
The World Chess Championship is an anachronism - ssclafani
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2013/11/the_world_chess_championship_is_an_embarrassing_anachronism_it_s_time_to.single.html
======
Someone
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
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....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Centaurii.app.RatingCalculator)

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).

~~~
bluecalm
The problem with double round robin (or long tournament in any non-ko form) is
that after some time most players play for nothing or not so much. It's not
ideal that the winner of the tournament is a person who scores the most points
against opponents who already lost their chances and are not so motivated
anymore. Another problem is that it's just another tournament, we have a lot
of those in chess. If you want a system to determine the strongest player just
look at the rating list which is formed from results of all those tournaments.
You don't need to play long additional one.

On the other hand world championship matches have tradition. Most chess fans
remember at least some of those. Maybe Fisher's match, maybe Kasparov-Karpov
battles, maybe the one when Kasparov destroyed Anand or maybe the one when he
banged his head (unsuccesfully) vs Kramnik's Berlin Wall. Matches are popular,
they excite the audience, people talk about them long before and long after.
The winner guarantees his place in history as a member of very narrow group of
players (only 15 of them, for what is over 100 years of world championship
history). People yelling "anachronism" don't understand what value this
tradition have for chess players and chess fans around the world. Every sport
has its own. Tennis has grand slams, football has the world cup, athletics has
Olimpics. Chess has world championship matches and please all the armchair
revolutionizers leave them alone.

~~~
apetresc
The kinds of top chess players that participate in the supertournaments we're
talking about are extremely serious about every game, even if they have no
chances in the tournament. Their ELO rating is equally affected by every game
in the tournament, and their ELO often determines which tournaments they'll be
invited to next.

Their personal 'career records' against other players in the field are also
very hotly-contested. Nobody in the top 20 would give up a win or a draw
against anyone else in the top 20 without a very serious fight.

~~~
bluecalm
It's very difficult to remain serious for 18 rounds when you play last 12 with
no hopes for anything. It's not even about being serious. You will have less
motivation for preparation, you may be willing to gamble more etc. once your
chances are gone. Those soft forms of not caring that much matter and in my
opinion they are human nature - it's difficult to put 100% of effort if you
already lost.

------
jonnathanson
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
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.

------
billforsternz
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
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.

~~~
sireat
The saying goes "Good chess players develop their brains, great chess players
waste theirs".

As a FM, I prefer that my kids do not study chess but something with more
helpful side benefits, programming, math, basketball even piano.

I would have much preferred to become a master at programming that a chess
master. A candidate master in programming can make a pretty good living, while
a chess master would be living in a park.

It is as Buffet said "Do something that you do not hate for a living".

~~~
iends
This makes me sad to read, but I had a similar thought when I was seriously
studying chess (I'm only an 1800-1900 player though.) I ultimately abandoned
chess, with the occasional blitz match on ICC these days.

I was spending 2-3 hours each night by myself alone and really enjoying it. I
was also paying IMs for lessons. I was improving a lot. However, I was alone
most of the time and couldn't share my experience with anybody. There was also
very little tangible benefit to me other than entertainment and mental
stimulation. Two things I can get elsewhere. Since I do have a masters degree
in computer science I decided to focus on two things: Software Engineering and
Violin.

I took up violin and haven't looked back. I had zero music ability an when I
started couldn't read music. It's the same amount of hark work as chess. Like
chess, I probably started too late to be anything other than an intermediate
player. The difference is, I can play for my wife and my parents. A random
person on the street can appreciate what I'm doing. I try to practice only 30
minutes a day.

I also doubled down on software engineering. Instead of spending 2-3 hours
playing chess, I spend more of my evenings writing code.

------
auctiontheory
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.

------
no_wave
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
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
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.

------
Matetricks
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.

------
iends
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.

------
adamconroy
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.

------
hsmyers
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
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._

------
jules
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.

~~~
adamconroy
The problem with this assessment is that computers basically cheat. Carlsen
isn't allowed to turn up to a game with an openings book, and some way of
looking up all possible 7 piece or less endgames.(if I remember correctly),
but the computer can. Another way of looking at is that if Carlsen had all
that information at his disposal every time he played another human, his
rating would be 300+ higher than everyone else as well.

~~~
tzs
Today's computers would still dominate even if their opening books were taken
away.

Open book essentially represents a very extensive analysis of one position
(the starting position) that has been carried out by humans over centuries. We
aren't as fast as computers, but we've been working on this one problem longer
and with massive parallelism, and so we've got the main lines covered quite
deep.

It used to be that most of book went deeper than a bookless computer could
analyze in the time available for the opening in a timed game. This meant that
a booked up human could steer the game into lines that appeared favorable for
the computer when analyzed to the depth the computer could analyze, but were
actually favorable to the human when analyzed to book depth.

Computers are now fast enough that they can reach or surpass book depth in
most lines, making it much much harder for a booked up human to steer the game
into a favorable line.

As an example of how fast computers are now, I just let Stockfish 4 64bit have
a go at the start position on my 2008 Mac Pro (dual 2.8 GHz quad core Xeon
processors, without hyper threading). I gave it 3 minutes (3 minutes per move
is common in world class chess events).

These were the settings: 8 threads, idle threads do not sleep, 8 GB hash
table.

It reached a depth of 30 ply (44 ply in selective search), and examined 940
million nodes, averaging around 5.3 million nodes per second. (It picked d4 as
its move, and expects a reply of d5).

The endgame tables also aren't as important as you might think at first. They
only cover endgames without pawns, and so it is not that often that positions
from these tables appear in a game. If one of these positions DOES show up in
a game, and the computer misplays it without access to the tables, that isn't
likely to give the human the win--it most likely will just let the human draw
in a lost position. That's because the problem computers have with these
endings without using tables is that they aren't able to see how to make
progress from a won position so they end up hitting the 50 move draw rule.
(Note that this only applies to games with a lot of pieces left. Even fairly
old chess programs could do the basic piece-only endgames without needing
tables).

Thus, if the tables were taken away, the overall result would be that in the
games where pawns remain (most games) computers would win a lot more than
humans, and in games where all the pawns go away while there are still several
pieces left humans would get some draws in lost positions.

Overall, take away both opening book and endgame tables, and computers would
still dominate, just not by quite as much because of the rare pieces only
endgame that humans would sometimes draw from a lost position, and the rare
case where the human could steer the opening into one of the few lines where
book is still deeper than the computer can reach and that line's evaluation
changes between the depth the computer reaches and the depth the book reaches.

~~~
adamconroy
Table bases do include pawns. I don't think anyone would think humans are
stronger than the best computers even if the computer didn't have opening
books and table bases, I was just saying that to compare ratings isn't really
fair.

------
toolslive
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)

------
lowkeykiwi
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...](http://www.designweek.co.uk/news/pentagram-brings-chess-into-a-new-
era/3035344.article)

~~~
rmrfrmrf
omg you just reminded me of how beautiful the Staunton set that Pentagram
designed is _drool_.

