MY THOUGHTS regarding the quick game tiebreakers for the World Championship Match:
i. Ideally the champion must have beaten the old one to be champion.
ii. I hate these FIDE quick game tie-breaks to decide the classical champion.
iii. The tiebreakers should be as fair as possible.
Notice that in the traditional Champion-retains-Title-in-a-tie, all the Champion needs is a tied match to retain his title. Advantage champion.
My recommendation is we give more white games to the challenger. Advantage challenger.
So, things even out.
We still retain the tradition of the challenger beating the champ to get the title.
The challenger gets to do it in a classical game, not a quick game.
Thus, suggestion if the world championship match ends in a tie:
Additional classical games with a limit, wherein the challenger receives more whites. If the champion manages to tie or win at the end, he retains the title.
Thus, the tiebreaker can be one extra white game for the challenger. Or two, three, or four.
Concretely, say two additional games. Challenger gets to play all two whites. He has to win all two additional games as whites. Or win one white and draw his remaining white game.
If the score is tied after two games, the titleholder retains the world championship.
We could even vary further, say one black followed by one to three whites for the challenger. Studies can be made in order to determine the best specific format (of blacks and whites) that can afford the challenger a fair chance at winning.
In my opinion, this would probably be welcomed by most of the chess world in terms of the sporting excitement it affords. Here we have the challenger; forced to try all means to win in classical games against a sitting champion that only needs to draw all the tiebreak games. A real drama at the end of the match.
If the match still ends in a tie, the champion retains his title, and deservedly so since he got more blacks.
This way the challenger must beat the champion in a classical game (not a quick game) in order to grab the title, and in so doing win the match outright.
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Prelude: What really matters in top level chess are the professional chess players, or those that derive a significant amount of their monetary income from chess competitions. So, I will be talking only about them.
In addition, I’m going to throw out titles like FIDE Grandmaster (GM), FIDE International Master (IM), and FIDE Master. I strongly think that the appellations GM and IM have been much degraded in the past several decades.
Among other things, this means that many untitled players in say the 1950s would be IMs today, and many IMs and untitled players in the 1950s would be GMs today.
Also, I’ll throw out Elo ratings in the discussions below, as ratings are just short-term descriptors and predictors of the performances of players in the same quasi-equilibrium group (bunched together in approximately the same time and place). In order to gauge the true strength of chess players, one will have to analyze their games with computers. (To be continued)/PN
