Change needed?

World Chess Title seems meaningless now
Chess Is Dying?
Author: Vishal Mehta
Published: June 19, 2011 at 6:00 am

Chess as we know it has been fractured a long time ago and the only organization that exists and gives some legitimacy to the title (FIDE) is old, corrupt and not doing anything to save the game. The title should be rightfully won only in a match, preferably 24 games. But FIDE has their series of “tournament world champions”. This is ridiculous and tends to taint the title which has descended from Morphy and Steinitz. FIDE, of course was doing what the market wanted – give more chances to more people. However, the champion could not be called a champion because sometimes, he was not even the strongest player at the moment (Ponomariov, Kasimdzhanov etc.). That FIDE has done the right thing for now does not guarantee that they will do the right thing in the future. World Champion Anand simply stuck with FIDE because he could not get guaranteed money in his match negotiations with Kasparov and he thought that FIDE was a better bet.

Another crib against chess is the frequent draws at the top level. It is as if Sampras and Agassi gathered to play the game, and said to each other – “I dont feel like playing today…let’s make it a draw and have a beer later”. Will tennis fans forgive them for the rest of their lives? No other sport’s spectators tolerate the amount of draws that chess fans do. So much that in recent times, a tournament organizer had rules preventing short draws lesser than 20 moves. Of course draw is still a legitimate result in chess and no one can change that. However, what fans want to see is a good fight regardless of the result. A lot of times, top grandmasters get into a very interesting position and they agreed to a draw. This is a questionable behavior, which is another reason why chess is getting killed.

The 2008 world championship in contrast, was short and had almost all the games very hard fought. Even if they were draws and much Kudos to Anand for not “playing safe” and venturing into sharp positions even when he had the title in his pocket (leading by 3 games).

Chess is fast approaching a dead end one can say. That does not mean that every chess game has been played or chess is “solved”. But top grandmasters with the help of chess engines have figured out most of the positions in today’s chess openings and have concluded them as either winning for one side or a draw. And since they are not willing to risk going into unclear lines, the games are typically won by the person who surprises his opponent with a “cooked novelty” into thinking on the board in the early middle-game. (This actually happened in the Anand Kramnik match quite a few times, when Kramnik had to solve a bunch of problems over the board and then did not have enough time and is one of the reason Kramnik lost). This is another thing that is killing the game – the emphasis on what novelty you prepare before the game than actual over-the-board calculations.

A radical solution would be to play Fischer Random Chess – a variant of chess in which both the sides have their first rank pieces in a random order. There are 960 starting positions in Fischer Random Chess and none of them have been studied even with a fraction of the resources as the traditional chess starting position. All the opening analysis and home-cooked novelties are meaningless in this chess variant (and there are enough of them to last a few centuries!) and you play the man over the board.

What we really need is a return to the roots of chess. Something which I don’t see it happening in today’s chess world.

Source: http://technorati.com