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Why There Shouldn't Be a Chess World Champion
An anonymous reader writes "An article at Slate makes the case that the time has come to stop crowning World Chess Champions. This week, challenger Magnus Carlsen is trying to take the title from reigning champion Viswanathan Anand. Despite currently holding the title, Anand is very much the underdog, which only serves to illustrate why the current system is broken. The article suggests measuring greatness the same way tennis does. Quoting: 'Here's what Carlsen should do: Beat Anand for the title, and then work with FIDE to institutionalize four big tournaments as chess's Grand Slams, simultaneously eliminating the title of world champion. Corporate funding for even major chess tournaments can come and go with frustrating regularity, meaning FIDE itself has to get involved. Perhaps the grand slam tournaments could be located in three cities permanently—Moscow, Amsterdam, and a Spanish locale such as Linares would be natural picks—with a fourth that would rotate from year to year. This would give chess the same clear and predictable yardstick for greatness that golf and tennis have instead of the extremely crude world champion benchmark.'"
I watch chess for the riveting slow-action replays.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Clearly, the current 3-year cycle makes no sense.
At the same time, people LIKE tournaments. If you want to be the true world champion, why not have regionals, as the author suggests -- but limit them to residents and let them be "open" (single elimination in round 1). We have brackets in other sports. This would allow people to compete regardless of wealth.
Each "continental champion" (think "North American Champion" or even "East Asian Champion") could face off in a tournament with the other regionals. This would let each population cheer for its hometown star from New York to New Dehli. Sure, maybe the two "best" don't face off in the "World Championship" but it also allows underdogs to win more easily and makes it more competitive.
Or we could just crown Deep Blue every year.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
America sucks at chess. Among the top 100 players, only 4 are from the US, and get this - none of the four were actually born in the US.
In tournaments it's about who can pick the most points from the weakest players, of course you'd like to win every time but if you're facing Carlsen I think most players will be more than happy to draw and try to outpace him on the rest. The world championship is intended to be a hardcore duel between the two best players, you have to defeat your opponent to win you can't skirt around it. The issue is twofold, one to get the opportunity to play you must win the candidates tournament meaning you must be pretty damn good in tournaments anyway and second by the time another championship comes around many expect the current champion to fall. Unlike many other sports the chess ranking is far more important than "points" collected from tournaments in other sports, so it's hard to make a single tournament be all that important. There are already several long-standing tournaments that usually have most of the top ten players, they're not going to get bigger even if the world championship went away.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That would have been the Indians. Or the Italians and Spanish for the modern game, via the Moors who brought it from Persia.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
I think the problem the author has is that he wants to believe that there is a singular notion of "best chess player". In reality, there are multiple notions of the best chess player. Ratings measure more the ability to stay consistent throughout your career and never let your form dip, tournament wins measure more your ability to take points off weaker players and shift our mindset rapidly to deal with the next style which comes along... and the world championship measures more your ability to present an impregnable wall of defensive ability and be unbeatable.
These are all very valuable things to have, and wanting to take one of them away just because your mind isn't flexible enough to cope with them all existing simultaneously is selfish.
It is not actually separated. Most chess is open. And there is no such thing as men's chess. There are special women-only tournaments as a response to there being 10-1 men in the sport, and a lot of sexist morons. So for a lot of women that is the only way for them to enjoy it.
See also: http://phys.org/news150954140.html
They don't have separate men's and women's. The main FIDE rating list includes both men and women players. The thing is, there are just not that many highly rated women players. To put it into perspective, the current FIDE top 100 list contains only one woman - Judit Polgar, no. 58. So they created another list for women to make the game more competitive for women and increase women's participation. There are chess tournaments exclusively for women, but there are no tournaments exclusively for men. Women are free to enter the open tournaments.
As to why there are so many more good men chess players compared to women? I don't know.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
And moreover, since Judit Polgar was capable of becoming a world championship candidate, it's proven that women can compete with men at the top.
The problem is that chess, or at least, serious chess seems to be an almost exclusively male pastime, for reasons I can only guess at. This leads to there being very few women in the top ranks of the game, simply because there are very few women at all ranks of the game, which creates the perception that they can't compete. So people organise separate tournaments for girls because that's what you do in sport. And so girls learning chess only have a tiny pool of other people to practice against, so they don't get the broad range of experience that the boys do, and they imagine becoming women's world champion rather than world champion so they don't get the ambition boys do, and so the regular stream of Judit Polgars which we need to break this idea is suppressed.
Segregation is a disaster for women's chess, but it creates a self-propagating vicious circle. It is its own explanation.
