2018 World Championship in London

[Nick Grey]

Toss of a coin is a fair choice.

But at the end of the day you have to look to the agreement made by the organisers that have paid the highest price/bribe/sponsorship & selling of rights.

Now that England have got to a semi-final of a football tournament in June 2019 again some broadcasters are wanting to bid. Well done those that won the rights before the qualifiers started.

[Richard Bates]

Proposed format, venue issues not withstanding.

Match schedule 12-20 games.

1) Winner after 12 games assuming at least four wins
2) If 1) not met, first to four wins
3) Leader after 20 games declared victor
4) Level after 20 games = tiebreak

With potential tweaks to required wins and number of games.

[Alex Holowczak]

Proposed format, venue issues not withstanding.

Match schedule 12-20 games.

1) Winner after 12 games assuming at least four wins
2) If 1) not met, first to four wins
3) Leader after 20 games declared victor
4) Level after 20 games = tiebreak

With potential tweaks to required wins and number of games.

You are perhaps expecting this, but I think that's a poor idea. In general, I think the chess world needs to acknowledge that lengthening the format isn't the way to go if the aspiration is a wide audience, or the potential of getting the match more widely covered by television. But maybe that isn't the aspiration. Are there any sports that are trying to lengthen the formats, either of their games or the number of games they play in a match? More competitions and shorter formats seems to be what they're all doing. Why is that the wrong approach?

[Alex Holowczak]

Here's how I'd do it. It's radical and it departs from tradition, but I think it would be a much more modern, engaging and perhaps even TV-friendly format. So it'll never happen.

You run a series of events with 32 players. In year 1, let the 16 highest-rated players in to all events. The other 16 could be made up in different ways, my proposal would be the Continental Champions, maybe the World Junior Champion and then the rest from a qualifying event, held as an 11-round Open Swiss. The Open Swiss would charge an entry fee but have no prize money - the prize is qualification to the main events. This is a bit like qualifying schools in golf and tennis - the prize is the tour card. If people don't take the place up for some reason (e.g. injured playing football, can't get a visa), then you invite the next person in the qualifying school to make up the numbers to get to 32.

The events are 32-player Knockouts, with the top 16 players seeded and drawn against one of the other 16 players at random. They play best-of-2 throughout, with one game per day. Playoffs on day 3 if required. Rest days scheduled after the L16 and SF. So the tournament takes 17 days in total, which fits into a cycle of just over 2 weeks and 3 weekends. Award points depending on which round the players lose in, e.g. 1 for a L32 loser, 2 for a L16 loser, 4 for a QF loser, 8 for a SF loser, 12 for the runner up and 20 for the winner. Try to run 6 of these during the year if possible, in different countries around the world (ideally in different continents). At the end of the year, then either: 1. The player with the most points is the World Champion (as is common in motorsport, for example - no doubt other examples of the principle exist), or 2. The top 8 qualify for a Double Round Robin, a bit like the Candidates Tournament, and the winner is the World Champion. I'm not sure which of those two options I prefer.

Either way, the top 16 in the final standings after Year 1 qualify automatically for the series of events in Year 2. Everyone else has to win their place back either as the Continental Champion, World Junior Champion or via the qualifying school. So if you went for option 2 above, you could hold the qualifying school and the Final Tournament at the same time to save time in the calendar, since the same set of players wouldn't be involved.

The other good things about this would be that:
1. 3/4 of the players will be knocked out after 6 days, so it shouldn't be too tiring - unless you're winning lots of matches in all the tournaments, in which case the there's a good chance of you being rewarded by becoming World Champion.
2. You get a World Champion every year. Individual sports that have World Championships (or Grand Slams/Majors) seem to have ended up with the events being held annually rather than every two years, so I think chess should do that too.
3. In a year when the World Cup is due to happen, you can include that as a tour event, just with more points available, and seeding all 32 tour card holders with 96 qualifiers.
4. The format can be used for the women as well as the open title.
5. There's a natural excitement caused by the structure of the tournament at least every 3 days.
6. Chess starts to look like a proper sport at the top level where events have a purpose, rather than just a series of invitationals with no wider context for their existence.

[Nick Grey]

The only reasons these sports work are TV audiences in multi-millions & live audiences in 10s of 1,000s.
Chess will never obtain those audiences so you are being over-optimistic.
Live sport is never played in complete silence so I cannot see any natural excitement for a chess player in reading a set of results.

[JustinHorton]

Here's how I'd do it. It's radical and it departs from tradition

Also from practical likelihood and the clearly expressed desires of players and fans, but whatever

[JustinHorton]

Anyway, did anybody go yesterday and come across these villains?

[Alex Holowczak]

The only reasons these sports work are TV audiences in multi-millions & live audiences in 10s of 1,000s.
Chess will never obtain those audiences so you are being over-optimistic.
Live sport is never played in complete silence so I cannot see any natural excitement for a chess player in reading a set of results.

The overcrowding at the College shows that people are willing to turn up to watch. The Chess24 streams are regularly getting 20-30,000 views. I don't know how many are watching on Norwegian TV.

