13 ms·

The World Chess Championship is an anachronism

118 points by ssclafani 13y ago

Matetricks 13y ago
I agree that the World Championship is rather arbitrary nowadays, but we already have the tournaments for a "Chess Grand Slam." Dortmund, Linares, Tata Steel, and the Tal Memorial are known as the strongest four tournaments during the year, aside from Candidates. These could serve as the benchmark for what the author is suggesting, but large tournaments aren't the answer to everything. There is certainly a difference between match play and tournament play - personally, I feel that the World Championship should still be decided by a one vs. one match. Carlsen has demonstrated his dominance in tournament play and is clearly the favorite, but Anand's match experience allows for a competitive dynamic. Of course, the entire system is a bit unfair and convoluted. Recall the whole World Chess Federation business from the 90s and the Offical vs. Unofficial World Championship nonsense. Carlsen abstained from the 2011-2012 cycle because of his dissatisfaction with the extant process. Nevertheless, I feel that this title is a bit too harsh. I'm supportive of a balance between larger tournaments and a bracket-style approach to decide on a world champion, not abolishing the title altogether.
hsmyers 13y ago
Anybody know if the sports writer is a rated chess player? While I don't particularly agree with the article it is at least interesting. From my perspective, the world championship is somewhat like the superbowl---if I like the opponents, I pay attention; else not. Should it be fixed? I think it better to spend time 'fixing' FIDE first, then returning to the layered approach of some decades back. Most of what many rated players that I talk/play with think the obvious corruption and manipulation need to go, but many point out that the bent politics is a tradition in of itself :)
- binarymax 13y ago
  Clicking on the author's name: Matt Gaffney got his National Master title from the U.S. Chess Federation in 1991. He wrote Slate’s political crossword from 1999 to 2003 and now writes a similar puzzle for The Week. He blogs about crossword puzzles at www.gaffneyoncrosswords.com.
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  Yes, he is a rated master, although idle from tournament chess since '95: http://www.uschess.org/assets/msa_joomla/MbrDtlMain.php?12495178 http://www.uschess.org/assets/msa_joomla/MbrDtlMain.php?1249...
no_wave 13y ago
If you care about which chess player has the best stats, look it up. Sports competitions have never been about who the best team is - it's about who wins. This is why it's fun.
- srin 13y ago
  Good point. Does the world champion also have to play through the rounds up to the final match? That could help, having to go through the round of 8/16, so the championship match doesn't end up being the best vs someone who was the best a while ago. Then it'd always be a fun match between the two top. Not to mention drawing to keep your title doesn't seem fun
  - rmrfrmrf 13y ago
    No; the defending champion automatically plays in the World Chess Championship. The problem with the champion playing in the candidates matches is that the champion and the candidate will play each other before the championship title match, which kind of kills the hype. Chess is more about the games than the outcomes. While drawing to keep your title doesn't seem fun from a statistical standpoint, the draws, in this case, are often hard-won. Even more interesting is that one of the reasons that Carlsen has progressed so amazingly is that he has been known to play on in positions where most grandmasters would agree to a draw.
- pasquinelli 13y ago
  totally agree. it's the chance that the weaker player might win (or the stronger one lose, depending on your point of view) that makes people pay attention. it's what actually happens that counts, not what's statistically likely to happen.
jules 13y ago
An interesting tidbit is that while the difference in rating between Carlsen and Anand is 95 points, the difference between Carlsen and Houdini 3 is 376 points.
- gautamnarula 13y ago
  Another interesting tidbit is that the difference in rating between the top ranked player (Carlsen) and the World Champion (Anand) is the largest since Spassky-Fischer in 1972, when Champion Spassky was rated 2660 and Fischer was rated 2785--a 125 point difference!
  - asdfologist 13y ago
    At least some (if not all) of that can be explained by rating inflation. The same gap in ability translates to many more points today than 40 years ago.
    - billforsternz 13y ago
      >The same gap in ability translates to many more points today than 40 years ago Not really. Ratings inflation means you can't compare the absolute values, but is much less noticeable on ratings differences. So 2660 + 4.7% = 2785 (125 points) in 1972. The equivalent today would be something like; 2750 + 4.7% = 2879 (129 points) The same gap in ability translates to only 4 more points. Actually even that modest difference should not arise from ratings inflation. That is because the Elo system is based on the idea that a given "gap in ability" is supposed to yield a constant Elo delta. An Elo delta of 100 points is supposed to translate to a 64% score for the stronger player, a delta of 200 points to 76% etc.
      - asdfologist 13y ago
        Interesting, that sounds reasonable, but two questions: 1. Is it certain that rating inflation is linear? 2. Is there actually any evidence that the constant Elo delta property actually holds even with inflation? It's well known that Elo is flawed, which is why people have been working on alternate rating systems...
Someone 13y ago
