not sure
Should the title of World Champion be shelved?
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r_k_ting wrote:
The article is a hot steaming pile of horse manure.
The author wants to replace the world chess champion matches with a tennis system of ratings based primarily on 4 big tournaments. But in chess, the world champion means something, while in tennis, the No. 1 title doesn't mean a whole lot.
I bet every chess player master upwards can name every single classical world chess champion since Steinitz. Ask a top 100 tennis player to name every single world No. 1 for the past 50 years and they can't. Why not? Because in the end no one really cares that much about every single player who managed to achieve No. 1, as great players are judged on the number of grand slams won.
In chess, we care about the world champion title a great deal. Who in their right mind would want to throw away all the history and prestige of the chess world champion title for what they have in tennis?
The reason people can name chess champions is people who are good at chess deeply study past matches to improve. Tennis isn't like that. It's a physical sport. You don't study the last 15 rank #1 players for hours upon hours in Tennis. Instead, you do things like exercise, warm up your technique with drills, and practice. With chess, on the other hand, you can't be a top 100 player just by having the mental goods and continually playing the game. Chess is so strongly related to understanding past games / current theory that you must study people throughout history to improve to an impressive degree.
The alternative proposed in the article, a tennis style title based on 4 grand slams a year, produces a less valuable title.
It's an interesting analogy. But the tennis rankings primarily come into play when seeding the players for the grand slam tournaments. And with the tennis schedule being such that there are often multiple tournaments played concurrently, the ranking system tells you who is playing the best tennis at a given point in time, based on rating points won from tournament to tournament.
Chess needs a world champion - it already has the FIDE/elo rating system to tell you who's playing well.