Anyone else missing the C/Anand and C/Karjakin matches?

[IM Jack Rudd]

I've been following this match all the way through, and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. Two top-class players playing very good chess; very little in the way of obvious mistakes; mostly very hard-fought games - today's was a somewhat curious exception.

[Paolo Casaschi]

Since when does entertainment matter?

Exactly my point. Caruana is a worthy challenger because he won the candidates, nothing more to be said. But the same applies to Anand and Karjakin.

However, when Anand and Karjakin qualified as challengers a number of people expressed disappointment, rather preferring the star of the moment (Aronian, Caruana, take your pick). This year instead Caruana was generally welcomed as a challenger with great expectations for the match.

My comment here is just to show the sillyness of the complains about the qualification of Anand and Karjakin as a challenger few years ago... you get the anointed star to the fight and still the fight is in many ways disappointing...

[Matt Mackenzie]

I don't recall many complaining about either qualifying to play Carlsen.

Karjakin got a bit of stick subsequently for what was widely seen as his "safety first" approach.

(again, my comments about "draw odds" for the champion might apply here)

[NickFaulks]

But not really a worse one, I'd say.

I still make Carlsen favourite, but not at anything like the odds quoted in the betting markets.

[Alex Holowczak]

Since when does entertainment matter?

Exactly my point.

For a few immediately obvious reasons - but apparently so obvious that they need saying.

Professional sports normally try to be as entertaining as possible so that people pay to come to watch them; they buy tickets, the players become more marketable, and the sponsors queue up, and so on. This isn't a new phenomenon - rugby league did that in 1880whateveritwas when they split from rugby union. They changed the rules to make it more entertaining, and indeed the NRL in Australia used the league rules rather than the union rules as a result. To some extent, if you start at Union and draw a line to get to League, if you carry on drawing the line you'll get to American Football, which is by far the most successful of the three similar games in terms of providing opportunities for players to be professionals.

From a strong amateur's perspective, normally a sport will want as much money at the top through professionalism to encourage strong amateurs and junior players to make the step up from being a strong amateur to a professional.

From a beginner's perspective (of any age), if the game is dull and uninteresting, why would you ever spend your time watching or playing it? To the non-chess community, 12 draws in a row is both unfathomable and a source of mockery. Of course we don't mind, because we're already involved in the game, but this World Championship so far won't have inspired too many beginners to take up the game. Usually big tournaments in a sport are used to provide inspiration to beginners.

So if a sport gets its professional set up right, then its amateur and grass roots base normally improve.

But you're probably right, the chess world doesn't care very much about entertainment. It does seem to care about why there are comparatively few sponsors willing to sponsor the game though, but as yet no one seems to have thought that a lack of entertainment might be a key component of that.

[Paolo Casaschi]

Interesting comments about the match from Maxime Vachier-Lagrave: http://www.mvlchess.com/2018/12/06/carlsen-caruana/

Worth reading the whole article; with respect to the topic of this thread, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave comments about the difficulties of Caruana in creating opening problems for his opponent, suggesting that Anand in 2013 and 2014 had been clearly more dangerous.