By the same token, we should scrap most of the Olympics. For example, why run a marathon there? We already know who is fastest in a year, and we do have a series of grand slam events (http://worldmarathonmajors.com/US/ http://worldmarathonmajors.com/US/) However the Olympic marathon is special because it is completely different. In most other marathons, runners care more about their time than about winning, because it determines whether/how much they get paid to run other marathons. In the Olympics, on the other hand, nobody cares about times. Similarly, the classical one on one match for the world championship in chess is different from tournament play. In the former, you have to beat the strongest player in the world; in the latter, you have to beat the weaker players or top players with an off day and prevent getting beaten on your off day or by stronger players. It's the same in soccer. There, there are both national competitions where consistently beating weaker teams is the way to win and national knock out tournaments where one has to beat the best team to win. And yes, knock out tournaments are more likely to have the weaker team win, but that can make them more attractive, as determining the strongest player may take a long time (for an example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1984 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1984) IMO, the 'only' problem with the chess world championship is that the organization is a shambles. Fix that, and nobody will complain that the knock out tournament is different from regular tournaments.
- gautamnarula 13y ago
  In this scenario, chess's biggest advantage is it has an extensive, well developed rating system--Elo[1]. The tennis example given in the article isn't a good one, because the point system used to determine rankings is somewhat arbitrary. I wrote about this a little more in depth [2] while I was developing a free android app to bring elo ratings to any multiplayer game [3]. If we are going to stick with the title of World Champion, I believe the best way to go about it is an annual double round robin tournament featuring the 10 highest rated players. Each player plays every other player twice, once with black, once with white, and the player with the most points (win = 1 point, draw = .5 points, loss = 0 points) wins. The problem with having candidates matches--or really any qualifying tournaments--is that it heavily favors the current champion. Even a player as strong as Carlsen probably has a < 50% chance of winning a tournament(s)/series of matches against other top ranked players. This means that the top rated player may have a cumulative probability of <10% of gaining the title, while the current champion, even if ranked eighth like Anand currently is, could have a 40-50% chance of retaining the title. This is why the title of World Champion should be based off a round robin tournament of all the top players. Chess already has a robust, accurate, and thoroughly tested and revised rating system. We ought to make more use of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating [2] http://www.gautamnarula.com/rating/ http://www.gautamnarula.com/rating/ [3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Centaurii.app.RatingCalculator https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Centaurii.... Edit: Another problem with matches, as opposed to tournaments, is that transitivity doesn't exist in chess (as I've learned in my years of competitive play). If A regularly beats B, and B regularly beats C, it does not mean that A will regularly beat C. This is where matches are flawed--one player could have a particular weakness against the other and lose a match to him, while still being the strongest player in the world, as measured by his results against all the other top players (which is what the elo rating does).
auctiontheory 13y ago
The World Chess Championship, like all other competitive sports and games, provides entertainment - it doesn't feed people, cure cancer, etc. Gaffney's argument is logical, but for that matter, abolishing competitive chess would be just as logical - or illogical. Weird to see this on a mainstream site like slate.com. The world title is merely one symptom of the professional chess world's many problems.
billforsternz 13y ago
The World Chess Championship has been through difficult times in recent decades, often due to bizarre decision making by an ineffective governing organisation. However there are good signs that stability and coherence is returning, it's on an upswing. Anand has been a great World Champion, winning many brilliant games in his defences against worthy opposition. Carlsen-Anand has captured the imagination of chess players around the world to a much greater extent than any recent tournament, no matter how prestigious. Oh except maybe for the Candidates tournament - which gained it's outscale gravitas because it was a step towards the throne. The World Championship of Chess has tradition, gravitas, drama. Statistically speaking the strongest World Champion has not always been the strongest player at any given point. But so what; Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik .... Anand, [Carlsen?]. These players have ascended the pantheon and achieved a kind of immortality. They're all worthy. Don't you dare tell me that Petrosian isn't (see original article). I'd hate to interfere with a tradition like that. (Note: yes I am flushing the period between Kramnik and Anand as a sad anachronism).
robomartin 13y ago
Chess stopped being interesting to me a long time ago, when I realized the only way to be a competitive player was to become a human database. If you don't devote significant effort to massive amounts of memorization there is no way you will be able to compete. The magic of the game to me is/was in working hard to figure out how to out-think, out-strategize and even trick your opponent. And, yes, that still exists. World Chess championships are not robotic regurgitations of prior games. Some aspects of them might be, but there's plenty of hard thinking applied as well. All I am saying is that you reach a level beyond which the only way to progress is to become a database and that's simply not interesting to me. I also happen to think it is an absolute waste of time unless you happen to be particularly gifted at chess and have aspirations on the world stage. This is the reason I don't encourage my kids to continue playing competitive chess beyond a certain stage. One of my kids was killing it in local competitions all the way up to the stage where kids started to become walking databases. I wasn't going to do that to my son. There are better things to focus on in life. The other realization was that getting better at playing chess didn't make you better at everything else. It is a fallacy to think that because someone is amazing at chess they have superior reasoning abilities in other domains. That is rarely the case. There are early to mid-stage cognitive gains to be had from learning and playing chess. Beyond a certain point getting better at chess simply means you got better at chess and nothing else.
