Reforming FIDE, Part 2: Assessment
Now that we know what FIDE officially believes its own mission is—to be the “governing body of the sport of chess and regulate all international chess competitions”—we can move forward to address the question: Is it actually doing a good job at that?
A good first step towards answering this question, I believe, is to conduct the following thought experiment: What would happen if FIDE would disappear tomorrow?
After all, if the result of a suddenly FIDE-less world would be an immediate level of disarray throughout an abruptly compromised global chess landscape, then that would be a sure sign of its structural importance and contemporary relevance. But personally, I’m of the view (together with many, many others) that the exact opposite would be the case: were FIDE to suddenly vanish, the chess world, on the whole, would simply breathe a collective sigh of relief.
More specifically, I’m convinced that it’s important to calmly distinguish FIDE’s structural role—its “international chess efficacy,” if you will—from concerns of corruption, politicization and all of that. It’s not that those issues aren’t worthy of consideration in their own right, of course (and they will be duly addressed in all their unpalatable detail in an upcoming post) but they are properly quite distinct from evaluating whether or not FIDE is actually accomplishing its official mission—and, very much relatedly, investigating to what extent said mission is still relevant in today’s world.
It’s logically possible, at least, to imagine a thoroughly unscrupulous administrative structure nonetheless doing a reasonable, even impressive, job in some specific areas. That, in itself, is of course no reason to avoid addressing the corruption issue in its turn—it’s very hard to imagine that a reformed system would be structurally unable to match the productivity of certain pockets of a corrupt one—but it’s naturally vital to coolly assess where, exactly, we stand at the outset to ensure that any reforms we make don’t unwittingly compromise some particular sector that’s presently operating reasonably and effectively.
Indeed, many of the existing criticisms of FIDE suffer strongly, I think, from precisely this conflation of structural issues with FIDE’s depressingly notorious levels of politicization and internal administrative dysfunctionality (to put it charitably). Single-mindedly focusing on the corruption aspect naturally leads one away from considering key questions like, “To what extent is the mandate of this organization founded in 1924 still relevant a century later in a radically different world?”
Instead, most people find themselves unthinkingly rushing to the conclusion that if only so and so could somehow become the head of FIDE, or if this or that nefariously meddling government would somehow magically change, all FIDE-related problems would promptly disappear. They wouldn’t.
Let’s begin with the positives. While I certainly claim no expertise, and have done no detailed examination of the situation whatsoever, my sense is that, on the whole, the mechanisms for training arbiters and awarding titles is currently being done quite competently, as evidenced by the fact that no chess player I spoke with has complained about this (at least not to me).
Even the few related incidents that have occurred, such as the controversy surrounding one of Elisabeth Pähtz’s GM norms, didn’t seem to impugn those in the business of performing the actual investigations and the awarding of titles. When I spoke with Elisabeth about it, she had nothing negative whatsoever to say about anyone involved in the process itself—what particularly bothered her was her sense that a disproportionate amount of attention was paid to the issue simply because she is a woman (an assessment with which I happen to agree and believe to be important to address—but that’s a topic for another day).
Now to the negatives. The world of officially-sanctioned top-level chess is, as I have explicitly mentioned on several other occasions, a shambolic disaster. There is no clear, stable identifiable structure—no coherent, modern, publicly-acknowledged sporting culture in which any prospective fan can easily immerse herself and participate (other than the world championships—of which much more, necessarily, in an upcoming post).
More significantly still, there is an undeniable sense that, professionally-speaking, FIDE is increasingly anachronistic and out of touch with the modern world, mired in an outdated framework that was likely never terribly efficient but has now become a significant impediment to the enormous opportunity to successfully transform chess into an integral aspect of our modern sports and entertainment culture to the untold benefit of players, fans, and a wide range of concomitant business interests.
