Global Sports Focus

Author: Meera Iyer

  • Classical chess is losing its best players to the faster formats, and the schedule is why

    Classical chess is losing its best players to the faster formats, and the schedule is why

    The strongest tournament format in chess asks for three weeks of a player’s month. Very few players can afford to give them.

    Classical chess has a scheduling problem that has nothing to do with the quality of the chess. A serious open or round-robin takes nine to fourteen days of play, plus travel, plus preparation, which is most of a month. A rapid or blitz event takes a weekend and pays comparably at the top of the circuit, and streams far better because a viewer can follow a whole game in twenty minutes.

    A rational decision

    The players have responded rationally. Several of the strongest have reduced their classical calendars to the events that carry rating or qualification significance and filled the rest with faster formats. That is not laziness. The faster circuits are where the sponsorship and the audience have moved, and a professional has to follow them.

    The middle of the field thinned

    The consequence for the classical game is subtle. The events are still being won by the same elite players, so the top of the standings looks unchanged. What has thinned is the middle: the strong grandmasters who used to fill a classical open are now playing rapid instead, which reduces the depth of the field and makes the format easier for the leaders than it used to be.

  • How engine preparation has changed what a novelty is worth

    How engine preparation has changed what a novelty is worth

    Twenty years of engine dominance have not removed preparation — they have moved it.

    The standard complaint about modern chess is that preparation has killed creativity in the opening. That was true for perhaps a decade after engines overtook human analysis, when a well-prepared player could walk an opponent into a forced line and emerge with a decisive advantage. It is much less true now, because everyone has the same tools.

    Where the returns moved

    What has changed is where preparation pays. A novelty in the first fifteen moves is worth far less when the opponent’s team will have checked the same line. The returns have moved to positions that engines evaluate as roughly equal but where the human practical difficulties are asymmetric — a slightly worse structure that is far harder to defend than to attack.

    A different kind of player

    That rewards a different kind of player. Memorisation is worth less; judgement about which equal position is unpleasant to face is worth more. The strongest players of the last few years are, notably, not the ones with the best opening files.

  • The Candidates format is producing better chess than the match

    The Candidates format is producing better chess than the match

    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.