- lowkeykiwi 13y ago
  Wouldn't overspecialization be common with most pro sports? Playing sports is great but becoming a swimming world champion, for example, is just hours every day of swimming. Hardly world-changing or helpful outside the pool.
  - taeric 13y ago
    I believe the contention focuses on the difference in how you play against an opponent. In chess, by this contention, ultimately what your opponent is doing has little bearing on what you do. There is a "correct" response to every board position. Now, I think this is accurate for essentially single player sports. Golf and the like. Many competitive sports, however, you have to adjust what you are doing based on what your opponent is doing. Not just in a "correct" way, but to account for changing circumstances.
lowkeykiwi 13y ago
Considering that Pentagram recently bought World Chess and their World Chess Championships it looks like there'll be changes made in the running of world chess but not sure if they'll do away with the World Champs. http://www.designweek.co.uk/news/pentagram-brings-chess-into-a-new-era/3035344.article http://www.designweek.co.uk/news/pentagram-brings-chess-into...
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  omg you just reminded me of how beautiful the Staunton set that Pentagram designed is drool.
adamconroy 13y ago
I think the fact it is an anachronism is what makes it worth continuing. It has a history. There is a lineage stretching back to the 1800's. It is a significant thing to beat the current champion, who beat the previous champion etc. And the process of selecting the candidate to challenge the champion hasn't always been perfect, but in general it is pretty good and fair. And regardless of ratings / performance etc, the World Champion is a match play champion. Elo is a very objective way of deciding who is generally the strongest player, and that is published and acknowledged. There is on and off : a world knockout champion, a world blitz champion, a world rapid play champion. So loads of other different scenarios are taken care of, so why not preserve the match play champion lineage. Basically, this article is link bait.
jonnathanson 13y ago
The idea of a "World Champion" doesn't make sense in boxing, either. It doesn't make sense in most professional sports, in which "championship" status is essentially the result of a random walk through a succession of games or matches over a given timeframe. But fans prefer randomness. Fans like upsets, underdogs, unexpected outcomes, turnaround stories, and changing fortunes. Fans would hate long-term statistical regressions across N population of teams or athletes. A lot of sports need champions. More accurately, they need the idea of champions. Fans and enthusiasts have an intrinsic desire to know where everyone stands. Competitors need something to strive for. And that something has to be in constant contention. Someone has to occupy the throne, but his seat needs to be sufficiently precarious. Chess has swung in and out of the public eye over the decades, but by and large, it's occupied the fringes of pop-cultural obscurity. Take away the Garry Kasparovs, Bobby Fischers, and Anatoly Karpovs of the game -- or rather, the idea of these people as "champions" -- and chess would be even more obscure in the public eye than it is today. Chess, to put it bluntly, has never had a great PR plan. The championships, flawed though they might be, are the fraying threads tenuously holding the game above the abyss of public irrelevance. Chess insiders need the wonkiness of Elo ratings and normative comparisons. But outsiders and casual fans need the romance. Chess needs to strike a balance between these two groups and their oppositional desires. The point of the "world championship" in any sport or game isn't actually to determine who's the best. It's to determine who's currently on top over X timeframe (by a mostly arbitrary arrangement of circumstances and outcomes). Fans won't articulate it as such, but that's what they like about championships. Championships satisfy the human desire for narrative.
- jrpt 13y ago
  The author is suggesting scraping the world championship in favor of a golf or tennis-like grand slam: have four major tournaments per year. These tournaments would still have champions, upsets, underdogs, and narratives to them. It works well enough in golf and tennis. There's the Wijk aan Zee tournament every year which should be on the list. It's up for debate what the others would be. I like the suggestion personally and hope to see it happen. This is coming from a chess player and fan. Also, up until recently, you used to be able to find chess columns and puzzles in the newspapers. Nowadays they've been cut or replaced by sudoku. But for a long time that was excellent PR. I don't think it's fair to say chess never had great PR, since even in the US it used to be in the newspapers regularly. And it's still popular in Europe.
iends 13y ago
I'm surprised the guy writing this is a US national master, he should know better. 1) There is a huge difference in winning a round robin tournament vs. a head to head match in chess. The psychology is completely different. Anand has played in many matches, so he knows what to expect. Carlsen not so much. Carsen is also playing in Anand's native India. 2) The author puts too much stock in chess ratings as the absolute measure in chess ability. Elo has its own set of issues (e.g. rating inflation over time). 3) The author also fails to point out why Magnus rating is so much greater than Anand's. Anand simply has less incentive to play in open tournaments knowing he is going have to defend his title in a years time for a big cash payout. Throughout the course of studying he finds novelties (moves that have not been played/analyzed before, but he thinks are solid moves) and he does not want to tip his hand (preferring to have his opponent try and figure out the continuation over the board instead of with the help of a computer.) The result? He plays in just enough tournaments to stay sharp and in those tournaments he plays safe chess. 4) There is already a Grand Slam system in chess.
toolslive 13y ago
small note on the article: tennis does have a world champion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITF_World_Champions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITF_World_Champions