Why should all three locations be in Eurasia? Fuck that.
Why should the US baseball finals be called "the world series"? Why should the US rugby-ripoff-for-sissies-in-padding-who-need-a-rest-every-twenty-seconds be called the same name the rest of the planet had long been using for a completely different game? Fuck that, in the wrong'un.
One town's very like another
when your heads down over your pieces brother
Chess does not need to be a show financed by big money
Of course it does.
Announcer:"If Kasparov fails to move his Redbull King within the next two moves, he could face danger from the Challenger's Capital One Queen."
Madden:"That's right Gus. All he has to do is put Kasparov into a Bud Light Checkmate, and then he might just stand a chance of winning this thing."
we've always brought in big talent from elsewhere
Einstein 'nuff said
Arguably, we have a certain talent for importing talent... Scoring all the Jewish physicists when the Nazis drove them out, in order to build a bomb, and then scoring all the Nazi rocket scientists when the Soviets drove them out, in order to build something to deliver it with...
Playing both ends against everybody, awww yeah...
I've yet to RTFA, but the sentence "Despite currently holding the title, Anand is very much the underdog, which only serves to illustrate why the current system is broken" does nothing to illustrate the point. Rather the opposite: a contender who beats the incumbent happens all the time. The fact that this is possible, is the prime motivator for trying at all, and thus the reason for the existance these tournaments.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
You mean Hand Egg?
Truly the greatest thing about America is its ability to attract immigrants that then add to its greatness. We should be very careful not to ruin that, either through policy or xenophobia. It's the one thing we can compete in better than anybody else, and that fresh infusion of energy and labor keeps our economy and culture going.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
I wonder if it is because men seem to have more of a tendency to become single minded/obsessive about things.
You're obviously not married.
Well, and the whole football name criticism is a bit disingenuous as well. There is no such sport as "football." That's merely a common shortening of the name of several sports. In America, technically it's American Gridiron Football, whereas what most of the rest of the world calls football is Association Football, which itself is a "ripoff" of Rugby Football and Cambridge Rules Football. Then there's Australian Rules Football, Canadian Gridiron Football, Gaelic Football, two major kinds of Rugby Football, and a host of other related sports. Most of these involve a fair bit of hand use, with Association Football being the exception, though let's not forget the goalkeeper uses his hands quite a bit. All the games involve the feet, and all the games share a common ancestry. Just as we didn't evolve from chimpanzees, both species evolved from a common ancestor, the same can be said of the various football sports.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
You do realize American Football is a very intellectual game and is probably the closest physical sport to chess. I very highly doubt you know anything about it. Each play is carefully choosen to outwit the opponent. The time between plays allows for that setup.
You keep watching that sissy garbage of yours. Ill stick to a real sport.
To be fair, it's because the game is pure cerebral memoization and lacks and true skill component or even the mildest hand-eye coordination. The devs have all but abandoned the game after the queen and bishop patches. IMO, I liked the preivous versions when the queen was no more special than the king. At least it was more accessible to checkers players.
From a game designer perspective the complexity level of chess is painfully low, so much that computer "AI" opponents consists of better ways to organize a tree of known moves, hardly anything like machine learning at all. It's only slightly less boring than checkers to most folks. It's not like other more complex (and fun) turn based strategy games don't exist. Try out one of the flavors of Ogre Battle, or Final Fantasy Tactics -- Hell, even Advance Wars.
If the "digital vs board game" component is throwing you for a loop: It shouldn't. I implement tactics games as paper cutouts and dice to ensure they're fun before spending a bunch of time fleshing out the tedius combat details you'll only concentrate on in rare instances, in favor of the larger game. See? Chess even lacks the levels of complexity an average videogame has. Humans are cybernetic beings, as such they can allocate their attention across a wide ranging field, then bore down into problem spots; A good game provides interesting detail at all levels of play with enough varriation that even without dice you'll never get the exact same game twice -- With chess? There's basically right and wrong moves starting at the 2nd move -- no emergent properties at all, and an environment complexity of precicely ZERO. Whomever can think far enough ahead wins. That's why Chess is a solved game.
Oh sure the game's got history and an over inflated sense of prestige. Look down your nose at other games and play that shitty one. You die-hard elitist chess fans are fucking ridiculous from an information theory and cybernetics vantagepoint. Computers can just help precicely manage more variables and thus allow us to play games with more breadth and depth than a 64 cell grid overlaid with 6 -- COUNT THEM: SIX -- movement patterns. A kid playing halo competively has more shit going on in their brain than a chessmaster. Don't believe me? Whip out the FMRI and see.
