Richard Bates wrote: ↑Thu Nov 29, 2018 1:30 pm
Alex Holowczak wrote: ↑Thu Nov 29, 2018 10:20 am
Christopher Kreuzer wrote: ↑Thu Nov 29, 2018 1:03 am
Does this inability to win two of those two matches without the need for a tie-break impact his overall legacy and place in the historical chess pantheon in any way?
In my mind it shows that chess has moved on significantly, and there are now a number of players capable of playing as well as the World Champion for a prolonged period of time, rather than the old days where over a match of this length, you could be reasonably sure the stronger player would outplay the weaker player. This is a reason why the format of the World Championship cycle is unsuitable in modern chess, in my opinion.
This smacks to me of misanalysing what has happened to support a conclusion you want to come to. For a start, close World Championship matches between closely match players is hardly a new thing. And often when the gaps in official ratings were far more than they are today. One could point to higher numbers of draws, but then there are also plenty of counter examples from the past. The difference was that matches required certain numbers of wins as well as being longer.
And let’s not forget, how easily Carlsen has won is not an issue, the fact is he has won every match.
We’ve just had a match where the two best players in the World (and most closely matched in history) have had an incredibly close match. If you believe in the accuracy of the rating system why would we expect anything else?
You want to replace it with a system where there is a high chance that neither player would even reach the final.
Lots to unpick here, but I think you're wrong for several reasons.
My points are that:
1. Objectively the players at the top are better than they were 20-30 years ago, and it is demonstrably true that the likelihood of a drawn game increases the higher the ratings of the players. Take the Women's World Championship Final in Khanty - four games but two decisive results; of course their ratings were of the order of 200 to 300 points lower.
2. The top 10 in the world are more closely matched now than they were in the Kasparov/Karpov eras, which again makes a draw a much more likely result in tournaments like this.
There's a difference between a close World Championship match where all games are drawn, and a close World Championship where there are decisive games. Changing the format doesn't increase the likelihood of decisive games (or at least, if it were a knockout, you would have more decisive games in the early rounds than the later rounds), but what it would do is reflect the fact that there are more players of a similar standard now than has been the case in the past.
In the Women's World Championship just completed; the Final pitted the #1 seed against the #3 seed. I proposed a format some way back where there wouldn't be a Final; it either ended based on the result of a Grand Prix, or the Candidates format was used for the Final. But in any case, so what? If the World #1 loses to the #64 seed in a 2-game match, does he or she deserve to be World Champion? If Magnus lost his protection to the World Championship match, if he could only finish 24th in the European Championship (and so failed to qualify for the World Cup), does he deserve to be World Champion?