FIDE World Championship - Magnus Carlsen vs Ian Nepomniactchi

There is a Blitz World Championship coming up soon. The time control is 3 min+2s. I mean 3 2! That is way too fast. Who on earth can follow that? I suggest we change it too 30 minutes Blitz to make it more viewer friendly.

I did some research, and it will probably surprise you, that the reason they hold the world championship in the first place is to figure out who the best chess player is.

I know, I know. All this time I thought it was for the purpose of entertaining @nikkilikechikki but I guess there are other things in life.

+1

Do you really think they hold the world championship to determine who the best chess player is? If Nepo were to win, do you think anyone would say that he is the best chess player? No. The reason they hold the world championship is to have a big chess tournament with a prestigious title and lots of fanfare. That's it. We already know who the best chess player is. Rating makes that absolutely clear.

Remember when Kramnik beat Kasparov in the title match?  I wonder what % of chess players thought Kramnik was the best player?

If you cannot beat your opponent a single time in 15 games while losing 2, you cannot claim to be better than him.

@DreamscapeHorizons - Llama, of course.

Yes.

Yes (would have been better to ask "do you think most people would say...")

Would I say Nepo is the best? It depends.

If Carlsen gave a reasonable performance and lost, then it would at least be clear he is not the best chess player.

And in general, just because a championship is suppose to determine the champion doesn't mean it's good at it

The marketing aspect is secondary. The world runs on money, so whenever there is an event of interest, someone is going to figure out how to make money off it.

If it weren't purportedly the best two players in the world, for example if I played my neighbor, no one would care.

In general, yes, ratings do an excellent job of ranking players.

One argument against this is that players are not machines that give equal effort and preparation to each event. Tournaments that allow players to qualify for the Candidates, and then the Candidates itself, are when players are doing their best to play at their peak. In this sense (and when players take long breaks e.g. Kramnik in 2018) ratings aren't perfect.

@ Jenium:  That's a good point but had they played more than 1 match would the results have been the same. Everybody goes through peaks and lulls. Also, I didn't follow the results from top tournaments immediately after, but who had the better overall average results over the next couple of years? I'm not sure.

In the case of Kasparov-Kramnik, Kramnik was winning in 5 different games, but only managed to convert 2. Kasparov never had a good position throughout the whole match. Almost felt like Karpov-Kasparov 1984, how successful Kramnik's prep was. 

@jenium - history is absolutely filled with underdogs becoming champions. The very definition of underdog is an inferior player/team/whatever and being the best never guarantees a championship. Champion means champion. Best means best. Kramnik employed a strategy that Kasparov was not prepared for, but nobody in their right mind thinks he was better.

@llama - the problem with your argument, and the problem with a championship in general, is that it's a small sample. Any statistician will tell you that in small samples, anything can happen, so one tournament means little from a statistical standpoint. Ratings are a much more reliable measure of what is best. Being world champion gets you in the history books, gains you money and fame, but it doesn't mean that you're the best. It just means you won one match.

In chess, as in many sports, if player A is better than player B (who is better than player C), that does not guarantee that player A will always beat player C. Different players have different styles and unique weaknesses that can be exploited by certain players who are willing to invest the research, prep, and hours of training and practice. Magnus is objectively a stronger player than Nepo, to be sure, but he still has the capacity to lose in a short match.

Take tennis for example. For a long time, Federer was undisputably the best in the world, but he was regularly defeated by Nadal, whose style presented a challenge to him.

Well, historically it means you won many matches (all the candidates matches and then the WCC match).

In modern times it means you won (or placed highly in) multiple of the strongest tournaments that year (FIDE Grand Prix, FIDE world cup, Candidates tournament).

A qualification so difficult, and tournaments so hard, that you can be knocked out without losing a single game! (As MVL was in the 2017 World Cup).

So it's more than a single match or tournament. Getting to the championship involves some luck, sure (Gelfand was not an ideal challenger) but it generally means the player has scored very well in extremely strong tournaments over the last few years.

What lots of people forget is that Kasparov was going thru a messy divorce at the time of the 2000 world championship too so, not only was he unprepared for Kramnik's match strategy, but he was also mentally distracted which prevented from focusing 100% at the board.

This is why it's important to consider athletes (including chess players) as people with complicated desires and motivations. Any number of factors on any given day can adversely influence a player's performance.

Even assuming all of that, which I grant you is an arduous process, that doesn't deny the fact that the championship itself is a small sample. Nepo certainly earned his way to the championship, but even then, the Candidates was also a small sample that didn't necessarily produce the best challenger. It produced a challenger based upon the results of a small sample. If you really wanted to ensure the best championship, you'd just select the top two rated players ignoring who the sitting champion is, and have them play. If the sitting champion is rated #16 in the world, then their play would do nothing to determine who is best. But tradition states that you must beat the sitting champion... unlike in practically every other sport.

But why don't they do it that way? Because it isn't a spectacle! It's not fun! It's not as entertaining!

Sure, no system is perfect. Nepo wasn't the one I would have picked to face Carlsen.

And if Firouzja stays above 2800, then I think a lot of people will be disappointed if he's not the next challenger.

My point in arguing that the system is fundamentally flawed in determining who is best is not to say that it's bad, but to say that it exists to entertain Nikki... and all the others out there. Using ratings without an event is boring.

This wasn't the finals of the football world cup were there is just a single game and - with a bit of luck - everything can happen.  It was a 16 game match of chess (slow chess that is, where you have enough time to think). And yes, Kramnik was the better player at that point. He beat Kasparov fair and square, and it wasn't even close.

"Kramnik employed a strategy that Kasparov was not prepared for"? Beautiful, I will remember that line next time I lose to a titled player...  I was the better player, they just employed a strategy I was not prepared for.