118 points by ssclafani 13y ago

I agree that the World Championship is rather arbitrary nowadays, but we already have the tournaments for a "Chess Grand Slam." Dortmund, Linares, Tata Steel, and the Tal Memorial are known as the strongest four tournaments during the year, aside from Candidates. These could serve as the benchmark for what the author is suggesting, but large tournaments aren't the answer to everything. There is certainly a difference between match play and tournament play - personally, I feel that the World Championship should still be decided by a one vs. one match. Carlsen has demonstrated his dominance in tournament play and is clearly the favorite, but Anand's match experience allows for a competitive dynamic. Of course, the entire system is a bit unfair and convoluted. Recall the whole World Chess Federation business from the 90s and the Offical vs. Unofficial World Championship nonsense. Carlsen abstained from the 2011-2012 cycle because of his dissatisfaction with the extant process. Nevertheless, I feel that this title is a bit too harsh. I'm supportive of a balance between larger tournaments and a bracket-style approach to decide on a world champion, not abolishing the title altogether.

hsmyers 13y ago

Anybody know if the sports writer is a rated chess player? While I don't particularly agree with the article it is at least interesting. From my perspective, the world championship is somewhat like the superbowl---if I like the opponents, I pay attention; else not. Should it be fixed? I think it better to spend time 'fixing' FIDE first, then returning to the layered approach of some decades back. Most of what many rated players that I talk/play with think the obvious corruption and manipulation need to go, but many point out that the bent politics is a tradition in of itself :)

binarymax 13y ago
Clicking on the author's name: Matt Gaffney got his National Master title from the U.S. Chess Federation in 1991. He wrote Slate’s political crossword from 1999 to 2003 and now writes a similar puzzle for The Week. He blogs about crossword puzzles at www.gaffneyoncrosswords.com.
auctiontheory 13y ago
Yes, he is a rated master, although idle from tournament chess since '95: http://www.uschess.org/assets/msa_joomla/MbrDtlMain.php?12495178 http://www.uschess.org/assets/msa_joomla/MbrDtlMain.php?1249...

