Carlsen may have the right not to defend his title (certainly he is not legally or contractually obliged to do so), but I do think that he, in his role as world chess champion, has an obligation to the chess world nonetheless. It is a real shame that he is unwilling to defend his title, tiring and taxing though it may be for him. It diminishes the title, I think, when, first, the reigning champion doesn't value it enough to defend it and when, second, the undisputed champion and number one player is not part of it.
Completely agree. It does seem fitting with a generational shift in attitude that Carlsen doesn't care about the responsibilities of being the champion or feel any apparent sense of duty to the legacy of the game itself...the very game that has given him a deeply privileged place in the world. I fear his move is the death knell to the classical championship in a form that matters. Changing the Candidates to a round robin and adding short time controls to decide the WCC were bad enough. The changes being talked about by most are the kind that would change the character of the WCC so that it is unrecognizable. Appealing to those with short attention spans seeking shallow entertainment, perhaps, but at the price of the deepest art and competition of what will be formerly the "royal" game.
I'm largely in agreement with what you've written. The only thing I'd disagree with - or maybe am just confused about - is your comment about changing the Candidates to a round robin. There have been periods where the Candidates consisted in a series of knockout matches, but the round robin format goes back a long way - the first five Candidates events were round robins, and the first three (in 1950, '53, and '56) were double round robins, just as we have today. The reason the format changed was because of Fischer's complaints about Soviet collusion in 1962, and not (AFAIK) because of any game-theoretical argument about the superiority of matches in determining the strongest possible challenger. Perhaps in some wonderful future where Caruana, Aronian, So, Nakamura, and Dominguez all qualify for the Candidates Fischer's argument will have to be revisited, but for now collusion doesn't seem like too much of a worry.
I know the history. I simply think matches are a better format for determining the stronger player than a round robin (and the reasons why seem obvious). Moving away from them isn't good for reasons having nothing to do with collusion, regardless of the origins of the change.
Edited to add: it's also useful to note that the reasons for moving back to RRs weren't done to make a better competition, but because the logistical limitations of the format are more amenable to sponsorship and time-constraints.
I agree that the logistics issue is the most obvious reason for the switch back to tournaments. But the reasons why "matches are a better format for determining the stronger player than a round robin" aren't "obvious" to me at all.
Suppose player A scores 75% against all the other top players, in the aggregate, while player B scores 65% against them. Who is better, A or B? Unless we're feeling suspicious, we're going to say that it's obviously player A. But it might be that for some reason player A has a problem against player B alone, and goes 45% against him (while scoring even more than 75% against everyone else). Player B would thus benefit from a match format, while player A - who would almost certainly be the higher-rated player - would benefit from a tournament format.
Here's an extreme version of this sort of scenario. Suppose they play in a double round robin Candidates. Player A beats players C-H 2-0, while player B beats C-H 1.5-0.5 and beats player A by that same margin. Player A scores 14.5/16, and player B scores 12.5/16. I'm not inclined to think that player B is the better player or more deserving of a World Championship match, even though we can stipulate that he would be the favorite in a one-on-one match with player A.
Another scenario: Players A through C are peers, but player A scores 65% against player B, while player B scores 65% against player C. One might expect that player A's percentage against player C would be devastating, but remember that they're all peers, and player C might in turn score 65% against player A. These sorts of "ouroboros" relationships happen in real life. In a series of Candidates matches, it would come down to luck in terms of which pairings happened in which order. In a tournament, their weird competitive relationship would be a wash, as it seems to me it ought to be.
The - or at least, a - problem is that expressions like "best player", "greatest player" are always ambiguous. Is it the most accurate player - and does this have to be weighted by degree of difficulty? The one who wins the most? The one who is hardest to defeat? The most dominant player? Given the arguments above - which have real-life parallels - and the ambiguity issues mentioned in this paragraph, I don't see the supposed superiority of the match format. (And even if it is superior - please explain to me why you think it is - there's nothing obvious about it.)
Finally, I'll add another practical consideration to the logistics issue you noted. (And add that real-world considerations like logistics *do* matter. More sponsors, more time out of the players' schedules, more costs for them in hiring seconds, etc.) Consider the Candidates tournament that just ended. Being the runner-up was huge. Let's suppose that matches would have gone exactly like the tournament did, i.e. Nepomniachtchi would have defeated the other seven players in matches, Ding would have defeated players 3-8, etc. The problem is that unless Nepo and Ding were seeded 1 and 2 before the event - and they weren't - they might have been paired before the final match. (If I'm remembering correctly, Ding was the top seed and Nepo was #4, so they would have played in the semis. So it would have been Nepomniachtchi-Nakamura in the finals.)
