NickFaulks wrote:Alex Holowczak wrote:
If he were, he'd want to change a lot of the governance of FIDE so that he had the freedom to do what he saw best, and I don't think a group of chessplayers would give him that freedom.
I don't understand that, how could he want more power than Kirsan has? Unless you think he might want to make the game more exciting by changing how the pieces move, for instance?
When he took over World Snooker, he tabled a motion that basically gave himself a 51% stake in the game. The players voted for it. I don't know what freedom this gives him in practice, but it meant that he had more freedom. Hearn now effectively owns World Snooker, and the only way to remove him from post is to buy him out, rather than vote him out. He set up the PDC from scratch.
Whatever power Kirsan has, I'm sure he'd quite like to not have to fight an expensive election campaign every four years.
Hearn has shown that he can introduce new events with new formats, while knowing what to leave alone. The World Snooker Championships are still in Sheffield (until 2015, anyway!), and the Final is still 35 frames over 4 sessions over 2 days. However, he's made lots of other changes designed to increase the number of tournaments, and attract a global audience to the game.
There are some problems with the events still: For example, the first round of the Indian Open was played in Doncaster - a place not noted for being in India. The tournament in India started from the second round onwards, and some of the 64 remaining players had to play Indian wildcards for sponsorship reasons. Just a necessary step for going where they want to go.
As a fan of snooker and darts, he mostly tinkers with event formats, rather than the Laws of the games. He also tries to make the game more of a show, with walk on music to get the crowd involved. You don't really need to get the crowd involved in chess, I suppose. On the other hand, the crowd at PDC darts events is loud, whereas they insist on near silence when the players are throwing at the BDO events. Then look at the health of the two organisations...