What an awful way do decide a championship. Maybe they should just play Texas Hold’em, winner take all.
What a good way to decide the Championship this year!
Exciting format + reasonably long time control with an increment providing for games being decided solely on players’ wits rather than hand speed - what else can one wish for?
Besides, we are now likely to have Sam back, whom we almost lost for US chess.
Michael Langer
I actually loved the playoff format, and will consider using it for any events I organize with indivisible prizes.
As Michael Langer points out, even though the games were rapidplay, they were still contests of skill. They were long enough for ability to show through, but short enough that they could conceivably capture the attention of people other than current hardcore chess enthusiasts, and certainly not something as boring as calculating tiebreakers.
A good sporting parallel may be found in golf, with the four-hole playoff used at The Open Championship. It’s not sudden-death, hole-by-hole, like the Masters or the PGA Championship, but it’s not an 18-hole playoff that adds an extra day, like the US Open.
It was, IMHO, a great tiebreaker. Frankly, I could very much live with the US Championship being a 32-player invite-only Swiss over 9 or 11 rounds, with an Armageddon playoff.