To answer your questions:

1. Push it to 22 games. That way each half is an odd number. Strictly alternate colours so that the challenger can decide if he wants White in the first game of the first half or the first game of the second half.

2.I haven't been able to pay attention to the games as I would have liked. Too much work of my own to do.

3. Eliminate the tiebreak. In the event of a drawn match the title becomes vacant. That will motivate them.

4. Gelfand is improving, from what little I have seen.

Technically, that's not an answer, that's a Doctor's note for not having an answer.

In this case, no, with two different players, possibly. In this match, both players were perfectly content to go straight to the tiebreak if their opponent didn't self destruct. It's hard to blame them. Gelfand faced a much tougher opponent, Anand had a hugely diffiult match next time, and will likely have another next time. He probably wanted to take it as easy as possible this time. Sofia Rules, and playing the tiebreak before the main match would likely have a greater effect than adding 4 additional games.



Lower, by default. It's not that what little play there was was so bad, it's that there was so little play. Most games were 24 moves and draw, and we set a new record for shortest games. But because the games had so little content, there were, of course, fewer errors. So, is the glass half full or half empty?


Longer matches tiebreak before the match, Sofia Rules.

Or maybe the match championsihp is passe, and we should just forget championship events altogether, and declare the #1 player on New Years Day to be World Champion for the year. Match play measures something different than tournament play or ratings measure, and I'm not sure people care about that thing any more.


It doesn't. To me, it proves that Anand was content to draw games without trying to prove himself better. It's not that he tried and failed to beat Gelfand, he didn't even really try that hard.

I missed this match. But I do agree that match play measures something else than tournament play and ratings.

Frankly its the only thing I care about. Match play measures how good your chess is against the best and most prepared opponents. Not how good it is at beating scrubs.

Its a shame that the chess world still has not caught on to the notion that a legitimate match style championship would catch headlines. The endless steam of meaningless tournaments and hand wringing over a few elo points isn't really headline grabbing.

You say fans no longer care about match champions and what they measure. But how do we know? We know that chess had a golden age. That golden age should be now, with the internet making chess so much more accessible. But its not. The golden age was when we had chess championship matches and match qualifiers.

In a poll most Catholic priests said they did not think that the celibacy requirement was too stringent. Of course, if they did, they might not be catholic priests.

Same applies here. If you are a big fan of chess match world championships cycles you had nothing to watch since when?

How many years would we expect the people who would be interested in such a system would stick around the chess scene?

So yes, of course, the current and tiny following chess has, doesn't care about matches. Like those priests they don't see the problem. Its everyone outside who just sees an endless supply of meaningless tournament games, so ignore chess that we need to appeal to.

Hey there niceforkinmove, it's good to see you here!

And, I say a great big AMEN!! to what you say in your quote above!!

There are too many tournamnets and not enough matches in top-level chess!

And, deciding ANY World Championship in chess with anything other than a "person-on-person", one-on-one direct match is absolutely absurd and non-sensical!!

In closing here, once again, niceforkinmove, it's good to see you here!!


Chess Fan

As Official Ninja Posting Champion of this message board, I officialy welcome you back to this message board. (Nothing new to add on the Match vs. Tournament question, we've been over that a hundred times.)

Hey, Fork. Nice to see you!!

Nice to be back. I kept getting logged out. I'm glad kramnik is doing well in chess. My own chess is worse than it used to be. Incredible as that sounds.

I am glad to see so many familiar faces.