no_wave 13y ago

If you care about which chess player has the best stats, look it up. Sports competitions have never been about who the best team is - it's about who wins. This is why it's fun.

srin 13y ago
Good point. Does the world champion also have to play through the rounds up to the final match? That could help, having to go through the round of 8/16, so the championship match doesn't end up being the best vs someone who was the best a while ago. Then it'd always be a fun match between the two top. Not to mention drawing to keep your title doesn't seem fun
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  No; the defending champion automatically plays in the World Chess Championship. The problem with the champion playing in the candidates matches is that the champion and the candidate will play each other before the championship title match, which kind of kills the hype. Chess is more about the games than the outcomes. While drawing to keep your title doesn't seem fun from a statistical standpoint, the draws, in this case, are often hard-won. Even more interesting is that one of the reasons that Carlsen has progressed so amazingly is that he has been known to play on in positions where most grandmasters would agree to a draw.
pasquinelli 13y ago
totally agree. it's the chance that the weaker player might win (or the stronger one lose, depending on your point of view) that makes people pay attention. it's what actually happens that counts, not what's statistically likely to happen.

jules 13y ago

An interesting tidbit is that while the difference in rating between Carlsen and Anand is 95 points, the difference between Carlsen and Houdini 3 is 376 points.

gautamnarula 13y ago
Another interesting tidbit is that the difference in rating between the top ranked player (Carlsen) and the World Champion (Anand) is the largest since Spassky-Fischer in 1972, when Champion Spassky was rated 2660 and Fischer was rated 2785--a 125 point difference!
- asdfologist 13y ago
  At least some (if not all) of that can be explained by rating inflation. The same gap in ability translates to many more points today than 40 years ago.
  - billforsternz 13y ago
    >The same gap in ability translates to many more points today than 40 years ago Not really. Ratings inflation means you can't compare the absolute values, but is much less noticeable on ratings differences. So 2660 + 4.7% = 2785 (125 points) in 1972. The equivalent today would be something like; 2750 + 4.7% = 2879 (129 points) The same gap in ability translates to only 4 more points. Actually even that modest difference should not arise from ratings inflation. That is because the Elo system is based on the idea that a given "gap in ability" is supposed to yield a constant Elo delta. An Elo delta of 100 points is supposed to translate to a 64% score for the stronger player, a delta of 200 points to 76% etc.
    - asdfologist 13y ago
      Interesting, that sounds reasonable, but two questions: 1. Is it certain that rating inflation is linear? 2. Is there actually any evidence that the constant Elo delta property actually holds even with inflation? It's well known that Elo is flawed, which is why people have been working on alternate rating systems...

Someone 13y ago

By the same token, we should scrap most of the Olympics. For example, why run a marathon there? We already know who is fastest in a year, and we do have a series of grand slam events (http://worldmarathonmajors.com/US/ http://worldmarathonmajors.com/US/) However the Olympic marathon is special because it is completely different. In most other marathons, runners care more about their time than about winning, because it determines whether/how much they get paid to run other marathons. In the Olympics, on the other hand, nobody cares about times. Similarly, the classical one on one match for the world championship in chess is different from tournament play. In the former, you have to beat the strongest player in the world; in the latter, you have to beat the weaker players or top players with an off day and prevent getting beaten on your off day or by stronger players. It's the same in soccer. There, there are both national competitions where consistently beating weaker teams is the way to win and national knock out tournaments where one has to beat the best team to win. And yes, knock out tournaments are more likely to have the weaker team win, but that can make them more attractive, as determining the strongest player may take a long time (for an example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1984 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1984) IMO, the 'only' problem with the chess world championship is that the organization is a shambles. Fix that, and nobody will complain that the knock out tournament is different from regular tournaments.

