The Tournament at the End of Time
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Alright, let's go.
Ahem.
It is sometime in the month of June, Anno Domini 2022. The 2022 Candidates Tournament has just finished, with Ian Alexandrovich Nepomniachtchi cleared to challenge Magnus Carlsen for the title of World Chess Champion a second time. However, with the World Chess Championship scheduled for 2023, the thoughts of the chess community are still far from the title.
That is set to change very soon.
In Barlinek, a small town in Poland's West Pomerania Voivodeship, Emmanuel Lasker suddenly appears in a flash of light, nearly being run over by a local man's Volkswagen, "Where am I, what is going on?" he gasps in his native German, barely able to recognize neither his Prussian hometown nor the strange automobile whose lights he is shielding his eyes from. "Is this heaven?" he wonders as a man exits the car, holding a strange, oblong object to his ear. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how the reader may interpret), it is not the case, and the confused former world chess champion is brought the local police station, where, in an awkward Google Translate assisted conservation, he slowly learns about his predicament. Any doubts about the man's identity are dispelled when he, unfamiliar with technology, directs an officer on a computer in a chess.com 15 | 10 tournament in dismantling the opposition.
In Riga, Latvia, Mikhail Nekhemyevich Tal similarly materializes in the Latvian Academy of Sciences building wearing a mismatched pair of shoes, causing several nearby to faint. The Magician of Riga's identity is quickly confirmed with the presence of his right cleft hand as the facility is evacuated under the pretense of a gas leak.
In Chennai, India, Viswanathan Anand, having seemingly aged backwards about a decade and a half, suddenly appears in a rarely unfilled seat in the city's crowded metro. Some immediately make a beeline for the closing exit, the more religious onboard are moved to animated praise.
The internet is energized as sudden sightings of World Chess Champions appear in the cities of their birth, truth blurring with fiction as government censors clash with swarms of photos and clips, some real, most doctored, showing these champions, young and in their prime, being hastily spirited away by local authorities. Copycats post games - some horribly faked, claiming to have played against one of the champions. Airports, police stations, any locations of importance in the sighting cities are flooded by people trying to get a look at these champions. Conflicts suddenly stop as world governments try to understand the meaning of this break in reality. The worldwide devout ring the bells of apocalypse as authorities try in vain to contain the escalating wildfire. But for all the chaos that would be wrought upon the Earth by such a scenario, I am only interested in one question: How would these immortals fare in a tournament for the title of World Chess Champion - of All Time?
Melodramatic intro aside, I think the question of which World Chess Champion is truly the strongest has been floating around since, I think, forever. It certainly has been for me, and this forum idea has similarly been around in my head for a while, until I finally managed to finalize some details. So watch and entertain yourself with this slightly post-pubescent 1700 trying to wrangle the question of which World Chess Champion is the strongest of all.
Part 1: Conditions and Prep
Alright, firstly, all the World Chess Champions will be in their "prime" form of any time (thus, we might be seeing 2030s Magnus playing in this tournament), a culmination of their physical, mental, skill, etc. time when "teleported" to the present day. They will also retain all their chess experiences throughout their whole lives. However, even with these conditions, the field is still heavily skewed towards the modern champions.
In his infamous "I Hate Chess" interview, Bobby Fischer complained of what he saw as the game of chess increasingly falling into monotonous opening theory up into the twentieth moves, and indeed, I would think that earlier chess players like Wilhelm Steinitz would have to fight for their survival against even revised mainline openings. Additionally, the sheer volume of resources and experience available to modern players, such as engines, simply dwarfs what a past champion would've had at their disposal. The sheer volume of games played by present players is many times that of players even coming into the 20th century. There's probably a lot of other things one could say about the imbalance between past and present players, but the point is, if we were to just throw the champions immediately into a tournament, it would probably look like the moderns demolishing their predecessors. To resolve this, I plan for a preparation period of one to two months be allotted to the players for preparation, with all chess resources in the form of books, databases, engines, etc. available to the champion, as well as ready physical and mental exercise tools (as well as tech support for all the technological ignorant ones). Communication with the outside world will be limited, and communication between preparation teams will be strictly forbidden. Champions will be able to contact their close and loved ones, be it through the veil of time if needed. Each champion will also be able to choose a non-champion as an assistant for the period of their prep time. I say this solely because I want to see Siegbert Tarrasch get into an argument with Short or some other modern GM. Assuming that all the champions come out of their preparations mentally intact, we may proceed to the next step of this experiment.
