IM Greg Shahade: "Slow Chess should die a fast death"!

Do masters and grandmasters play much G/60 chess?

Most games I know about at that level are slow or blitz.

Speed chess is way more fun !!

Professional chss players get paid to play chess, it's their job, they basically have all day to do it.  I play chess in my lunch break of a totally different full time job or maybe when I get home in the evening.  That's why I play faster chess - I don't have time.  I like watching the professionals play long chess though - I don't have to put the effort in so it's fine to watch a some 5 hour games after work, but obviously not to play one.

Obviously for you. Many an amateur in all levels enjoy a good, deep game lasting several hours. It's an experience - and of course, nobody is forced to do it if they don't want to. 

Classical chess, classical FIDE ratings and classical titles count more. 

Patzers,beware!This guy has a longer attention span than you!

I think there is something to be said for Shahade's opinion.  In my area there is only a handful of rated rapid tournaments a year.  This is unfortunate as a 5 round G30 tournament can be finished in a day as opposed to the 2.5 days it'll take to finish a long time control tournament.  This in itself is a barrier to more people playing serious chess. 

I enjoy long time controls but finding an entire weekend or long weekend where I can or even want to commit to 20 hours of chess in any given year is rare.

Does more rapid tournaments over classical tournaments dumb down chess?  I doubt it. 

Of all the games I've watched at tournaments, the only one I remember is a last round, board #1 with K+R vs K+R+P played between a master and an FM.  Analog flags hanging with under a minute on either side from a G30 start.  People think hockey is a fast game. 

I see it.

I don't see it. I'm in V2. Oatmeal, are you in V3?

"We are intentionally formatting chess tournaments to be as little fun as possible. This is stupid and detrimental to the long term health and popularity of the game."


This speaks for itself.

Every area is a bit different.  While I won't say I'm in a chess desert, it is pretty close

I've held a few quick rated events but I don't think the majority of players within driving distance are really interested in playing 5 or 6 rounds of rapid (assuming you can get enough players for that many rounds).

My standard is 4 round G/60,d5 tourneys for the majority of the events I run. For a while the TD before me (and the first ones I ran) were 5 round G/60,d0, which made for a long day. I've also held a some two-day events, 5 round G/120,d5 and my last one 5 G/90,+30.

To get more players from outside the area, I need to have longer time controls for the most part. If I had a decent free or very low cost location (that allowed entries and cash prizes to be paid) I might look into more quick events but I don't think the demand is there. Again, that is from my area and I'm sure there are similar areas.

I'm also loathe to play G/30 (since it impacts regular ratings) as are some other players I've spoken with, especially since it is way to easy to get into time trouble and blunder games with the lower time.

Interesting Article. I love slow chess and choose not to play any other kind. Each to their own I guess.

10 round G/30 would be a fun alternative to playing a CCA event first 3 rounds G/45 and last 2 rounds 40/2 + G/1.

I'm very surprised to say that, after reading his blog, everything that he says makes sense to me.  It's not about dumbing it down, it's about evolving and looking at what people want from chess and what chess tournaments need to do to change into something commercially viable and interesting to watch for more than a small niche.  If people want titles, accomplishments, or to play seriously, they play slow chess.  If people want to have fun, they play fast chess.  This also seems like a logical progression from where chess has come from - if you look at the history of chess before chess clocks were standard practice, over the board games could last for days.  This changed when chess clocks were introduced, but time controls were still slower than they are now, requiring adjournments overnight and play resuming in the morning.  I feel bad saying this, but I wonder if it's more common than I think - I don't really enjoy watching chess live.  I would much rather go through a game with the annotations after the fact than sit through six hours of a broadcast.  The other thing is that when people argue about the quality of the game, you have to consider that if quality were the only thing that mattered, advanced chess, engine matches, or correspondence would be at the forefront.  

for the tl;dr people:  I agree with Shahade and the points that he makes.  Chess needs to evolve to be a spectator sport and to make tournament play more than a niche.

Nowadays chess games can also last for days, or weeks,or months - just look at the thriving "online chess" community on this very website. Correspondence chess has never enjoyed a truer renaissance than right here, right now. 

There's everything for whoever wants it - you name it, you got it: The classical chess with its honors and titles, corr. chess, computer chess, cyborg chess, rapid chess with its tournament and even FIDE ratings, blitz, bullet, chess variants, chess960... there's more of everything. 

Most chess players seem to take it as a given that we should strive to make chess more popular. I don't really see the point. Do we really want to make a WWE version of chess where top players play through a crazy prepared game at bullet speeds for the sake of entertaining some idiotic audience?

I personally don't give a shit whether chess becomes popular or not as long as I have plenty of people around my level to play against.

Shahade lost me at

world championship.

I can see more 30+5 happening, but a 15+5 WC?

Bogus.

The game needs to remain what it was for hundreds of years.

15+5 is not chess.

Speeding up the game for spectators is not chess.

Chess is chess.

Let's keep it that way.

Let's look at it this way. How many blitz wins from five years ago do you still relish? Nothing beats the exhilaration of a G60 when hotly contested against a rival opponent when winning with an imaginative plan, executed with a precisely calculated sacrifice, nor the afterglow that comes from such. Blitz has its place; quick , cheap fun. But to me, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat are attenuated when all you do is just click and start another, and another, and another...

This is basically how I responded to the blog, too. Why on earth would anyone want it to be any different than it is right now? We have everything for everyone. I just can't fathom why someone would want to eradicate classical chess as it's been played for hundreds of years rather than just be happy that rapid, blitz, and bullet are now viable "focuses" and specialities for a player today. There are tons of tournaments, prizes, attention, etc all centered around speed chess today that there wasn't yesterday. So, not only does he want to have his slice of the pie, he wants the whole thing. It's not good enough that everyone is happy - He needs chess to make a full and total conversion from what it is now to a sport where games longer than G60 don't exist at all.

I think that's where he loses anyone who is even remotely interested in Chess enough to actually play in tournaments to begin with. Mr. Shahade's blog post, attitude, and notion are all just absolutely ridiculous.

Very, very well said.

I believe that he's either - 

1) being facetious, or - 

2) had his share of disappointment from tournaments, people in chess, attitudes, bad experiences - so that he's now in "revenge" mode...

Much like a pianist who gets no decent opportunities to practice his art because of favoritism, envy etc. - and then he gets upset and furious that other people, less capable than himself, get all of the opportunities, the placements, the worthy places to play... and starts writing articles about the well-deserved demise of the whole profession!!

Frustration can be a big motivator... but alas, it's a skewed viewpoint and shouldn't really be taken seriously (you may take the person and his frustrations to heart if you are his friend - just not his apocalyptic messages and ideas)