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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.
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.
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.
Because it is idiotic. The whole premise is. The young star challenging for the World Championship for the first time being the favorite doesn't tell us the system is broken... it tells us the challenger is a big rising star!
And the Champion is one of only, what, only 6 people to have held ratings over 2800? This is not the 90s, Anand is not Khalifman, and everybody knows Anand is the clear Champion. And that Carlsen is the clear #1 player.
We already have ratings that tells us who is the best. The World Championship is a title. Adding an extra series of tournaments and calling it a title is fine, but why would it replace the World Championship? And FIDE actually tried it, and it was a total joke and those "Champions" aren't considered real champions.
These people should first learn some history about the chess World Championship before they tell chess players how our championship should be structured to better entertain the most casual observers. Because this is a long-argued topic, and there is a very strong consensus that the World Championship title has value, that it is not always held by the strongest player, and that it is normally achieved by winning a 1 on 1 match between a Champion and a Challenger.
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
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
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.
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."
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