gautamnarula 13y ago
In this scenario, chess's biggest advantage is it has an extensive, well developed rating system--Elo[1]. The tennis example given in the article isn't a good one, because the point system used to determine rankings is somewhat arbitrary. I wrote about this a little more in depth [2] while I was developing a free android app to bring elo ratings to any multiplayer game [3]. If we are going to stick with the title of World Champion, I believe the best way to go about it is an annual double round robin tournament featuring the 10 highest rated players. Each player plays every other player twice, once with black, once with white, and the player with the most points (win = 1 point, draw = .5 points, loss = 0 points) wins. The problem with having candidates matches--or really any qualifying tournaments--is that it heavily favors the current champion. Even a player as strong as Carlsen probably has a < 50% chance of winning a tournament(s)/series of matches against other top ranked players. This means that the top rated player may have a cumulative probability of <10% of gaining the title, while the current champion, even if ranked eighth like Anand currently is, could have a 40-50% chance of retaining the title. This is why the title of World Champion should be based off a round robin tournament of all the top players. Chess already has a robust, accurate, and thoroughly tested and revised rating system. We ought to make more use of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating [2] http://www.gautamnarula.com/rating/ http://www.gautamnarula.com/rating/ [3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Centaurii.app.RatingCalculator https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Centaurii.... Edit: Another problem with matches, as opposed to tournaments, is that transitivity doesn't exist in chess (as I've learned in my years of competitive play). If A regularly beats B, and B regularly beats C, it does not mean that A will regularly beat C. This is where matches are flawed--one player could have a particular weakness against the other and lose a match to him, while still being the strongest player in the world, as measured by his results against all the other top players (which is what the elo rating does).

auctiontheory 13y ago

The World Chess Championship, like all other competitive sports and games, provides entertainment - it doesn't feed people, cure cancer, etc. Gaffney's argument is logical, but for that matter, abolishing competitive chess would be just as logical - or illogical. Weird to see this on a mainstream site like slate.com. The world title is merely one symptom of the professional chess world's many problems.

billforsternz 13y ago

The World Chess Championship has been through difficult times in recent decades, often due to bizarre decision making by an ineffective governing organisation. However there are good signs that stability and coherence is returning, it's on an upswing. Anand has been a great World Champion, winning many brilliant games in his defences against worthy opposition. Carlsen-Anand has captured the imagination of chess players around the world to a much greater extent than any recent tournament, no matter how prestigious. Oh except maybe for the Candidates tournament - which gained it's outscale gravitas because it was a step towards the throne. The World Championship of Chess has tradition, gravitas, drama. Statistically speaking the strongest World Champion has not always been the strongest player at any given point. But so what; Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik .... Anand, [Carlsen?]. These players have ascended the pantheon and achieved a kind of immortality. They're all worthy. Don't you dare tell me that Petrosian isn't (see original article). I'd hate to interfere with a tradition like that. (Note: yes I am flushing the period between Kramnik and Anand as a sad anachronism).

robomartin 13y ago

Chess stopped being interesting to me a long time ago, when I realized the only way to be a competitive player was to become a human database. If you don't devote significant effort to massive amounts of memorization there is no way you will be able to compete. The magic of the game to me is/was in working hard to figure out how to out-think, out-strategize and even trick your opponent. And, yes, that still exists. World Chess championships are not robotic regurgitations of prior games. Some aspects of them might be, but there's plenty of hard thinking applied as well. All I am saying is that you reach a level beyond which the only way to progress is to become a database and that's simply not interesting to me. I also happen to think it is an absolute waste of time unless you happen to be particularly gifted at chess and have aspirations on the world stage. This is the reason I don't encourage my kids to continue playing competitive chess beyond a certain stage. One of my kids was killing it in local competitions all the way up to the stage where kids started to become walking databases. I wasn't going to do that to my son. There are better things to focus on in life. The other realization was that getting better at playing chess didn't make you better at everything else. It is a fallacy to think that because someone is amazing at chess they have superior reasoning abilities in other domains. That is rarely the case. There are early to mid-stage cognitive gains to be had from learning and playing chess. Beyond a certain point getting better at chess simply means you got better at chess and nothing else.

lowkeykiwi 13y ago
Wouldn't overspecialization be common with most pro sports? Playing sports is great but becoming a swimming world champion, for example, is just hours every day of swimming. Hardly world-changing or helpful outside the pool.
- taeric 13y ago
  I believe the contention focuses on the difference in how you play against an opponent. In chess, by this contention, ultimately what your opponent is doing has little bearing on what you do. There is a "correct" response to every board position. Now, I think this is accurate for essentially single player sports. Golf and the like. Many competitive sports, however, you have to adjust what you are doing based on what your opponent is doing. Not just in a "correct" way, but to account for changing circumstances.