Carlsen may have the right not to defend his title (certainly he is not legally or contractually obliged to do so), but I do think that he, in his role as world chess champion, has an obligation to the chess world nonetheless. It is a real shame that he is unwilling to defend his title, tiring and taxing though it may be for him. It diminishes the title, I think, when, first, the reigning champion doesn't value it enough to defend it and when, second, the undisputed champion and number one player is not part of it.
Completely agree. It does seem fitting with a generational shift in attitude that Carlsen doesn't care about the responsibilities of being the champion or feel any apparent sense of duty to the legacy of the game itself...the very game that has given him a deeply privileged place in the world. I fear his move is the death knell to the classical championship in a form that matters. Changing the Candidates to a round robin and adding short time controls to decide the WCC were bad enough. The changes being talked about by most are the kind that would change the character of the WCC so that it is unrecognizable. Appealing to those with short attention spans seeking shallow entertainment, perhaps, but at the price of the deepest art and competition of what will be formerly the "royal" game.
I'm largely in agreement with what you've written. The only thing I'd disagree with - or maybe am just confused about - is your comment about changing the Candidates to a round robin. There have been periods where the Candidates consisted in a series of knockout matches, but the round robin format goes back a long way - the first five Candidates events were round robins, and the first three (in 1950, '53, and '56) were double round robins, just as we have today. The reason the format changed was because of Fischer's complaints about Soviet collusion in 1962, and not (AFAIK) because of any game-theoretical argument about the superiority of matches in determining the strongest possible challenger. Perhaps in some wonderful future where Caruana, Aronian, So, Nakamura, and Dominguez all qualify for the Candidates Fischer's argument will have to be revisited, but for now collusion doesn't seem like too much of a worry.
I know the history. I simply think matches are a better format for determining the stronger player than a round robin (and the reasons why seem obvious). Moving away from them isn't good for reasons having nothing to do with collusion, regardless of the origins of the change.
Edited to add: it's also useful to note that the reasons for moving back to RRs weren't done to make a better competition, but because the logistical limitations of the format are more amenable to sponsorship and time-constraints.
I agree that the logistics issue is the most obvious reason for the switch back to tournaments. But the reasons why "matches are a better format for determining the stronger player than a round robin" aren't "obvious" to me at all.
Suppose player A scores 75% against all the other top players, in the aggregate, while player B scores 65% against them. Who is better, A or B? Unless we're feeling suspicious, we're going to say that it's obviously player A. But it might be that for some reason player A has a problem against player B alone, and goes 45% against him (while scoring even more than 75% against everyone else). Player B would thus benefit from a match format, while player A - who would almost certainly be the higher-rated player - would benefit from a tournament format.
Here's an extreme version of this sort of scenario. Suppose they play in a double round robin Candidates. Player A beats players C-H 2-0, while player B beats C-H 1.5-0.5 and beats player A by that same margin. Player A scores 14.5/16, and player B scores 12.5/16. I'm not inclined to think that player B is the better player or more deserving of a World Championship match, even though we can stipulate that he would be the favorite in a one-on-one match with player A.
Another scenario: Players A through C are peers, but player A scores 65% against player B, while player B scores 65% against player C. One might expect that player A's percentage against player C would be devastating, but remember that they're all peers, and player C might in turn score 65% against player A. These sorts of "ouroboros" relationships happen in real life. In a series of Candidates matches, it would come down to luck in terms of which pairings happened in which order. In a tournament, their weird competitive relationship would be a wash, as it seems to me it ought to be.
The - or at least, a - problem is that expressions like "best player", "greatest player" are always ambiguous. Is it the most accurate player - and does this have to be weighted by degree of difficulty? The one who wins the most? The one who is hardest to defeat? The most dominant player? Given the arguments above - which have real-life parallels - and the ambiguity issues mentioned in this paragraph, I don't see the supposed superiority of the match format. (And even if it is superior - please explain to me why you think it is - there's nothing obvious about it.)
Finally, I'll add another practical consideration to the logistics issue you noted. (And add that real-world considerations like logistics *do* matter. More sponsors, more time out of the players' schedules, more costs for them in hiring seconds, etc.) Consider the Candidates tournament that just ended. Being the runner-up was huge. Let's suppose that matches would have gone exactly like the tournament did, i.e. Nepomniachtchi would have defeated the other seven players in matches, Ding would have defeated players 3-8, etc. The problem is that unless Nepo and Ding were seeded 1 and 2 before the event - and they weren't - they might have been paired before the final match. (If I'm remembering correctly, Ding was the top seed and Nepo was #4, so they would have played in the semis. So it would have been Nepomniachtchi-Nakamura in the finals.)
I think Carlsen has no obligation at all to the chess world, and I think he has the full right to not defend his title.
If, but just as an exercise, I had to imagine some kind of (maybe, moral) obligation, I would say to Nepo.