Reforming FIDE, Part 3: Enslaved to the Past
I must confess that I have never understood why the world chess championship is so broadly considered to be as essential to the current professional chess culture as it seems to be. Of course, I definitely see the value of a competitive structure where the hierarchy of accomplishment is so clearly evident for all to see (as explicitly mentioned in a previous post); and I will certainly grant that over the decades the world chess championship has produced a considerable amount of high drama and consequent entertainment (how could it not?), but on the whole it strikes me as an irredeemably old-fashioned and hugely inefficient way to be doing things.
Back in the day when there were relatively few top-level players, the notion of a world chess championship match to officially proclaim who was the planet’s best player might have made some sense—particularly for a community replete with top-hatted gentlemen keen to fill their ample free time by indulging in yet another wagering opportunity—but all of that is so obviously out of step with our contemporary modern sports and entertainment culture.
Many, I know, will instinctively defend the world chess championship on historical grounds, arguing that it is an essential aspect of chess tradition that must be protected at all costs, but I must admit that I am never very sensitive to such reactionary-oriented protestations.
I don’t for a moment deny the importance of preserving one’s distinct heritage—indeed, as someone who recently created a four-part documentary series on the broad sociocultural impact of chess over the past 1500 years, the one thing you can’t reasonably accuse me of is a lack of appreciation of the value of history or tradition—but that’s quite a different thing entirely from calmly recognizing when progress needs to be made.
In keeping with the spirit of these blog posts, there are two separate reasons why I’m convinced that the world chess championship should be abandoned:
- Because it is an unhelpful structural anachronism that significantly impedes the development of professional chess within an appropriately modern sports and entertainment culture framework.
- Because its very existence plays a large role in maintaining the deeply deleterious structural politicization of chess in general, and FIDE in particular.
You may, of course, disagree with one or both of these points, but it is important to recognize that they are distinct.
To put it another way, I’m convinced that even if we were to wake up tomorrow and joyfully discover that FIDE was suddenly a thoroughly transparent, completely apolitical organization without the slightest whiff of structural or personal alignment with any government or corporate interests on earth, I would still vigorously argue (always assuming that I wouldn’t have been killed by the shock, of course) that the time for a world chess championship has long passed.
To put it still another way (in order to explicitly distinguish my arguments from some notable historical precedents that every chess fan is all too well aware of), I have no sympathy whatsoever with those who are determined to “overthrow FIDE” and establish a parallel organization with its own version of the world championship. Whatever I think of the world chess championship, it is patently obvious that having one is vastly superior to having two competing ones.
So what’s my problem with the whole notion of a world chess championship?
Well, there are several things.
First of all, I don’t like the idea of the defending champion of any title getting an automatic bye to the final the next time around. Again, perhaps this was understandable back in the days when there were relatively few players around—as I pointed out in Chessays, for its first few decades that’s exactly how Wimbledon worked too—but nowadays it seems completely inappropriate and severely limiting to my experience as a fan. Rafael Nadal’s 14 French Open Titles would be a far less remarkable achievement if all that was required was winning 20 matches instead of 98 (but still impressive even then, of course—such is the magnitude of the accomplishment).
Not only does this make it structurally much easier for one player to stay at the top than it should, it also drastically narrows the scope for new, mouth-watering encounters between different sets of top players. Most people, I’m guessing, were not rooting for Ian Nepomniachtchi to win the recent Candidates Tournament because they were hoping for a different sort of world championship matchup (that is, when they assumed that Magnus Carlsen would be playing) than they had the last time around, a scant six months earlier.
From a fan’s perspective, the existing structure strongly lowers the likelihood of a diverse array of matchups, thereby limiting the potential entertainment value. This is said with no disrespect to Mr Nepomniachtchi, of course, who obviously won the qualifying tournament fair and square (and by a considerable margin)—indeed, it has nothing, properly, to do with him whatsoever. It is a structural issue.
But it is also important to note that it is a structural issue that extends well beyond the fans to the players themselves. I don’t pretend to know, of course, but it’s hard not to conclude that Magnus Carlsen would have been much more interested in spending a few months of his life diligently preparing for a long match against Ding Liren or Alireza Firouzja than plunging right back into the Ian Nepomniachtchi preparatory well only a year or so after having convincingly dispatched him the first time around.
