I see the “draw problem” that Mike mentions having the same deleterious effect in either case. With draw odds, the champion can just play for a draw in every game (even with White, it’s very difficult to beat a GM who’s determined to draw). Only the challenger is required to take risks. He has to play to win, and the champion doesn’t. I think that tilts the playing field too much in the champion’s favor. This is especially important with today’s shorter matches. Drawing 24 games is harder than drawing 12 or 14. Nevertheless, draw odds for the champion is preferable (in my opinion) to rapid/blitz playoffs.
I would agree that champion keeps title if the match is drawn requires more games, but the old 24 seemed sufficient. Even in the first Karpov-Kasparov match, the longest strings of draws were 17 and 14, and that’s with Karpov holding a huge lead. Of course, only wins counted in that match. It’s not THAT easy to draw at will with the black pieces against a world championship contender, even if you’re Magnus.
No one individual can EVER be considered greater than the ENTIRE global chess body, which at this time, is very
unfortunately FIDE. Magnus Carlsen has proved himself quite the elite champion. Perhaps one of the 2-3 greatest
in history. However, just as Chess adjusted when first Fischer, then Kasparov left the throne empty, world chess will
adjust anew. Certainly, the loss would be more Carlsen’s than that of FIDE. Carlsen has been quite clear in his distain
for the World Championship Format, with a “set” # of games, with a rapid tie-break (if required), to follow. Without
a question, this format is quite different than the “forever” WC matches of yesteryear. BUT, the “made for TV” approach has GREATLY broadened the appeal of the game.
So if Magnus exits, simply “fair thee well”. For this would simply open a wider door to many American hopefuls such as Caruana, So, Dominguez Perez, Shankland, Xiong & Sevian!!
I’m not sure what chess needs right now is another ‘world champion’ who didn’t win his title by beating his predecessor. And until there is someone who can beat Magnus over the board in a match format, he remains the undisputed best player in the world.
“Best Player” and “World Champion” are not necessarily synonymous. “Best Player” is simply whoever has the highest rating, while “World Champion” can, and usually is determined by some other procedure. There is nothing necessarily wrong with those two not being the same person. If Nepo had beaten Carlsen in their recent match Nepo would have been the World Champion, but Magnus would still have been the world’s best player.
There are also many sports or games which don’t choose their world champion by having an existing champion hold the title until beaten in a match. But this method of selection is so ingrained in the chess community that it is difficult to imagine it being changed. What chess definitely doesn’t need is another situation where we have two people holding separate “World Champion” titles.
It’s a legitimate question. When you list the World Champions do you include Ponomariov, Khalifman, Kasimdzhanov, and Topalov?
Alex Relyea
One could in theory become the highest rated player without being the strongest player by avoiding playing one or more individuals.
Carlsen has not, to this point, avoided playing anyone, something that cannot be said about several previous former world chess champions.
This would be an odd time for him to start, which leads me, again, to speculate that there’s something else in play here. Follow the money.
No.
I’m not so sure about this.
I would also question it, if only because ratings are not as precise as most people think. When Carlsen and Caruana played for the title, their ratings only differed by 3 points. That’s not a significant difference – certainly not enough to definitively pronounce Carlsen (slightly higher) as “best”. The match result seemed to confirm that they were about the same strength at “classical” time controls (although Carlsen seems clearly better at faster TCs).
Also, just look at how the world’s top ten have shuffled over the last few years. My take is that all of those guys are roughly equal in strength. I would not be comfortable pronouncing, for example, number 3 definitively “better” than number 4 at any given time.
I would still say, though, that Carlsen is the world’s strongest player – not because he happens to have the highest rating right now, but because he has held that spot for years, and usually by a significant margin over whoever is second. This is similar to Kasparov from 1985-2005. At any given time, the order of the top players’ ratings can be somewhat arbitrary, but when one player holds onto the top spot for many years running, it’s safe to say he’s the best. If he also keeps an iron grip on the World Championship throughout those years, that reinforces the claim.
If you want a metric to determine “best player” at any given time, then it is highest rated. If you want to use subjective judgments to try to figure this out, then we can argue about it until the cows come home without reaching any conclusions. Everyone has their own subjective criteria for what determines who is better than whom, and I can’t say that mine are better than yours. But rating is a number. Either mine is higher than yours, or it isn’t. So unless you want this to be forever muddied, the answer is that “best player” is the highest rated. If you don’t mind this being forever muddied, then it’s pointless to even talk about who is the best player; no conclusions will ever be reached.
Yeah, so I don’t either. It doesn’t seem legitimate to have the “2021 World Championship” with a small tournament, be it a swiss, round robin, or even a knockout with very short matches. It is too random. Sponsorship seems to have lost its appetite for a series of long matches, so we can’t seed the champion as one of, say, eight playing candidates matches. I think if we want to have a World Champion who is considered the best, then a new Champion has to beat the best. This is why I say ties should go to the defender.