Here's how I'd do it. It's radical and it departs from tradition

Also from practical likelihood and the clearly expressed desires of players and fans, but whatever

The clearly expressed desires of fans seem to be for a longer match. I don't think that would solve the problem that people have expressed with this match. The fans seem desperate for the tournament to be run in the same way the World Championships were run in the 1970s; which was old-fashioned compared to a number of sports' formats for their tournaments even then. Unfortunately, the world has moved on - the chess community doesn't seem to have noticed.

The players' main interests would normally be money in a sporting context, and one assumes it would be in chess. If there was a prize fund increase for a large number of players as a result of a new format, whatever the format settled on was, then you may suddenly find that any objections don't materialise.

[JustinHorton]

So you might find the same for a 16-game match of course, but hey.

[Mick Norris]

The Chess24 streams are regularly getting 20-30,000 views. I don't know how many are watching on Norwegian TV.

The answer is lots, as per NY times (not necessarily a beacon of factual accuracy)

Almost everyone in Norway has some relationship to chess nowadays. It’s on T.V. and in newspapers all the time

In a country of around five million people, close to half a million play chess regularly online, according to the Norwegian Chess Federation

I think per capita Norway is now the most chess crazy country in the world

which is a bit weird given there are 600m worldwide

[Mick Norris]

So you might find the same for a 16-game match of course, but hey.

A compromise would be that only 6-6 goes to more games, i.e. another pair of games then only 7-7 goes to faster tiebreaks (or 8-8 if you add in another pair); you might even say first win after 6-6 settles it

[David Sedgwick]

Anyway, did anybody go yesterday and come across these villains?

I imagine that that photograph was taken in the VIP area, which is out of bounds to those paying £70 for a ticket.

I was there on Monday for Game 8 and I saw two of the people in the photograph. I haven't seen the person in the middle since he came to the Candidates Tournament in London in 2013.

[Geoff Chandler]

Hi,

Think the current format 12 games all over in 3 weeks with exact start and finish date
very attractive to potential sponsors and the media.
Do not like rapid/Blitz so champion has draw odds.

Or

Cancel candidates. Make that the World Championship. Qualify as normal except
the current Champ does not have to qualify, he gets that daft 'wild card' spot.
In event of tie for first place use any method that guarantees a winner except rapid/blitz
but if current champion one of those tied on pts. for first place , he (or she) retains the title.

[Brian Towers]

The only reasons these sports work are TV audiences in multi-millions & live audiences in 10s of 1,000s.
Chess will never obtain those audiences so you are being over-optimistic.
Live sport is never played in complete silence so I cannot see any natural excitement for a chess player in reading a set of results.

These are good points. If you want the success of major sports like football or boxing then I think you need to go for what I call the "Muenchener Freiheit" model for world championship matches.

Next to Muenchener Freiheit UBahn station in Munich there are several large outdoor chess sets which attract players and large numbers of spectators in all weathers (except possibly hot sunny summer weather when the FKK areas of the Englischer Garten are perhaps more attractive). The crowd is definitely noisy and often at least slightly drunk - beer is regarded as "food" in Bavaria.

For the next world championship the matches should be played on one of these sets in a large boxing arena. Beer should be on sale and the players should be exposed to the crowd, if not the elements. A ticket gets you a seat in the arena for the whole game and fans should also be able to watch live on pay-for-view television. Mobiles and laptops banned in the crowd, GMs banned from the front two rows of seats, but if IMs like Basman want to buy a front row seat from which to scream "g4!, g4!" at the players then they should be encouraged. The players are banned from wearing earplugs or anything which reduces the noise levels for them and, of course, encouraged to have a beer or two.

[Paul Cooksey]

The clearly expressed desires of fans seem to be for a longer match. I don't think that would solve the problem that people have expressed with this match. The fans seem desperate for the tournament to be run in the same way the World Championships were run in the 1970s; which was old-fashioned compared to a number of sports' formats for their tournaments even then. Unfortunately, the world has moved on - the chess community doesn't seem to have noticed.

The players' main interests would normally be money in a sporting context, and one assumes it would be in chess. If there was a prize fund increase for a large number of players as a result of a new format, whatever the format settled on was, then you may suddenly find that any objections don't materialise.

I'm going to criticise this with the harshest criticism I can think of... Alex should apply for a job at AGON

The causality between formats and mass audiences is not proven, and in my opinion these assumptions most likely wrong. The difference between chess and popular televised sports is not the format of the matches. It is that chess is not a visual spectacle easily understood by most people. From a TV viewing figures point of view the problem is the game not the format. Unless you believe the 600 million number is a potential TV audience.

I'm one of what could be an assumed x hundreds million Monopoly players, in the sense I have set and might have a game at Christmas. The idea I might buy a premium TV subscription to watch professional monopoly if someone thinks up an exciting format is ludicrous. Non-chess players and casual players think about chess the way I think about monopoly.

What chess has is strong appeal to a small audience, who are willing to subscribe to chess24, pay for premium tickets, etc. I'd rather celebrate chess as the best game in the world and try to grow from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Chess.com really impress me as innovators. But I think the people like AGON trying to transform chess into a fourth rate spectator sport are fantasists not innovators.