Such a consideration immediately highlights, at least to me, the puzzling lack of interest in actively seeking out and listening to what the players actually want (a key point I will return to in a later post). The amount of speculation by self-proclaimed experts and insiders of all stripes as to why Magnus Carlsen “mysteriously elected not to defend his world title” would fill several football stadiums. The guy is still very much alive and kicking—spending his days, as usual, beating the rest of the world at chess. Why the hell don’t we just ask him?
A further structural point is that, while the world chess championship is vastly more prestigious than any other tournament, the current qualification process for the challenger (i.e. the Candidates Tournament—and yes, among all of the other far graver issues, we can add a lack of awareness of how to properly use apostrophes to the burgeoning FIDE indictment) is not significantly different than any other tournament—compare, say, the 14 matches for each player in the Candidates Tournament with the 13 played by competitors in the Tata Steel Masters—resulting in an unmistakable tinge of arbitrariness associated with the whole business.
Again, without any disrespect to Mr Nepomniachtchi whatsoever, his record going into the 2022 Candidates Tournament hardly made him the obvious choice of potential WORLD CHAMPION—his rating prior to the tournament was 2766, slightly ahead of Teimour Radjabov, Jan-Krzysztof Duda, Hikaru Nakamura and Richard Rapport, but behind Alireza Firouzja, Fabiano Caruana and Ding Liren.
What, exactly, are we saying about the status of the other professional chess events if their primary purpose is simply to serve as part of the (ever-changing) qualification process for the Candidates Tournament (i.e. the meritorious part of the qualification process, you understand, as opposed to the additional non-meritorious padding that FIDE routinely throws into the mix by approving players demanded by its political masters, such as allowing Kirill Alekseenko to compete in the 2020 Candidates Tournament despite the fact that his rating was considerably lower than many other players and he hadn’t won anything of note)?
There is a palpable asymmetry going on when the only thing that really matters—i.e. qualifying for and thus potentially winning the world championships—is to manage to put together a great two and a half weeks during one tournament.
More concretely still, given the current context in which we find ourselves, let us imagine that Hikaru Nakamura won, rather than lost, his final game of the 2022 Candidates Tournament against Ding Liren—hardly the most impossible of scenarios to envision. If so, he would now find himself as one of two participants in the upcoming FIDE World Championship held in the obviously globally-relevant epicenter that is Astana, Kazakhstan, with an odds-on chance to be the next CHAMPION OF THE WORLD (Nakamura currently has a positive head-to-head record against Nepomniachtchi for all time controls).
Does it make any sense at all to anyone (not least of which Mr Nakamura) to believe that the distance between being declared the unequivocal world champion and just another top player is one match at the end of one tournament that, in all likelihood, Hikaru Nakamura wasn’t taking nearly as seriously as he would have had he still been in the running to win the event?
All of this, then, makes it very, very difficult for me to be a professional chess fan. I get excited about watching the Australian Open because it’s clear that it is one of four premier professional tennis events during the calendar year, exactly on par with Wimbledon, Roland Garros and the US Open. It is, tennis-wise, a big deal. That doesn’t, of course, mean that there aren’t other tournaments worth paying attention to or enjoying, but it’s universally understood that these are not as significant as the grand slam events (professional tennis is particularly explicit here, as they label a range of different tournaments by class, together with associated ranking points, making it very easy to become a fan and follow what is going on).
Similarly, if I follow golf, I know that The Masters, for all of its much-vaunted tradition, is essentially equivalent to the PGA Championship—both are “majors” (and, once again, there are many lesser, but nonetheless very prestigious tournaments throughout the year). There is unquestionably a very clear and transparent hierarchy, in other words, but one which doesn’t overwhelmingly diminish the stature of every single tournament other than one “main event”.
So that, in a nutshell, is my problem with the world chess championship (I actually have more issues, but out of the goodness of my heart I’ve decided to stop there). And all of this before we begin to turn our attention to the obvious litany of corruption possibilities that naturally flow from a notoriously shady governing body whose self-appointed mandate and matching financial interests are so overwhelmingly linked to its existence.
It’s now time, in other words, for an insalubrious dive into the overtly politicized disaster zone that is FIDE, as it vigorously plays you, with its constantly-invoked Gens una sumus sliminess, for all you are worth.
I told you it couldn’t be avoided.
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.