Alex Relyea
While your point is taken, it’s also an oversimplification. A rating is a number. But the number is relative to a scale, and has a specific meaning concerning how it’s calculated.
If player A is always 1 rating point higher than player B throughout both players’ careers, is it correct to say A is the best player? (No.) So while you have a point, it’s not that simple - your point can reach an incorrect conclusion if applied indiscriminately.
Mr. Bachler is correct. The issue is a particular pet peeve of mine: the difference between precision and accuracy. An example would be my weight. To say that I weigh “about 250 pounds” is very accurate, but not very precise. To say I weigh “116.3274 pounds” is very precise, but not very accurate. In any measurement it is possible to reach a point of precision beyond which a comparison is impossible with any accuracy. Now that we have floating point ratings in US Chess, we can precisely rank almost all players except for those like I (frequently but not as I type) am, at their floors. No one thinks that it would be an accurate ordering, though, not least because there are likely many players rated 2195ish who are noticeably stronger than those who haven’t been higher than 2200.00 for years. I have heard that the rating system is accurate to two digits and, while I think it is a little better than that, I don’t think it is reliably much better. As long as Carlsen can remain 50 points above everyone (Firouzja is 52 points lower as I type) there is strong reason to believe that he’s the best in the world, but, while our level of precision says that Radjabov is better than Dominguez is better than Anand (by one point each), the level of accuracy allows us to state no such thing authoritatively, and extremely cautiously at best.
Alex Relyea
You’re both missing Scott’s point. If you MUST identify the world’s best player, highest rated appears to be the only objective measure available. The flaw you point out is indeed a flaw, but unless you can produce a better objective metric, you haven’t refuted Scott’s statement at all. You’ve at best proven the folly of trying to identify the world’s player when it isn’t clearcut by the eye test. Right now few would disagree with the claim that Magnus is the world’s best player. If he were suddenly removed from the world, do you think we would have consensus on who is the world’s best? I don’t.
Nor do I, and that’s my point. Ratings may be the best thing we have to determine relative strength, but they’re not definitive when the numbers are close, because their accuracy is limited. A look at the latest live ratings shows (among other things) this:
#5 2773 Nepomniachtchi
#6 2772 Aronian
#7 2772 Giri
#8 2772 So
Can anyone claim with a straight face that Aronian, Giri, and So are exactly the same strength, while Nepo is just a little better than any of them? The ratings just aren’t that accurate. The most we can say about these four (based on their ratings) is that they are all about the same strength. Since ratings basically change with every game played, these will all be different in a month or two, and will probably be in a different order as well. But none of the players’ intrinsic strengths will have changed significantly. Ratings, like any statistic, are going to bounce around somewhat randomly in the short term. At any specific point in time, there is a circle of uncertainty, and that circle is certainly bigger than just a few rating points. When I play anyone whose rating is within 50 points of my own (in either direction), I consider myself and my opponent to be equal for all practical purposes.
Keep in mind that the ratings are generated by a probability function, and between any two players, what they establish is a probability as to which player is better. The bigger the gap, and the longer that gap is maintained, the higher the probability that the higher-rated player is better. But to say “I’m better than you because my current rating is 5 points higher than yours” is nonsense. A momentary gap of that size is meaningless. It’s not as simple as Magnus Carlsen being the best just because his rating is the highest right now. What convinces me that he’s the best is that his rating has been the highest for several years running, and by more than just a few points for most of that time – and that’s all I was claiming in the post that got Scott’s dander up.
ETA: If the four players mentioned above were numbers 1-4 instead of 5-8, I would not be able to say that any of them is “the best”. We seem to have a mentality (in sports as well as in chess) that at any given time (and furthermore, at all given times), there has to be a unique individual (or team) that’s “the best”. This is not a law of nature. There can be a group of players or teams at the top that are all about equally good, but clearly better than everyone else. We don’t have to proclaim one of them as “the best” – and there can be a World Champion who is “first among equals”, as Botvinnik was thought to be for most of his reign (he may have even used that phrase himself). I’m perfectly OK with there not being a clearly identifiable best player in the world (although I would agree that we currently have one, and his name is Magnus Carlsen).
This thread seems to go far afield from where it started.
What I wondered when I started it is how the chess world react if Carlsen really means it when he says he would only play a match with Firouzja.
Would we regard the winner of the inevitable FIDE championship match as “the world champion” ? Would we consider him champion-with-an-asterisk?
Or suppose the FIDE championship match is, say, Nepo versus MVL. Inevitably, someone will offer Magnus big bucks to play a “real world championship” with Firouzja. Which match would Americans recognize?
