Lasker's 27 year reign

That is your personal opinion, but there are many who would disagree.  You don't do anything to earn a first name, but there is considerable effort involved in earning a doctorate.   The title of Dr. may be more of an identifier than the first name.

National soccer championships are generally held every year as is the FIFA Club World Cup.  Many of the sports in the Olympics have a seperate world championship held every year.  In general, I'd say annual championships are the norm at most levels of most sports and games.

Elo-style performance-based rating lists are somewhat rare in most games and sports.  In some sports, rating lists are based on participation, or may be used to encourage players to compete for small prize funds in official events.

Also, championships generate media and fan interest, and give players something to strive for.

This whole business about giving draw odds and the right to a rematch is nonsense as well.  Bronstein should be considered co-champion for the period after 1951, and Karpov for the time he drew, or else playoffs should have been held.  FIDE went too far with the rapid knockouts, but some of the changes they introduced make perfect sense.

I am not sure what you mean by "tennis world championships". Wimbledon is considered to be the most prestigious annual tournament but some of the Wimbledon winners are known not to have been anywhere near the world's top. The no.1 ranking is generally considered to be more important than a win in any particular tournament. The Olympics are a complicated affair and for some of the Olympic sports there are separate championships which may or may not be considered more important than the Olympics win. Elo performance ratings are used in a number of sports. Soccer again has a situation where most top players play in teams outside their nation-country most of the time and make their living thus but the world championship that pitches the national teams against each other every four years is considered very important. There is no situation or system that generally prevails in "all other sports and games except chess".

Atos, at what interval do you think game or sport championships (world, national, provincial, city) are most commonly held?  Annual?  Quadriennial?  In Canada at least, most chess organizations try to organize an annual championship.  I suspect that the same is true of most national chess federations as well.

Also Atos, every sport you mentioned has a clear tournament/match format with every competitor having the same hill to climb in order be called "champion", e.g. the previous champion gets no special consideration when the goal is to see who the current champion is; no draw benefits in those other sports and no extra preparation time (maybe some byes, but those are usually based on cumulative recent performance, not "I-won-the-championship-and-want-to-coast-and-avoid-elite-competition-to-get-an-unfair-advantage-the-2nd-go-round").

The analogy of tennis is a good one, but if chess should be more like tennis, then there should be no officially sanctioned "World Chess Championship" and tournament results over a career could then speak for themselves.  

But the best way to see who is "best" in chess (or anything) is to have a large competition with equal rules for the best pool of available elite competitors and have them do what they normally do...play each other in chess.  But the only way to know the best pool of competitors is to have them play each other in tournaments leading to the "championship" event...and you'd have to include the current champ, who should not have a "pass", otherwise the phrase "current world chess champion" becomes meaningless.

Perhaps chess needs two world champions. One for tournament play and one for match play ?  Its pretty obvious that match play is most likely to produce the strongest player than tournament play....... 

The No.1 rated player is "the world champion for tournament play" or something. Not exactly called thus but obviously the no.1 rating has considerable importance. The World's Champion has traditionally been determined in match play between the top contenders. Perhaps this should be held more frequently, but there is a few difficulties that come to mind, such as:

who qualifies as a top contender ?

where is the funding ?

is playing a championship match, including long preparation etc. more profitable than just playing in tournaments ?

Brings us back to the days of Lasker.

Just after Anand became world champion at Mexico City, he expressed a preference for deciding the title by tournaments partly in order to avoid the situation where the media and spectators have to sit through a rest day or short draw.  When you have a tournament, there is always something going on every day, and it makes it more interesting.

Whatever the format, it should allow players who are improving rapidly a shot at getting in on the fun.  The problem with a match is that there are only two players.  You need some mechanism to see who would be most suitable to play in the match(es).

The mechanism used to be the interzonals from which 8 candidates qualified and then met in knock out matches until there was one left, the challenger to the WC ...... I prefer that way myself but think they could do this every two years instead of every 3. 

Yeah, I liked the zonal/interzonal system too.  I suppose the zonals still feed into the chess World Cup, do they?

I dont know. Its all very confusing it seems now. I still dont understand how Kamsky qualified for the candidates this time round....... 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_World_Cup_2009

Qualifier requirements at bottom.  

On Kamsky, per Wiki --> As a finalist of the previous world championship cycle, Kamsky has been given direct entry to the eight player Candidates Tournament to determine the challenger for the World Chess Championship 2012. 

Chess World Cup style is more like it, maybe add more games to each match. Why don't they do the World Championship this way?

It is idiotic that a LOSER of a match in 2009 is given an automatic final-8 bid for a world championship match to be held 3 years later (Kamsky)

Or perhaps the champion should be the one who can cope with both formats?

If match play and tournament play are so different, does it really make sense to have a strong tournament player challenge a strong match player?

What guarantees are there that the strongest match play challenger makes it through the tournament stages?

To me I think there ought to be something like this:

First, rated game earns or loses you points (except for draws against equally rated players).  Every two months a candidate for the championship tournament is chosen by the winner of this points contest.  If a winner wins multiple times you take the next person on the list.   At the end of 12 months you've got 6 candidates.   You then grandfather in the former championship challenger for a total of 7 candidates.  These guys then play a triple round robin event to decide the challenger.   So, say 1 year to find th candidates, 3 months to complete the round robin event and the championship held 3 months after that.   Then you've got a championship match every 1.5 years.   To me this seems like a really good starting point. 

How many points you win or lose would work much like it does in the golf world for the fedex cup.  Except points are rewarded in inverse proportion to the time controls.  In other words faster time controls earn and cost less points.  Slower time controls earn and cost more points.   So, there would be a natural tendency to use play towards the middle.  Game/30 would not be real helpful. :)

What do you think of this as a template?  Obviously things could be jiggered one way or another to make the most sense.

Aronian won the Grand Prix series easily, that was a six-tournament series going on in 2008, 2009 and 2010 with Ivanchuk, Karjakin, Gelfand, Kamsky, Mamedyarov, Radjabov, Grischuk, etc. What did he get for that? The same thing that Kamsky got after failing to qualify in Grand Prix and World Cup (and he also lost the candidates match, and was very far from qualifying by rating, so he had lots of chances).

The system is weird when Kamsky, Mamedyarov, Radjabov, Gelfand and Grischuk get the same thing as Aronian after being beaten clearly by him in a very long qualification series, and then comes these minimatches to top it off, so now he has to face the same players in this lottery style event too. Plus a couple of players that never wanted to participate in the qualification.

I would like to see Aronian go through for a match against Anand. I believe he is the most problematic for Anand and it would be a very interesting match. 

So Anand is world champion.  Carlsen tied for first at Baku Grand Prix, and qualified by rating for a place in the Candidates, but has withdrawn in protest over the changes that were made to the format midcycle.  Aronian, Kramnik, Topalov, Mamedyarov and Grischuk have qualified for the Candidates matches scheduled to be held in May.  Ivanchuk and Karjakin played in both the World Cup and Grand Prix, but failed to qualify for the Candidates.  Nakamura chose to sit out of the World Cup, and didn't qualify for the Grand Prix.  Is that about the size of it?

nobody likes my idea? Not worthy of comment?

I would prefer just about anyone to Kramnik.