The hardest tournament in chess is no longer the one that crowns the champion.
There is a quiet consensus among elite players that the Candidates is a harder event than the World Championship match it feeds. The reasoning is not sentimental. A fourteen-round double round-robin against seven of the strongest players alive demands sustained accuracy across three weeks, with no opportunity to prepare exclusively against a single opponent.
Depth against breadth
The match, by contrast, rewards depth over breadth. Months of preparation against one player’s repertoire can neutralise a small rating deficit, which is why the champion’s advantage has proved durable. The result is a curious inversion: the qualifying event produces more decisive and more theoretically interesting games than the final.
Why the format resists change
Proposals to widen the match format surface every cycle and are generally rejected, largely because the champion has no incentive to accept them. But the gap in quality is now large enough that the argument is being made by people who would previously have dismissed it.
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