I wonder if Carlsen will participate. I'm actually rather salty at him for forfeiting the title. If you are a chess champion, you have to defend the title until you lose, or die, whichever happens first. After he had refused to defend the title, it made the title of his successor automatically less worthy. That's bad.
It definitely devalues the event and title - we all know that Magnus is the best in the world - but it (the world championship) is starting to look dusty and outdated in the world of streaming successes like Hikaru, ChessBrah, Botez, etc.
Chess has moved on significantly since Magnus first became champion (partly due to the man himself).
If Fide is struggling to move with it, there will be a limit to what it can ask of its dominant figure in the context of an event that requires huge investment in time, money and energy for participants.
Be mad at FIDE for failing to adapt the match format to something less ridiculous. For years Magnus advocated for changing both the World Championship Cycle and the format of the games (classical, rapid, blitz). FIDE did nothing, as expected.
Currently the World Chess Championship is just a collection of very talented chess players spending months having supercomputers evaluate positions looking for the slightest imaginable edge.
Having watched Karpov/Kasparov battles as a child, I don't think that the match format is ridiculous. I'd only change the tiebreaks rule to use the same time control as the main event.
So, now you have computers that show you the best moves, ok. But this knowledge still has to be squeezed into a human brain. So I don't see any problem with the match format. And even 'draw death' talks are laughable after latest candidates tournament and yours championship.
Memorizing 20-30 or even 40 lines is next to trivial for a Super GM. And prior to this year with more decisive games, the championship was becoming incredibly stale with every event being decided by tie breaks. And despite how exciting this event was, it was still decided by rapid tiebreaks. So do what Carlsen says, reduce the number of classical games and throw in rapid and blitz, winner takes all. That makes the most sense.
Quite the opposite approach would be better. Tiebreaks only happened because players are actively seeking them for various reasons, playing to 14 draws in previous matches. Set the formula to 5 wins in classical (like it used to be), and it would be a real chess championship event. Players would no longer seek draws hoping for some luck in the tiebreaks.
When the two greatest chess players of all time both have issues with FIDE regarding the world chess championship title, I think it's fair to give both of them the benefit of the doubt: FIDE is probably doing something wrong, in one way or another.
I think I agree with you in that I am too feeling weird that Magnus decided to let go of his title, and unlike others like Bobby Fisher he is still playing chess.
When you get older, you realize "world champion" is meaningless, and the
adjudicating organizations are profit-driven, even if they're legally
non-profit (the NFL being the most brazen example).
NFL was non profit because it istrade association that serve the (for-profit) teams. It's not a nefarious scheme. They changed it because their customers are vocally stupid.
Forfeiting is almost like accepting the defeat, not in the ability kind of way but "i can't go through the torture anymore" way ..but yeah it's like you accepted the defeat, so it's okay to assume he lost.