THE CHESS BOOM & TECHNOLOGY
Because chess, as we all know, is booming. And it is booming, I’m convinced, principally because it is a tremendously engaging, internationally-recognized activity that is so strikingly in lock step with the dominant communications technology of our time. As Danny Rensch pointedly described it in the film series Through the Mirror of Chess:
“Unlike a lot of other experiences online—whether it’s social media that is anything but truly social in connecting people, whether it’s video games that are often a fantasy, maybe disconnecting people from reality would be what they’re doing, more than connecting them with anything that they might really be able to do in real life—chess is not that. Chess is actually the same game online as it is physically over the board, the same game that has been a piece of human history for literally hundreds of years, if not thousands."
Now, there is a great deal to be said about what all this means in terms of chess’ potential impact on a wide range of contemporary societal issues, from leisure to community to education to prison reform to personal empowerment (there is enough there to make an entire film or two, in fact), but that is not, remember, what we are talking about here. By FIDE’s own admission, their mandate is to be “the governing body of the sport of chess and regulate all international chess competitions”—in other words, the claim is that FIDE is integral to the success of chess as an international sport.
And the obvious conclusion I am driving towards is that, while it’s conceivable that an international governing body like FIDE was perhaps necessary—or at least helpful—to establish and maintain chess as a bona fide international sport in 1924, it is completely irrelevant (at best) a century later.
As a self-professed “chess tourist,” I’m naturally quite careful to limit my chess-related pronouncements. I have personal feelings about standard subjects like everyone else (which players are the most exciting, which openings are the most enjoyable to play and watch, which past games are the most fun to study), but it seems completely ridiculous for me to opine on any of that—why on earth should anyone listen to what I have to say on those topics?
But when it comes to the question of how the world of professional chess should be reformed, it’s a different story entirely: in this case, I’m convinced that I’m actually an ideal representative of the target audience, precisely the sort of person the chess world should be encouraging to participate in the new professional sports and entertainment possibilities of chess. Because, as it happens, I’m someone who would definitely be interested in regularly watching top-flight professional chess, but on the whole I don’t. Because it is an opaque, incoherent mess.
Unlike other sports, it seems impossible to get any clear, comprehensive sense of what the hell is going on: which events matter more than others and hence who rises to the big occasion, who are the rising stars and where the next great battles will occur. There are interesting snippets here and there, but everything that is done well—everything that actually intrigues me, draws me in and sustains my interest—is done by those outside of FIDE, like Chess.com or Lichess.
A particularly revealing example of what I mean here is chess commentary. I explicitly highlighted the role of chess commentary in both Through the Mirror of Chess and Chessays because I’m convinced that it perfectly illustrates how modern technology has completely transformed the consumer experience of top-level chess. I’ve spent hours on end binge-watching Danny Rensch and Robert Hess giving highly illuminating and entertaining real-time analysis of top-level games—games I wouldn’t have spent more than a minute (at most) watching without such commentary.
Of course, chess commentary, of one fashion or another, has existed for many years now (I’ve chatted about this with the likes of Bruce Pandolfini and Ray Keene, as it happens, who have many amusing stories to tell), and I’ve long believed that chess commentators are, on the whole, extremely under-recognized for the remarkable job they do under particular challenging conditions (what other sport involves watching people think for prolonged periods of time punctuated by a few seconds of “action”?).
But we’re unquestionably in a different era now: the combination of clear, attractive visuals, real-time computer-aided analysis and insightful and engaging chess experts makes for a transformatively captivating commentary experience that is simply essential for the enjoyment and active participation (well, as active as you can be as a spectator) of people like myself.
In short, as a typical representative member of the target audience, my personal conviction is that all the pieces of the puzzle are well and truly in place for me to enthusiastically become a professional chess fan, a regular consumer of chess-related sports entertainment, except for one thing: the professional chess landscape—FIDE’s self-proclaimed domain and primary reason for existence—is nothing less than an unmitigated failure.
Which brings me, inevitably, to the world chess championship.
A BIT OF BACKGROUND:
I am documentary filmmaker and author. I created a recently released 4-part documentary, THROUGH THE MIRROR OF CHESS: A CULTURAL EXPLORATION, about the remarkable impact of chess on culture, art, science and sport. I also wrote a book, CHESSAYS: TRAVELS THROUGH THE WORLD OF CHESS, about all sorts of chess-related issues that I encountered during my time spent as a tourist in the chess world.
