Jonathan Bryant wrote:Lewis Martin wrote:If he wins then, Anand is World Champion again.
Only in the way that Karpov was World Champion in 1993, or Khalifman was World Champion whenever that was.
What a naive statement.
This is a completely different comparison.
As I am sure that you can recall, Short beat Karpov in the semi-final and then beat Timman in the final. So, in this instance, Short was regarded as the rightful challenger to the champion at the time, Kasparov, for the World Championship title.
After the split, it was Kasparov-Short and Karpov-Timman. So, it is no surprise people regard the Kasparov-Short match more of a World Championship match than the FIDE one, Karpov-Timman.
Eventually, in 1999, Karpov retired the title. I can't remember how Khalifman got the title, but he did so without challenging "the resident champion".
Here, we have Carlsen-Anand. Carlsen is the World Champion who has not yet confirmed his participation. That's entirely his choice. But what he cannot do is play a match against someone else and somehow claim that this should be the World Championship match, for him to be the World Champion. He could do it for money if he wanted to, but not to claim that he is World Champion, since he did not play Anand.
Anand is the rightful challenger. Why should Carlsen effectively exclude him to play in a different match? He qualified (and qualified convincingly) by rightful means for the title as stated for the 2014 Championship, unlike Karpov-Timman who lost their respective matches to Short.
As for Carlsen-Caruana: well, why should this be considered a World Championship match? If you say it is World Number 1 vs Number 2, then Aronian will be quite miffed since in terms of 2014, he has been number 2 far longer than Caruana. That is not how World Championship matches should be decided.
If you say, because Caruana won the strongest tournament ever, well, Anand did not play in it whether he was invited or not is irrelevant, then one could argue that this was not "advertised" as the Candidates tournament like the one in Khanty Mansiysk. In this sense why should he be excluded? How do we know that Anand would not have won this tournament if he participated?
Jonathan Bryant wrote:
I’m not saying that it’ll be a good thing. I can see the long term arguments against, I can see the short term benefits. I was more interested in peoples’ opinions of whether it was a possibility or not.
Bottom line: whatever you or I or anybody else thinks, if Carlsen wants to play Caruana and somebody wants to pay him to do so the match will happen and Carslen - Anand won’t.
In terms of likelihood of this happening, the fact that Carlsen - Anand II would be like Karpov - Korchnoi III certainly doesn’t reduce the odds.
It isn't a good thing. We don't need this mess. Granted, there needs to be a shock to the FIDE system to improve it, but this isn't the way to go about it.
You've heard my opinion above. Carlsen's match against Caruana won't be for the World Championship title. This will be more controversial than Kasparov-Short, if indeed Carlsen-Caruana is claimed by the players/organisers of the match to be the World Championship. (Ignoring Stan Vaughan of course.)