Don’t King Me
Magnus Carlsen is the world’s best chess player, but he shouldn’t be the world champion.
By Matt Gaffney
Starting this week, challenger Magnus Carlsen will face champion Viswanathan Anand in a best-of-12 match in the latter’s hometown of Chennai, India, with the winner to wear the crown of World Chess Champion. The event has the feel of a coronation; even at the age of 22, the Norwegian Carlsen is already spoken of in the same breath as Paul Morphy, Jose Raoul Capablanca, Bobby Fischer, and Garry Kasparov, generally considered the very best of those who’ve played the royal game.
To illustrate his dominance with one statistic: The gap in points between Carlsen and Armenia’s Levon Aronian, the No. 2 player in the world, in the current World Chess Federation ratings is greater than the gap between Aronian and the world’s No. 19 player. Only a very few have dominated the game like this, so while Anand is a great player and a fine human being, he’s definitely the underdog in Chennai.
Even though Carlsen is the world’s best active chess player, he should not be trying to unseat Anand in a winner-take-all event. Chess has had a world champion since 1886, but this one-off, mano-a-mano event is now an anachronism, one that’s more harmful than helpful to the game. It’s time for the World Chess Federation (FIDE) to shelve it. With Carlsen looking likely to become chess’s new king, now is the perfect time to make a switch—and I know just the system to fix the game’s current championship woes.
Before we get to solving chess’s problems, it’s necessary to walk through how it got stuck in such an untenable position. The first person with the nerve and talent to credibly label himself World Chess Champion was a fellow from Prague named Wilhelm Steinitz. Before Steinitz, chess had been mostly a romantic game where the swashbuckling ideal was to sacrifice a boxful of pieces to chase the opponent’s king around the board, finally checkmating him so beautifully that centuries hence, students would marvel at your derring-do. Lovely as it was, Steinitz—who ruled the game starting in the 1870s—turned that notion on its head, accepting his hell-bent opponents’ proffered pieces and living to tell the tale through calm, rational defense. He wasn’t anyone’s favorite player, but he got things done.
For the next 60 years, the World Championship title was like a boxing belt: You had to beat the current holder to get it. This wasn’t a great system, since a champ could hold out for pretty ridiculous conditions, like a guaranteed rematch if he lost and retaining the title in case of a drawn match. Champs could also choose their opponents to a large extent, ducking dangerous contenders when at all possible. Consider Alexander Alekhine, world champion for almost 20 years from the 1920s to 1940s, who preferred beating up on his old punching bag Efim Bogolyubov to facing more credible opponents.
Full article here.
Then Nakamura should be in the same breath as well. He’s more talented than Carlsen.
Let’s not confuse form with class. A well rounded player is what makes a world champion. Carlsen is young, is not known for his openings and has a lot of room to improve. Fresh young blood walks in and storms the room, this does not make them best of the best. It is surprising how folks give very little focus to Anand and the “other” player is always given the focus. So Anand is an underdog but hey, he is the nice guy and thats all to his credit?
Somewhere deep down there is sensed the pro-western bias, the white man (Non-Slav at that) is always the best and the other chaps are all “good guys but underdogs”.
At the end of the day all I fall back on is Kramnik’s opinion of Anand. Kramnik convincingly beat Kasparov and he should know a thing or two about chess. Oh well maybe he is also a “nice guy but always the underdog?
This was a great read! Wonderful new ideas that I don’t really disagree with for the most part. Well done.
Other than in some people’s minds, “class”, racial bias and what’s proper in the make-up of a WC champion is nonsense.
World Chess Champion is just a title awarded at the end of a specific contest.
Deciding who’s definitively the “best of the best” is a nice parlor game – without any accepted rules.
Elo ratings mark Anand as the underdog. I doubt that pro-Western bias is a real issue; Anand is rightly very popular everywhere.
As to Carlsen: maybe he has a lot of room to improve (scary thought!), but a few obvious factors favour him besides rating. And one doesn’t get a stratospheric rating like that with a burst of good form, as Anon @ 7:55 implies; it takes class.
But Anand could win, especially as the match is so absurdly short. I would rather like to see him pull it off, but there’s no point in denying that Carlsen is favoured.
“Carlsen is already spoken of in the same breath as Paul Morphy, Jose Raoul Capablanca, Bobby Fischer, and Garry Kasparov, generally considered the very best of those who’ve played the royal game.”
One very reliable way to make me ticked off is to NOT mention
Emanuel Lasker in a list purporting to include the greatest chess players of all time. It is truly shameful to leave out the man who 1) was champion of the world for 27 years, who 2) at the age of 66 in 1935 came in 3rd in a strong international tournament in Moscow only 1/2 point behind Botvinnik and Flohr and ahead of Capablanca, Spielmann and a whole host of very talented Soviet players, and who 3) according to the percentages had one of the greatest tournament careers of any world champion.
FIDE and others have been tinkering with this “World Championship” format for decades and there is always someone who doesn’t like how it is structured. So we fall back to something more traditional.
I for one am quite happy with an AVRO Tournament-like Candidates tournament followed by a World Championship match. Perhaps 12 games is too few but it is adequate.
It might not sit right with some to compare this match with a 12-round boxing championship but I do believe after this World Championship is over we will have no doubt who is the champion. There is tradition involved in match play for the World Championship. It may not be logical, it could be argued that it is not “fair” but if Magnus Carlsen wants to be World Champion he should do just what Bobby Fischer did: play the games and win it.
I think the key measures of a great player are: Has he been clearly outstanding over his peers? Has he sustained this dominance over a reasonably long period? Did he have excellent competitors? Can (at least) some of his performances be considered as classics of his sport?
Greatness must have all these. That’s why Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson are greats, but Vladimir Klitschko and Floyd Mayweather are not.
I’d say Capablanca, Fischer, and Kasparov pass all criteria. Carlsen definitely passes 1 and 3, is very close to passing 2, but has yet to establish a clear mark on 4.
I agree, I think it’s time to scrap the WC matches. They don’t make sense to me. Carlsen has been the best player in world for a few years now, yet it is Anand, who despite poor form these last couple of years is the WC? In the last match he faced Gelfand who wasn’t even top 10 rated at that time? I think just let the elo rankings speak for themselves and have a world number 1 player, like Carlsen. It would cut a lot of confusion. The candidates tournament is confusing also. Why not let the world number 2 automatically play the world number 1? It’s just so crazy!