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Entry by QUALIFING RATING LEVEL..SAY…2500.
..NOT BY INVITATION ONLY
YOU BECOME NO1 BY WINNIG GRAND SLAM MATCHES
Immediately after the M-Tel Masters tournament this spring, in Sofia there was a meeting of the mayors of 4 towns: Sofia (Bulgaria), Wijk am Zee (the Netherlands), Linares (Spain), and Morales (Mexico). The aim of the meeting was to make a Grand Slam in chess, including the chess tournaments in those 4 towns. An agreement was signed and work is under way. I have no recent news about it, though.
Morelia (Mexico) instead of Morales. Excuse me, quoted by memory.
Linares, Dortmund, Wijk and Zee, … and one more. Maybe Sofia. And there need not be exactly 4, one can call it Grand Prix instead of Grand Slam 😉
The system depends whether we want to offer significant prizes for the total score (summary from all the tournaments), or not.
If not, then 8-player double round-robins. 3 places for top-rated, 2 places for best except them in prev slam tournament, 2 places from qualifications, one place for wild card offered by organizer. Qualifications played as tournament B during previous slam (= a few months earlier), as Swiss.
Exact numbers to be discussed. The point is that one need not wait a year between qualification and the main tournament, the qualifications winner earns the place in the next slam tournament.
If the summary score is to be important, then less rotation should be ensured. In such case, 7 players should be selected for the whole year (1 place remaining for wild-card given by organizers). In this case, those 7 should be: top rated player, 4 best (except him) from previous year slam, and two qualified (by total score from a few qualification tournaments).
as lantonov mentiond – Sofia (M-Tel) and Morelia are very good candidates, too – and why copy tennis with “four” slam tournaments, why not have six – great idea by mekk!
Just found a more recent news item about this event – http://www.chessninja.com/dailydirt/2006/09/chess_grand_slam.htm
http://www.chessninja.com
/dailydirt/2006/09/
chess_grand_slam.htm
September 9, 2006
Chess Grand Slam
Breaking News: It barely rang a bell, and the only reports so far are in Spanish, but it looks like the Grand Slam Association tipped at the MTel this year came into being furreal in Spain yesterday. [With blurry photo.] MTel, Linares, and Corus are obvious, but the inclusion on the list of the Spanish city of Bilbao – the meeting took place in nearby Santurtzi – is a surprise. Morelia and Dortmund are mentioned as potential candidates for inclusion, as well as “maybe a Russian city.” Bilbao has been the home of the human-machine rapid tournaments over the past two years.
Danailov was there for MTel, Antón Madariaga, Juan Carlos and Josu Fernández for Bilbao, and Linares mayor Juan Fernández sounded excited: “We are delighted with the idea. It’s something that’s been missing. It will bring a new dimension to chess and create more resources. This sports needs to modernize. It needs greater diffusion and better marketing and the union of all the big tournaments will help this be achieved.” The Morelia and Wijk aan Zee organizers were there by telephone. The Grand Slam won’t just mean a “new shared logo,” and “a single corporate image,” although not all the listed ideas sound like good news. A few seem contradictory. Some translated excerpts from the various reports, all emphasis mine:
To assure the participation of the biggest stars in all the Grand Slam tournaments, the members of the Association reached a fundamental agreement: the four top players in the world ranking must play in all four of the events or they won’t be allowed to play in any of them. …
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 [sic], 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.”
First off, this is generally good and overdue news. With FIDE intent on destroying the value of chess (time controls, KO events) and the world championship (tournaments, challenge matches, dead cycle), it’s good to see the real professionals coming together to save themselves and the sport. Combined sponsorship, ensuring the top players participate, a stable calendar, and guaranteeing professional standards are all good things.
Common format? Ick. That would be like playing all the tennis Grand Slam events on the same surface or golf events at the same course. I would particularly hate to see every event become a super-exclusive six or eight-player double round-robin. But one report gives 6 and 14 for minimum and maximum, fitting with previous events, so let’s hope standardization is dropped.
Obviously the Bilbao hosts were running the show, but a human-machine rapid event isn’t the same as a super-tournament. Including them with no track record, and no confirmed dates on the schedule, is a little odd. (Bilbao was in October 2004 and November 2005.) They should have released a calendar at the same time. But they must have been convincing because I have faith in Corus organizer Jeroen van den Berg. I hope a few documents will be released soon.
It’s been gone over so many times it’s barely worth mentioning, but every new organization, tournament, website, server, and guy on the street wants to reopen the can of worms of copyrighting live game transmissions online. (“Piracy” above.) This isn’t even a can of worms anymore, it’s more like a can of dead horse. The instant a move is transmitted online it becomes a fact, news that can be relayed and reproduced anywhere just like the score of a basketball game (which is where this went to court in the US years ago).
In a way it would be nice if broadcasts could be protected since it would give organizers a better chance to monetize their web traffic, but it’s a pipe dream and one with a train wreck track record of stupidity and failure. At the 1998 Olympiad FIDE tried to charge for PGN downloads (rounds 1-4 for $19.95!); KasparovChess.com (among others) threatened lawsuits to protect event transmission; in London 2000 Braingames briefly stopped showing the Kasparov-Kramnik moves to journalists in the press room they were so paranoid (and deservedly so; one of the techs running their server passed the moves to me via IM anyway); Dortmund didn’t show live games at all for a while in 2005 and got nothing but grief. What you CAN protect is multimedia, what is called “robust content” like audio and video, even live chat commentary. (My memory credits Eric C. Johnson bringing up that argument six years ago. Chess Pride!) Use those things to attract people to your site or just be happy that so many people can follow your event worldwide.