If you said, “the Magnus match,” would you change your mind if the FIDE match is Nepo versus Caruana?
Or if Magnus says he will only defend his title if it a series of three-minute games?
I sort of answered all that early in the thread, but my answer led to some other questions: Who “owns” the World Championship – the champion or FIDE? What kinds of procedures for determining the champion are/should be acceptable? What does it mean to be World Champion? We would like the champion to be the strongest player, but this isn’t always the case – Fischer and Carlsen were clearly the strongest player for a while before they won the official championship, and if you go by rating, Kasparov was still the strongest player for at least 10 years after leaving FIDE, and for 5 years or so after he lost the title to Kramnik. And how do you define “strongest player” anyway? Hence the digressions. So I think they are somewhat relevant.
We have two past situations to guide us: (1) Fischer abdicating the title in 1975, and (2) Kasparov leaving FIDE in 1993. Although I still thought of Fischer as World Champion for a while, we sooner or later had to accept Karpov – he was active (and clearly the strongest active player) and Fischer wasn’t, and you can’t keep the championship by refusing to defend it. Part of the deal is that you have to defend it on a regular basis against reasonably strong challengers. And a large part of the value of FIDE is that they were able to enforce such procedures until the actions of Kasparov and Short in 1993.
After 1993, the situation was muddled, but I continued to accept Kasparov as champion, for two reasons: (1) Unlike Fischer, he continued to defend the title regularly against strong challengers, and (2) FIDE’s substitutes were not credible. First they offered a “title match” between two people who had lost matches to FIDE’s own official challenger (Short). Sorry, but there’s no way the winner of that match is champion (especially after the person who had beaten both of them in the FIDE cycle was crushed by Kasparov). Then they went to tournaments of some sort or another rather than matches. Although that system produced a few credible champions (Karpov and Anand), it also produced some not very credible ones.
Unfortunately, what Carlsen seems to be proposing is not quite analogous to either of those situations, so we’re left with the sort of speculation that has developed in this thread. For me, the most important principle (and it has been a strong tradition throughout the history of the World Championship) is that, to become World Champion, you have to beat the existing World Champion in a match. Of course, for this to work, the existing World Champion has to participate. If Carlsen continues to defend the title against reasonably strong challengers in reasonable matches (not tournaments or “three-minute games”), I would still consider him Champion as long as he’s winning those matches. If not, then I would probably accept the FIDE Champion – as long as their procedures are reasonable. If neither party acts reasonably, then we have a muddle which will satisfy nobody.
For more specific scenarios:
(1) Firouzja wins the Candidates and plays Carlsen: no controversy and no problem.
(2) Firouzja doesn’t play in the Candidates, but retains the #2 spot in the ratings, and plays Carlsen: this is muddled and unsatisfactory, but I would still consider the winner of this match Champion, no matter what alternative FIDE comes up with.
(3) Firouzja plays in the Candidates and doesn’t win, and also slips down a few spots in the ratings – but nevertheless plays Carlsen for the title: this is going too far, and I would be inclined to accept FIDE’s champion, as long as their procedures are reasonable (presumably a match between the #1 and #2 finishers in the Candidates, although they could also just declare the winner of the Candidates to be Champion – this is essentially what happened in 1975).
(4) If Carlsen refuses to play at all (ala Fischer), or starts clearly ducking the strongest challengers (although I can’t imagine him doing this), or goes to something silly like matches of three-minute games, then I give up on him and we’re back to FIDE, as in #3.
Of course, as I’ve said before, I don’t regard any of these scenarios as desirable. I like it when we have a clearly defined (and reasonable) procedure, and everyone abides by it – e.g., the procedure we had from 1948-1993 (notwithstanding the Fischer fiasco, but that was his own doing, and everyone else continued to follow normal procedures), and have returned to in recent years. Having two or more claimants to the Championship is not a good situation. So I really hope Carlsen comes to his senses and continues to play by FIDE’s rules.
Magnus was speaking not long after the Nepo match. That match, plus his previous matches (with Caruana, Karjakin, and twice with Anand), may have given him the feeling that there wasn’t much sporting interest in another match between him and any of the usual crowd. Reminds me of Morphy announcing that he wouldn’t play anyone else seriously except at odds.
A lot can happen in the next couple of years that could lead him to change his mind. Maybe losing 6 games in the World Blitz could modify his perspective.
Also, Firouzja himself might not always play as strongly as he did in the European Team. Caruana didn’t always play as strongly as he had done in the 2014 Sinquefield Cup.
It seems too early to take Magnus’s statement entirely seriously. I have to admit, though, that it casts a shadow over the whole WC qualifying process. Who wants to sign up for this arduous struggle, if they aren’t going to get a match with the World Champion?