Part 2: Players and Pairings
In this tournament, I will be recognizing world chess champions starting from Steinitz, as well as the FIDE-PCA split champions as players, thus giving us twenty patzers to vie for the title of World Chess Champion of All Time. I am personally not familiar with historical rating scaling, and honestly, I won't even try to open that can of worms and damage my own sanity, so, for the sake of simplicity, I will simply number the champions 1 through 20, 1 being Steinitz, the earliest, and 20 Magnus, the most recent. Anand will take number 15 for this scenario.
Google random number generator thus gives me the following round 1 pairings:
1. M. Carlsen v. A. Alekhine
2. V. Topalov v. V. Smyslov
3. A. Karpov v. T. Petrosian
4. G. Kasparov v. M. Euwe
5. B. Spassky v. V. Anand
6. E. Lasker v. V. Kramnik
7. R. Fischer v. M. Botvinnik
8. W. Steinitz v. A. Khalifman
9. R. Kasimdzhanov v. R. Ponomariov
10. J. Capablanca v. M. Tal
Pretty interesting first round we've got here.
Out of respect to the past, I think it's only appropriate to hold the tournament in London, the site of numerous early international tournaments, including the one which won Steinitz his title as first world champion. I imagine that I would allow the champions to decide on the exact tournament format themselves, perhaps less out of any genuinely good desire than to see the chess world burn.
Part 3: What I'll Be Expecting
I imagine my top three candidates for first place would be Carlsen, Kasparov, and Fischer. They've all had dominant reigns as champions, and I imagine Fischer likely would've boasted a sufficiently long-lasting one too, had he not forfeited against Karpov. They're more recent players with the luxury of better resources ahead of time compared to their predecessors and with much more experience in the field of games, including the fact that their careers were not stunted by major world events such as the World Wars. Even with the 1-2 month prep time given to the players, all the older players will have to seriously manage their time well with the sheer number of resources at their disposal to make up the century's time gap. Anyways, here's some various things I would be looking out for in a theoretically highly publicized tournament of this kind, with the heavy mental stress and other conditions mounted on the players.
Fischer being himself - Needless to say, Robert James was notoriously toxic in his time on the chess world, getting into arguments over which kind of board he was playing on, demanding incredibly specific tournament conditions, etc., and with the sheer amount of eyes on him, he might do something similar again, but hopefully not enough to get him ejected. Much has been speculated on Fischer's chess level, additionally, after his 1975 forfeit. I think with the conditions of this tournament, we can finally crack that question.
Tal and his sometimes dubious attacks - Mikhail Nekhemyevich constantly left his opponents fearful that they were about to be on the receiving end of a brilliancy, some of those fears being realized, but subsequent analysis has revealed that some of his attacks were not exactly sound and could've been repelled with exact play, had his opponents not been so unnerved. With the benefit of modern computing and hindsight, Tal will really have to step up his creativity game if he wants to pull off his same attacks.
Older players and the press - The game of chess today has radically changed not only on the board, but in culture from what was expected 150 years ago. Nowadays, there's a "spectacle culture" present, Magnus says he won't play anybody but Firouzja for the title, GMs describe each other as "decent", the list goes on. How the earlier generations will deal with not only being presentable on the board, but also in front of the cameras, remains to be seen.
Finally, I get that this would probably go better in my blog, but no one visits that anymore, any other things you'd be expecting from this tournament, drop it in the comments. I don't know what else I'm supposed to write.