlsen clearly feels that the World Championship is not important enough to sacrifice a large chunk of his career for.
Which other tournaments are considered like the top levels of Chess competition, and what are the criteria for being the top chess player in the world(If not winning the world championship)?
And Carlsen absolutely dominates the others, and have been the top rated player continuously for a decade. So no questions about who is the best, WC title or not.
Carlsen is right now 98 points above Nepo, the challenger, which is an insane difference.
The problem is that the world champion is out of play for 6 months out of every two years, preparing for just one game.
It's boring for him as well as the fans to spend that much time in isolation just trying to memorize everything about one particular opponent.
It would be better to have him out and about playing tournaments and beating lots of different opponents.
That way the match is the same but the half year of prep is gone.
If Magnus doesn't want to play this sport anymore, it's his decision, and totaly understandable. But don't try to change like a century of tradition (much like the rules of chess).
EDIT: fix typo
> when [Carlsen] first did he almost didn't win it to be allowed to play the WC match.
These complaints are in opposition to each other! You can have an open process which gives an outsider a chance to qualify, or you can teleport the incumbent best player straight to the final, but you can't have both.
The current Candidates structure balances it pretty well, in my view. Most of the 10 players who have a realistic chance in a match reach the final 8, but it often features one great-but-not-elite grandmaster who had a good tournament, and it's theoretically open to even the worst amateur who shows up to his Continental Championship and performs well in that followed by the World Cup.
Economically speaking, that won't be enough time for advertising, setting the venue or getting sponsor up either. It matters who plays in the WCC match before you can do either of those things. We still don't know when or where the match for this cycle will happen even now.
Most rounds would finish in around 2 hours, just like several e-sports games. Have 2 rounds a day and finish it in 8 rounds. With a more e-sport like approach, chess could bring in even more viewers and hence more sponsorships.
The format has been changing way too often, if anything.
> 12 matches is long (edit, 14 now), but no one dares to take any risks.
Not really: 12 or even 14 games is short, which is exactly why players aren't particularly willing to take risks - short format makes it hard to catch up should they fall behind. The format used to be 24 games in Kasparov times, and some WC matches were decided by the "first to X wins" rule, which could last very long, given that draws wouldn't push things forward (and for example Alekhine beated Capablanca after 34 games).
> And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting him again isn't that exciting.
It wasn't such a steamroll, the score doesn't tell a full story. Nepo's play quality was excellent and he arguably had more winning chances throughout the first half of the match. His first loss was in the longest WC game ever played (136 moves, and theoretically drawish almost until the very end when Nepo finally slipped). He collapsed psychologically right after, starting to make errors that - in his own words - were "simple things you would never overlook in a blitz game".
In part due to that gruelling, exhausting loss, for sure, but some have theorized he may also have folded due to realizing how many good chances he had missed before that.
GM Sam Shankland (US champion of 2018, for those not up to date with the who-is-who of chess world) went as far as to say Ian was two different players in the match: Nepo A and Nepo B.
Subverting people's expectations, Nepo won the Candidates now so convincingly (some suspected he might not recover, and certainly not to such an extent) that I see no reason why one would expect a landslide Carlsen's victory in the upcoming match.
Especially since there's an enormous difference between having NEVER played a WC match (which was Ian's situation the last time), and having already played one.
To quote Kramnik reminiscing on his first WC match: "it was still a very unfamiliar situation, like playing all your life for Lokomotiv and then coming out to play for Real Madrid in the final of the Champions League. Of course, you have to get used to the new situation, kick the ball a couple of times so they don't laugh at you."
> Even Carlsen didn't like the format
Yeah, well - he didn't like it, isn't that a bummer :) But come on, it's not like Carlsen has no say in the matter of the format, especially now that he already is a 5x world champion. He could have negotiated a different one with FIDE - or at least try. Obviously it's too late for that once the challenger has already been revealed, the time for that was before the cycle started. The format isn't set in stone though, far from it, and the #1 player, the reigning WC, has a lot of weight to throw around.
Carlsen may have not liked the format from an objective point of view, but the format was certainly very convenient for him. He excels in rapid chess, so if his winning chances are, say, around 80% in the classical portion of the match, they probably reach something like 95% once it comes to rapid tiebreaks. And the shorter the format, the larger the likelihood of getting to the tiebreaks.
> I wonder how this will affect the status of the title, when it's in practice is now a title-fight between the second best players.
This isn't something new. Kasparov was still the world's #1 for years after he lost the title to Kramnik. (He had actually hoped for a rematch, but they couldn't work the conditions out, and since age was catching up with him, he finally retired.)
They have also become less entertaining. 12 matches is long (edit, 14 now), but no one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive and all games ended in a draw. Karjakin they both at least won each their game, but still had to go to rapid tie-breaks. And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting him again isn't that exciting.
It's also almost impossible for a new person to get a chance. Even Carlsen didn't like the format and didn't participate in the Candidates for a few years, and when he first did he almost didn't win it to be allowed to play the WC match. Even though he clearly was the best player at the time.
I wonder how this will affect the status of the title, when it's in practice is now a title-fight between the second best players.
Also what will happen to the hype in Norway? Each WC match has so far been live streamed on all big news pages, biggest TV channels etc. It will still be a Christmas tradition to watch the rapid WC tournament I guess, but I'm afraid this will lead to less coverage. But just to tell how big Carlsen is in Norway: This is the top news on all outlets at the moment.