2023 World Cup Underway

With 206 participants, with at least one or two too many.

The World Cup is the descendant of the FIDE Knockout Championships that “graced” the chess world from 1999 to 2004 during the era of two champions. Now, rather than determining a world champion, it is one of the qualifiers for the Candidates. In this year’s edition, three players will go from the World Cup to the next Candidates - but they may not be the top three finishers. (That is to say, the finalists plus the winner of the match between the semi-finalists.)

Why not? Because FIDE, in its customary brilliance, allows the World Champion and the player he defeated in the final match to participate. Happily, while Ian Nepomniachtchi was happy to play Ding Liren decided not to. But fear not: Magnus Carlsen, who presumably won’t play in the Candidates even if he finishes in the top three, is also participating. So the world’s #1 and #5 players could easily knock out several players who might otherwise have qualified, even though the event has no competitive significance for them whatsoever.

That’s not quite right. For Nepo, there is: he can help keep out unwanted players in two ways. There’s the obvious way: knocking out important rivals. But there’s a second, shiftier way: he could lose at the right time to someone he’d love to pound on in the Candidates. (I don’t think he can guarantee that the player would qualify; the best he could do is lose in the quarter-final round, giving that player two chances to make it to the top three. Though maybe the final four would be good enough if Carlsen is in that final four?)

Let’s consider several counterarguments to this rant. First, the tournament is more exciting with Carlsen and Nepo in it. That’s true, but (1) it’s not more important than giving professionals with something at stake the chance to achieve a career dream by qualifying for the Candidates. (2) Top players are constantly in action these days, especially Carlsen.

Second, while Nepo doesn’t need to play (he’s already qualified for the Candidates) and Carlsen presumably won’t play in the Candidates even if he finishes in the top three, there is both a competitive and a financial incentive for them. To the first point, see the first rebuttal in the preceding paragraph. As for the second, so what? Suppose Ding Liren had decided to play and finished in the top three. Could he play in the Candidates? Why not? After all, there’s a fair amount of money to be had there! Or better still, why can’t he play in the Women’s World Cup and qualify for their Candidates event? The obvious answer to these questions is that those tournaments are designed for a specific purpose, and Ding’s participation would be inappropriate as he is not a member of the group for whom the purpose is relevant. He cannot be a Candidate to play himself, and he’s not a woman. The fact that he’s missing out on a nice payday or two is utterly irrelevant.

Argument #3: Ding cannot play himself in the World Chess Championship, nor would it be appropriate for him to play in the Candidates. But if we carry out this logic forever, he can’t play in anything, or at least not in any event featuring players who might qualify for the first official steps in the world championship cycle. For instance (I don’t know if this is true, but it might be), suppose that the Chinese Championship is a qualifier for the World Cup. Should he be forced to sit out because he would take a spot away from someone, or might defeat someone who’s a threat to allow a relatively weak player to take his place? If not, and he should be allowed to play, why prevent him from playing in the World Cup?

Or, suppose that it’s an ordinary super-GM event rather than any sort of qualifier, but he knows that his opponent will be the rating qualifer for the Candidates if he wins, but won’t be if it’s a draw or a loss. Maybe that opponent is Chinese, or maybe it’s his friend and second Richard Rapport. Is he obliged to forfeit the game because of his conflict of interest? Or perhaps avoid the tournament altogether? That seems wrong, so again, why can’t he play in the World Cup?

Slippery slope arguments can be tricky. Sometimes they’re plausible, and sometimes there are clear distinctions that make it easy to say “so far, but no further”. My inclination is to say that if e.g. the Chinese Championship were a knockout event he shouldn’t play, but if it’s a round-robin there’s much less of a problem - all his rivals will be affected more or less equally by his participation. (Not perfectly, of course, because of color distribution, but close enough.) Nevertheless, my recollection is that during the pre-Fischer era of Soviet dominance of the World Championship title (from 1948-1972) the reigning champion would sometimes skip the Soviet Championship (always a round-robin) in years when it was a qualifier for the Interzonal (the qualifier before the Candidates), precisely to avoid interfering with the participants’ chances of reaching the next stage.

As for the super-GM event, it’s an optional tournament and not a qualifier, so it’s irrelevant. It might function as a qualifier for the person trying to qualify by rating, but that’s not Ding’s “fault” - it’s not the purpose of the tournament. To go back to an earlier example, suppose Ding participated in a Swiss system event that had a female player trying to be the rating qualifier for the Women’s Candidates. (I don’t know if they have such a spot, but assume they do.) No one would claim that Ding would be obliged to either forsake the event or else make sure to play in an event/in events with the other women who might be the ratings qualifiers.

I did my best to disguise my point of view (/sarc), but it’s a big world and there are lots of opinions. Am I wrong? Can a principled case be made for allowing Carlsen and especially Nepo (or Ding) to play?

Having ranted, it’s time to discuss the event. It began yesterday (Sunday), but the “real” action won’t begin until Wednesday. Today’s estimate of the world’s population is 8,051,327,189 human beings, so by that standard FIDE’s restricting the World Cup to only 206 participants (one for every bone in the human body?) seems downright parsimonious. By the standards of an event that’s supposed to help determine the best challenger for the title, it’s rather bloated. Fortunately, it’s a knockout event, so the field will be winnowed down to players with a realistic shot of qualifying soon enough. The top 50 players have a bye in round 1, and will jump in, as hinted above, on Wednesday. Each round takes three days: a classical game on day 1, a second classical game with colors reversed on day 2, and then up to three increasingly rapid game-pairs, if necessary, on day 3. If it’s still tied after that, a three-player committee made up of Ding Liren, Ian Nepomniachtchi, and Magnus Carlsen will decide who gets to continue sudden death 3’+2” games will decide, with colors reversing after a draw.

This is day two of round 1, with the superstars showing up for the round of 128. Here’s the top 10: Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Nepomniachtchi, Anish Giri, Wesley So, Teimour Radjabov, Dommaraju Gukesh, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave. The top player in action right now, in case you’re wondering, is 51st seed Ivan Cheparinov, rated 2663. Much more info here, tournament site here (it’s also the site for the concurrent Women’s World Cup, which…sigh…has Women’s World Champion Ju Wenjun participating), and you can find the games in all the usual places.