Okay, sorry for hijacking my own item, but this is a pet peeve and one I fought from the other side for a few years. Back in 2000 we had lawyers looking into proving that the value of live moves is high enough to count as protected broadcast content. All those arguments make economic sense, and you can find a lawyer to sue anyone for anything, but they didn’t really stand up. The real value is exclusivity – being the only site to show the moves would have the same high value ten minutes or ten days later as long as no one else knew the moves and results. Organizers might intimidate some sites into cooperation or submission with legal threats, but it’s just bad blood and spilt milk. Multimedia is already here, so let the games go. Chess moves want to be free!
Getting back to the Grand Slam, it’s a good start and we must realize there will some false steps at first. The players will have to give up some of their freedom in the name of professionalism and sponsorship. (Trivial things like a dress code seemed blatantly offensive to many players just a dozen years ago.) A real calendar that can guarantee the participation of the top players is a minimum and they will benefit too. Having top guys drop out at the last minute for anything less than serious illness is even worse than Rublevsky in a neon Hawaiian shirt.
There’s an inevitable element of the rich getting richer, but that’s the nature of any professional sport. As many have pointed out, for the world #50 to make $100,000 a year, the #1 probably has to make five or ten million. Sport is elitist by its very nature; this isn’t a socialist democracy. The rest of the NBA didn’t complain (at least not the owners) when the Lakers and Celtics were winning all the championships in the 1980’s because the hot rivalry made the league boom and soon there was more money for everyone. If chess booms at the top it will trickle down, and I’m not talking Ronny’s voodoo economics. More demand, more tournaments, bigger prizes. It all starts with the consistency we must have to be commercially marketable. The ACP and the Grand Slam can be critical ingredients. It’s a pity FIDE is still part of the problem and not the solution.
Let’s hope there’s a press release of some sort soon – and that they let the Dutch or anyone but the Spanish do the website… I’ve written to various of the participants and we’ll see what we get for a report at ChessBase later.
The winners of these tournaments should thereby earn slots in the next FIDE WCChampionship cycle.
That would make them matter for something beyond themselves. They would build tension and interest in the FIDE cycle, which would make these tournaments more important.
G
Grand Slam should to have a venue in the US
If not yearly than one of the four should be rotating
or Maybe rotate one in the Americas, rotate Two in Europe, rotate one in Asia
One of them could be a qualifier to face the world champion every other year
Wijk AAN Zee. Not am, an or and.
Wijk aan Zee means Wijk at sea.
The events, how ever many there are, have to have qualifiers to reach them. You cannot mandate that FIDE rating list top-x inclusion means automatic berth to any of them – players will sit and protect their spot.
Make them play; give young up-comers a shot at it in the qualifiers. If they place well, they deserve to be in the Grand Slam tournament.
It’s not hard to identify the biggest and best tournaments out there.
i think that a mixture of opens and invitationals is the best way and i dont agree with the term “grand slams” but maybe im biased because i dont like tennis so much 🙂 and i was a baseball player lol . however i think someone should come up with an original idea for chess in this category
As long that they are not called Potty Slams like the world title was and is called the watergames potty games…the potty champ
Hard to belive that realy happened thanks to the FIDE
I am repeating myself, because I wrote this down during the Kramnik-Topalov match:
The world championship should be really world championship, where literally anyone in the world could become the champion of the world. How? Very easy. Just as it is done in football (soccer). Every country should organize a championship. Anyone should be able to sign up, perhaps in an elimination style, so large number of participants would be possible. Once they are down to much less players, the best ones could organize a round robin. Then each country could put forth their best player.
In the second phase continents should organize a tournament among the best from the countries on the continent.
In the third phase the best X players from each continent would meet in a city and have the big final tournament, and that would be a real Grand Slam, the way I see it and the winner of that tournament would be without any question the true champion of the world.
Opinions?
Gabor
there is basically few method for a Wchamp.
1 method is the boxing analogy.
Where the wchamp must be defeated mono by mono! but because of injury u cannot have a best of six or 10 series.
another method is a World cup analogy. Ko system is used. where the best is determine among many.
many preminary rounds using mini league system.
another system is the League or long tournament system. In football this is consider objectively stronger than having a ko-syetem or best of 8-10-12 system.
Another system is a grand prix system like in F1 or tennis or golf. the wchamp is decided by being the best in a series of tournament.
My opinion is to have a match between the best of the elites, 8-10 top rank (like in Argentina) against the best of the rest of a huge K0 system (Kasim, Ponomoriov,Khalifman). Let those two winner battle it up in 8-12 match. And then be the challenger in a match against the Wchamp. Zone and interzone are just too expensive and unpractical to make a qualifier system.
Make a seperate GrandPrix system which include rated blitz and rapid tournament. having just Classical game in a year time is not practical. The winner of the grand prix is seprated then the Classical WChamp and even be more prestigious to some.
Isn’t MTEL Master’s rather new to become a member of a Grand Slam? They should choose some more traditional ones first and let MTEL participate after say 5-10 years of consecutive annual tournaments.