Chess Grand Slams?

As things stand now, the organizers of each GS tournament have the freedom to use whatever format they like. It will be necessary to establish a common format, say the principals. …
There will be a single main sponsor and a shared scoring system (10 points to the winner, 6 for second, 2 for third) by which a yearly champion will be found. …
What’s more, the Chess Grand Slam Association will make a common front against internet piracy, where every day there are more servers that copy the games from the server that bought the rights. …

A minimum of six and a maximum of 14 players will take part in these international tournaments. “The winners of each tournament will take place in the Masters,” added Madariaga, who said the winner would get “a purse of 300,000 euros.”

The forced participation in all four events of course makes structural sense but I forsee a lot of problems. What happens in the case of illness? Or even feigned illness?

There are a number of reasons players don’t compete in all four events at the moment.

Firstly there is the Wijk aan Zee, Linares and Amber tournament glut at the start of the year. This is really too much chess.

Secondly players have over the years fallen out with various organisers and simply won’t play in certain venues.

Thirdly this is going to clash somewhere along the line with a FIDE event either by accident or design, or if it doesn’t clash, it will clash in the same way that Kamsky was forced to play two candidates matches without a break.

What will happen then is that at some point this insistance on players competing in all four events will fall down and one player will be forced to miss all.

The second issue raised here is that of copyright / sponsors getting the rights they are due. I think this is extremely important for the future of chess.

The details above seem to suggest they are trying to protect live coverage rather than not releasing the games at all. It seems that games per se can’t be protected and that’s entirely right. Apart from anything else the biggest consumers of chess data are the players themselves.

We instead are revisiting the issue of can you rebroadcast moves from an official site during the game. Its never been a big issue for me so long as the moves are made available right at the end of the game. The legality of rebroadcasting games has to my knowledge never been tested. I seem to recall that things like Box Scores (whatever they are) for Basketball is always cited and that somehow these couldn’t be protected. It does somewhat worry me that apparently in the UK you can’t even publish football fixtures on websites without paying the football leagues (although this in itself has recently come under scrutiny and may be challenged). But I guess worldwide (server in Panama anyone) its simply not going to happen.

There is a delusion I think, which having worked for 10 years on internet chess I think I can dispell. There are lots of chess players out there with money that they’re ready and willing to pay out for high quality chess coverage. There isn’t and never will be. If live games have to be paid for and they can shut down alternate sources, the amount of money generated even for the largest and most attractive of events is minimal. Its the truth and anyone who thinks there is a huge hidden income generation stream out there needs to think again.

This idea of companys bidding for the right to carry out live coverage and then earning income only happens in Spain, elsewhere these companys are brought in and actually paid to do this! It is and always will be uneconomical.

That said I really, really would like to see official sites get there full due of hits.

This doesn’t happen for a number of reasons.

1) The sites crash. This is the main reason I use ICC for many events for getting moves. I used to always go to official sites and use them but they crash a lot.

2) They use viewers. Sites don’t provide PGN or indeed any text format for games. When I follow games live (and I don’t do it that much to be honest which speaks to the point about how big the market actually is) I like to load the games into ChessBase, find out where the novelties are and run a chess client. All of these things are made impossible if you can’t get the games out of viewers except by typing the moves in. There are now a lot of different viewers out there the sole purpose of which as far as I can tell is to try and hinder getting the moves out of the site.

3) They don’t provide any of the extras that being the organiser and the official site should bring. Kasparov went through a patch of having flash notes compiled by one of his seconds based on his instant comments. This could be a contractual ten minute obigation at some point after the game so that some nice instant notes could be compiled. There are photos and videos (such as at the recent NH Hotels). There are many privalages to being the organiser, they should use them.

None of this will produce huge amounts of money but a nice, quick fully featured site providing PGN, notes and background would surely get hits and the possibility of revenue. But the bottom line is as I’ve repeated there is no big chunk of change out there. The only way to increase the money in chess is to have meaningful events which catch the mainstream media’s eye and imagination. A Grand Prix of chess tournaments may, in the very long term have some small potential to do that.