Bunch of pompus morons. I'm fine with chess having it's circlejerk. What pisses me off is how folks who tend to like these "ancient" games see everyone else as childish, when their game requires the least cognitive ability to master comparatively. Pokemon would be a step up, though I reccomend Magic: The Gathering instead.
Perhaps it's not America that sucks at chess, but Chess that sucks at America?
"That would have been the Indians. Or the Italians and Spanish for the modern game, via the Moors ..."
I'm so sorry, but It's the Moops.
I love ELO... Jeff Lynne is a musical genius!
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Association football is called "football" because it's played on foot, as opposed to polo, which is played on horseback. The name was originally given derisively; it implied "poor people ball."
In the 1850s, the word "soccer" meant "a member of an association." A 19th century soccer star popularized its use to mean "the game played by members of an association football association."
Well, and the whole football name criticism is a bit disingenuous as well.
In America, technically it's American Gridiron Football
"American" and "Gridiron" make sense. But "Football?" The players feet hardly ever contact the ball. And it's not even a ball.
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Why should all three locations be in Eurasia? Fuck that.
Why should the US baseball finals be called "the world series"? Why should the US rugby-ripoff-for-sissies-in-padding-who-need-a-rest-every-twenty-seconds be called the same name the rest of the planet had long been using for a completely different game? Fuck that, in the wrong'un.
Ah yes. I love when British or Aussie wankers like you post that. Allow me to educate you out of your ignorance.
Imagine, if you will, that the MLS (Major League Soccer - the top US professional league of what the rest of the world calls "football") announced that it was the greatest team in the world and that the EPL champion was a bunch of chumps who it could easily defeat. You would laugh. Rightly so. What European league do you think MLS is probably equivalent to? Maybe the French league?
The fact that you don't know due to your ignorance is that the best players in the world in baseball play in the USA in MLB. The gap between MLB and the best other league, which is Japan, is probably akin to the gap between MLS and the EPL. So there actually are no other leagues/teams that can realistically claim to be world's champions. That's why it's called the World Series - it truly is the best of the best. There are players in MLB right now from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Asia. The cream of the cream play in MLB. They don't toil in the other leagues. Again, the only other professional league that has a decent number of MLB quality players, and it's probably only 1-2 per team, is the league in Japan. I'm deliberately ignoring the top minor professional leagues in the USA as the best of those players will be in MLB eventually, but explaining how that system works would take more time than really necessary.
If you don't like American football and prefer rugby, that's your business, but rugby is actually a pretty crappy sport. If the US cared about it at all, and we do not, we would own the entire world in the sport. I have zero doubt about that. In fact, I wish that someone would field a team out of our best professional football rejects and compete internationally.
Actually, gridiron football is called "football" because it derives from the same sport as association football does. If you go back and look at the sport as it existed before organizations started codifying the rules you will discover that different towns played the sport differently. Association football chose to adopt (and adapt) the rule sets from towns that minimized the use of the hands. The various rugby variants adopted (and adapted) rule sets from towns that emphasized carrying the ball. Both variants of the game were called "football" because they were played on foot, rather than on horseback. I have never seen a good explanation of how gridiron football evolved from the rugby variants, although I am sure it has something to do with the introduction of playing on fields laid out with yard markers.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Actually, there is a very pragmatic reason that the U.S. dominates most sports it cares about. It has almost three times the population of the next country with a comparable average per capita income. In addition, the U.S. is ethnically more heterogeneous than any other country on the planet. These two factors mean that for any given activity the U.S. almost certainly has as many or more people with the inborn ability to excel at any given human activity and the money to make it worth their while to develop that ability IF sufficient numbers of people in the U.S. have an interest in that activity. This does not mean that the U.S. is better than other countries, it just means that the confluence of factors leads to there being people in the U.S. who can excel at an activity and there being, potentially, enough money to attract the best from elsewhere. No other country currently enjoys that combination.
The EU comes close to providing a similar environment, but it has greater cultural variations between its various parts than the U.S. does, at this time. In those instances where its interest in an activity crosses all, or most, of its internal borders, it is able to develop a similar position on the world stage that the U.S. does in baseball and basketball (that is, develop world class competitors and attract the best from the rest of the world).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Parent does have a point. I spent some time studying chess openings and competitive play, and it is kind of stale. There isn't a lot of variety in openings that won't get your ass kicked all over the board, and to be really competitive you have to spend a lot of time examining openings and positions that haven't changed much in several hundred years. I believe that a few chess masters have advocated changes to the game to mix it up a bit, and chance it from a game of who can memorize more openings and positions and into more of a dynamic strategy game.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!