lowkeykiwi 13y ago

Considering that Pentagram recently bought World Chess and their World Chess Championships it looks like there'll be changes made in the running of world chess but not sure if they'll do away with the World Champs. http://www.designweek.co.uk/news/pentagram-brings-chess-into-a-new-era/3035344.article http://www.designweek.co.uk/news/pentagram-brings-chess-into...

rmrfrmrf 13y ago
omg you just reminded me of how beautiful the Staunton set that Pentagram designed is drool.

adamconroy 13y ago

I think the fact it is an anachronism is what makes it worth continuing. It has a history. There is a lineage stretching back to the 1800's. It is a significant thing to beat the current champion, who beat the previous champion etc. And the process of selecting the candidate to challenge the champion hasn't always been perfect, but in general it is pretty good and fair. And regardless of ratings / performance etc, the World Champion is a match play champion. Elo is a very objective way of deciding who is generally the strongest player, and that is published and acknowledged. There is on and off : a world knockout champion, a world blitz champion, a world rapid play champion. So loads of other different scenarios are taken care of, so why not preserve the match play champion lineage. Basically, this article is link bait.

jonnathanson 13y ago

The idea of a "World Champion" doesn't make sense in boxing, either. It doesn't make sense in most professional sports, in which "championship" status is essentially the result of a random walk through a succession of games or matches over a given timeframe. But fans prefer randomness. Fans like upsets, underdogs, unexpected outcomes, turnaround stories, and changing fortunes. Fans would hate long-term statistical regressions across N population of teams or athletes. A lot of sports need champions. More accurately, they need the idea of champions. Fans and enthusiasts have an intrinsic desire to know where everyone stands. Competitors need something to strive for. And that something has to be in constant contention. Someone has to occupy the throne, but his seat needs to be sufficiently precarious. Chess has swung in and out of the public eye over the decades, but by and large, it's occupied the fringes of pop-cultural obscurity. Take away the Garry Kasparovs, Bobby Fischers, and Anatoly Karpovs of the game -- or rather, the idea of these people as "champions" -- and chess would be even more obscure in the public eye than it is today. Chess, to put it bluntly, has never had a great PR plan. The championships, flawed though they might be, are the fraying threads tenuously holding the game above the abyss of public irrelevance. Chess insiders need the wonkiness of Elo ratings and normative comparisons. But outsiders and casual fans need the romance. Chess needs to strike a balance between these two groups and their oppositional desires. The point of the "world championship" in any sport or game isn't actually to determine who's the best. It's to determine who's currently on top over X timeframe (by a mostly arbitrary arrangement of circumstances and outcomes). Fans won't articulate it as such, but that's what they like about championships. Championships satisfy the human desire for narrative.

jrpt 13y ago
The author is suggesting scraping the world championship in favor of a golf or tennis-like grand slam: have four major tournaments per year. These tournaments would still have champions, upsets, underdogs, and narratives to them. It works well enough in golf and tennis. There's the Wijk aan Zee tournament every year which should be on the list. It's up for debate what the others would be. I like the suggestion personally and hope to see it happen. This is coming from a chess player and fan. Also, up until recently, you used to be able to find chess columns and puzzles in the newspapers. Nowadays they've been cut or replaced by sudoku. But for a long time that was excellent PR. I don't think it's fair to say chess never had great PR, since even in the US it used to be in the newspapers regularly. And it's still popular in Europe.

iends 13y ago

I'm surprised the guy writing this is a US national master, he should know better. 1) There is a huge difference in winning a round robin tournament vs. a head to head match in chess. The psychology is completely different. Anand has played in many matches, so he knows what to expect. Carlsen not so much. Carsen is also playing in Anand's native India. 2) The author puts too much stock in chess ratings as the absolute measure in chess ability. Elo has its own set of issues (e.g. rating inflation over time). 3) The author also fails to point out why Magnus rating is so much greater than Anand's. Anand simply has less incentive to play in open tournaments knowing he is going have to defend his title in a years time for a big cash payout. Throughout the course of studying he finds novelties (moves that have not been played/analyzed before, but he thinks are solid moves) and he does not want to tip his hand (preferring to have his opponent try and figure out the continuation over the board instead of with the help of a computer.) The result? He plays in just enough tournaments to stay sharp and in those tournaments he plays safe chess. 4) There is already a Grand Slam system in chess.

toolslive 13y ago

small note on the article: tennis does have a world champion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITF_World_Champions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITF_World_Champions