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Bored games: After six straight draws, time for chess world championship to tweak the format

Eng Chin An / FIDE

Nine games. Each going for atleast four hours. Five more to go.

Classical chess can be a bit of a tough watch at the best of times, but this World Championship has been something else. If FIDE's aim was to bring chess to the masses, make it more accessible, a more enjoyable watch, the current tournament format does the exact opposite.

After nine games the scores for the 2024 FIDE World Championship are tied 4.5 - 4.5 and watching it has been about as exciting as the difference between both players' scores. You see, at one end, both challenger D Gukesh and reigning champ are very good players; at the other, one is very inexperienced at this level and the other is coming into this off one of his poorest years (if not most) of his professional career. Those factors are producing games where either no side gives anything away (see game 9) or the far more common -- slip-up, opportunity not grabbed, slip-up and draw (see games 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).

Now, this would be okay if it weren't for the fact that there is so much of it. This is like if two good cricket teams played a test that had five innings each, lasted for a month, and alternated between being good enough to bat all day and inexperienced/unconfident enough to not capitalize on mistakes enough in such a way that no one ever got bowled out.

Thursday's encounter between Ding and Gukesh, game 9, was the sixth consecutive draw played out between these two and very few casuals, and no non-casual fan, could possibly bring themselves to maintain the level of tension and attention needed to be fully involved in the match for this long. Just how many days can you stare at another person intently staring at a chess board? And if you (understandably) don't do that your alternative is to check scores, confirm draw, wait for the next match, and repeat it all... and that's an absurdly boring way to follow what should be the pinnacle of this sport.

Chess traditionalists could say, 'This is chess. It's how it works, how it always has. If you don't like it, too bad'. The problem with that is then you don't grow very much. And every sport needs to grow, to evolve. In a world of dwindling attention spans and instant gratification, a game or three of classical chess might be a nice little throwback, and an interesting diversion, but 14?

First, it's not 'how it always was.' Chess World Championships have constantly experimented with its formats and best-of-14 is a pretty new concept. If FIDE could realise that Gary Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov playing 48 games over five months to be 'the first to six wins' was absolutely unworkable (they abandoned that match with no winner), they can realign their thinking here too. More importantly, all this format does really (especially when there are so many draws) is reinforce the negative stereotypes of chess: that it can be frightfully dull, that it's too long... and it's not just the casuals or headache-fueled sports reporters thinking this. When even the greatest of all time gets (and these are his words) "bored" just thinking of this format, it ought to speak volumes. If chess becomes boring for Magnus Carlsen, what chance do the rest of us have?

As much as the official channels and pure-chess voices may hype up the permutations and combinations, and as well as these games are broken down across many platforms by many people aiming to hit audiences of varying technical interest levels, it simply doesn't work on a fundamental level if you're just here for the thrill of it. Which is what most sports fans look for in sport, especially a World Championship match. There simply has to be a measure of adrenaline-filled action, a hook to hang spectator focus on, a way for them to live vicariously through it for true popularity to be attained, and this format misses that bus by a whole calendar year.

Both Ding Liren and Dommaraju Gukesh are magnificent sportspersons. If they had gone to tiebreaks after the first three, or five games, no one would have any complaints, the intensity would never have dipped. Now, there are five more long games to go. It will be a shame if the watching world gets bored watching them go at it, for no fault of their own, but with draws writ large over the remaining games already, that unfortunately remains a very real possibility.