The End of a Classical World Championship?
Economist and retired (from chess) FM Tyler Cowen thinks that the classical format for the world championship is dying, and will be replaced by something else. "[T]he fundamental problem is that the players are too good and a very well played chess game is a clear draw.... On top of that the match format encourages risk-aversion and openings such as the Petroff for Black. There is too much advance openings preparation."
And yet, Nepo managed to lose four games, and had good winning chances in games 2, 5, and 6. The draw death of top-level chess is always exaggerated: there were plenty of decisive games in the FIDE Grand Swiss, and the World Cup, and the Candidates, for starters. Still, I get where he's coming from. It would be nice to have more spontaneity in the games, and it would also be nice to ban the Marshall, the Petroff, the Berlin, and the Italian Game with d3 for, say, the next 20 years. Here's another idea, meant more seriously than the openings ban: turn the world championship into a biathlon of sorts, with a classical portion and a rapid portion. (The qualifying events would have to have the same format, of course.) The classical portion should be substantive, but the rapid portion should be as well. Given the prevalence of rapid play nowadays, that is a major part of being a top professional, and evaluating who is the champion ought to take that into account.
No doubt there are other possibilities, and - for now, at least - there's little doubt that Carlsen would still be the favorite, maybe an even larger favorite, with the incorporation of a rapid element into the championship. One cautionary note: FIDE already has a rapid world championship, and it's also possible to find sponsors for any match one might like (Cowen is hungry for a Carlsen-Firouzja rapid match). Why kill off one of chess's greatest traditions, especially when 95% of what you want is already available without changing a thing? Traditions should be adaptable, but not eliminated without a very good reason.
Reader Comments (5)
Carlsen was asked this in the WC post 11 game press conference. And he said he's open to changes but he's not sure what those changes should be. In any event he seemed pretty opposed to doing something radical like fischer random.
In combat sports, audiences like knockouts rather than decisions, and the contests are designed to result in knockouts the great majority of time. The reason why knockouts occur isn't that someone found that punch out of nowhere in the last round; it's usually the result of a war of attrition in the preceding rounds. While this happens in long chess matches to some degree (witness Nepo), it doesn't happen that much because if a player has been up against the ropes for most of the game but manages to hold, the slate is wiped clean.
As a partial remedy to this, I wonder about making the time a player spends in one game impact the amount of time the player has in the next game, or better, the rest of the match. A huge number of variations are possible. It would make time management a much more significant sporting factor, add to the pressure on the players, and introduce a novel element of strategy, while staying within the broad remit of classical chess. A few random scenarios that came to me:
1. Carlsen smells a win in a complex technical ending, and decides to borrow against the time he has in subsequent games to prove it.
2. If the time control is say 40 moves in 120 minutes, and a player uses more than 110 minutes, they only get 110 minutes for the remainder of the games.
3. Nepo thinks he can play all his moves in 20 minutes, and hold most of the time. The result: Nepo is down 1 with two games to go, but Carlsen only has 20 minutes for 40 moves in those games, while Nepo has 120.
I usually dislike variants, but it's hard to see why stalemate needs to result in a draw other than historical reasons. The player who has no legal moves loses in other well-known versions of chess such as Xiangqi (Chinese Chess).
Also, draw by perpetual is not allowed in many variants as the perpetual attacker (check or otherwise) is obliged to cease.
Two simple changes would reduce drawing no end. No way the changes will get adopted though due to tradition. It would probably change chess too much.
My suggestion : do something similar to what they do in engine championships. Have a set of 1,000 pre-determined balanced opening positions (make the list public 3 months before the match) and draw one at random for every game. This way you reduce the impact of raw opening preparation and players may be tempted to push a little more when they get the kind of opening position they enjoy.
I think Greg Shahade had an interesting idea. He proposed to play rapids and blitz FIRST so that you would know ahead of time if you are going to lose the tie breaks and therefore can't bide your time.