He announced on Chess24 that a $250,000 online round robin for eight top GMs will begin April 18.
This may be the only major tmt for some time.
Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but at that time control, I would consider it a minor event. If this is the future of chess, I’ll have to find a new hobby.
Three recent world championship matches were decided by rapid or blitz tie-breakers.
Fans didn’t stop looking at the Carlsen-Karjakin and Carlsen-Caruana matches because the title was decided at speed controls.
Those were just as deplorable as this event. Flipping a coin would have been just as meaningful as using blitz games to decide a match. Carlsen is actually proposing to have a World Championship Match made up entirely of rapid games. Of course this suits him, as his superiority over people like Caruana and Ding is substantially greater at quicker time controls. I think it would make a mockery of the game. It’s like requiring World Series games to be 3 innings of tee-ball.
I did stop following when the competition went to shorter time controls. Frankly, if Caruana had defeated Carlsen via rapid or blitz games, I would not have considered him a true world classical champion. IMO, a tie after regular classical games means that the challenger has not defeated the classical champion. Period. Feel free to disagee and pay your money to follow an inferior form of the game.
I think folks will watch it, partly because it’s about the only chess going on, but also because Carlsen is the best promoter and spokesperson chess has had in a long time. He’s become what many hoped Fischer would turn out to be in 1972, if not even more.
No doubt people will watch it, and I would even agree that Rapid Chess (and blitz even more so) is more “watchable” than chess with a longer time control. If we want to make chess more “TV-friendly”, this is absolutely the way to go. And there’s nothing wrong with quicker time controls per se. My quibble is that quick time controls should not be used to decide a world championship, nor should they be the only form of chess that is played – and I fear that we are moving in that direction. To my mind, there are more important things than being TV-friendly.
+5
-3. I agree with the post, but I’m neutralizing Brian’s over voting. 
The first K-K match demonstrated that a fixed number of wins format is untenable, and faster time control playoffs were almost inevitable.
IMHO, the World Cup shouldn’t be decided by penalty kicks, but most ‘championship’ sporting events go out of their way to avoid ties, boxing being one of the few exceptions. (But boxing decisions have many other problems, and there have been accusations of corrupt judging for decades.)
Baseball has been kicking around a proposal that in extra-inning games, at some point an inning would start with a runner on 2nd base. Bad idea, but probably not as impactful on the game as the Designated Hitter Rule, may it rot in h***.
The NFL shortened the overtime period from 15 minutes to 10 minutes a few years ago, and it resulted in an increase in tie games. They’re going back to 15 minute overtime periods for 2020.
Chess has been moving in the direction of faster time controls ever since the first chess clocks were invented after the London 1851 tournament.
I’m in favor of no playoff at all. Go back to the champion having draw odds. That would force at least one of the players to take some risks (during the main match) and actually try to win, rather than both of them playing “not to lose”, just hoping to make it to the rapid/quick/blitz playoffs. And if the challenger can’t win the match, the champion keeps his title. This was not only standard for many years in chess, I believe it’s still standard in boxing. If neither player can prevail in the regular match, any kind of tiebreak (including faster time control playoffs) is bound to be arbitrary.
Of course this works better with a longer match like the old 24-game format, and maybe that’s no longer feasible because of sponsorship issues, but at any length, I would rather see the champion having draw odds than any form of faster time control playoff.
You could always do a tie-break with an overtime to the first player wit a plus score after an even number of games. The time control for the first game would be G/120+30 and the following games would be G/(remaining time from previous game)+30. If the first game was a draw on black’s 40th move with white spending 94 minutes and black spending 73 minutes then white would start as black in game two with 46 minutes and black would start as white in game two with 67 minutes.
That would allow finishing four sixty move games in eight hours with 20-minute breaks between games.
You might even see world championship games played to mate (so that the players could get all of the increment for use in the next game).
An obvious downside is that the rating system assumes equal conditions for both players so such an idea has a vanishingly small chance of flying.
The playoff wouldn’t necessarily have to be rated. After all, they use Armageddon games for playoffs (although no World Championship match has gone that far yet), and those can’t be rated. However, your proposal would still amount to a “faster time control playoff”, and I remain opposed to that concept.
I don’t think 24 game matches are strictly a sponsorship issue, it may be a time issue. That long a match will run at least 5 weeks, maybe 6. That may cut up to 2 weeks out of the players’ busy calendars.
Carlsen probably makes more money BEING world champion than defending it. And he may think that a 24 game match might prove advantageous to the challenger.
Oh come on, we can do better than that:
- 10th inning starts with a runner on 1st.
- 11th inning, runner on 2nd.
- 12th, runners on 1st and 2nd.
- 13th, 3rd.
- 14th, 1st and 3rd.
- 15th, 2nd and 3rd.
- 16th, bases loaded.
- 17th, add a 4th runner halfway between 3rd and home that gets to run with the pitch.
Bill Smythe
That is already being done in the minors ad a test of concept.
+2 
If you want to win or keep a world championship, bite the bullet and find six weeks once every two years, or in the case of a challenger, possibly once in your lifetime.
It should be noted that having so many rest days is a factor in the length of the tournament too. Since we don’t have adjournments anymore, a 24 game match with a rest day after four days of play would get the match over in 30 days, allowing for the opening ceremonies. Is that really so unreasonable to get a worthy world champion?
Caruana, Nakamura, MVL and Grischuk are listed as playing in Abu Dhabi-based three-minute on-line tournament starting April 15. All GMs supposedly can enter.