Perfecting the World Championship Cycle

There are so many different ways that the Classical World Championship could be run, and in this piece I plan to present a method that I think would be amazing.

The Candidates tournament is always one of the biggest tournaments in the chess world. This year it was not only watched by millions of chess fans, but it was also one of the most exciting tournaments I’ve ever seen. There were so many storylines and exciting moments, that it’s unlikely that any chess fan will ever forget what happened. From Gukesh’s incredible rise, to the nailbiting and heartbreaking final round draw between Caruana and Nepomniatchi to Hikaru’s late push to win the event, chess fans couldn’t ask for more.

What I think the Chess World should do, is to find ways to create more tournaments like this throughout the Championship Cycle. What makes a Classical Chess tournament great? Here are the things I’m looking for the most:

1. First place is critically important.
2. The stakes are high

These two qualifications fit the Candidates Tournament exactly. It was the highest stakes imaginable, and you had to win the tournament. That led to every player fighting their hearts out and knowing that nothing would suffice except for a first place finish.

The best way to make stakes extremely high, are to tie them to the World Championship. With that in mind, I propose the following cycle of 7 tournaments, that will determine who the future World Championship Candidates are.

Four six round, double Round Robin tournaments. The winner qualifies for the Candidiates

Two open swiss tournaments. The winner Qualifies for the Candidates

One FIDE World Cup KO. The winner qualifies for the Candidates

Lastly, the loser of the previous World Championship match will also qualify for the Candidates

I’ll lay out how each of these tournaments would work, and how to deal with certain oddities (players winning more than one event, or players winning events without intending to play in the World Championship).

• 4 Six Player, Double Round Robin Tournaments: The winner qualifies for the Candidates

These could be held every 4-5 months or so, in the 24 months in between each Candidates tournament. These tournaments would automatically include some high rated players, while also allowing other players to qualify in a democratic fashion. I am choosing a six player event instead eight to make sure that the length of the tournament is manageable from a calendar standpoint (10 rounds), and to help distinguish it from the 14 round Candidates tournament.

The first event would consist of the top 4 rated players in the world. 2 spots would also go to qualifiers from an open tournament to be held a month or two before the event. The winner of the tournament wins a cash prize and qualifies for the Candidates. The other players get some cash prizes, but receive nothing else of value.

The second event would consist of the top 3 rated players in the world who have not yet qualified for the Candidates. This time there would be an open tournament to qualify 3 more players from an open event.

The third event would consist of the top 2 rated players in the world who haven’t qualified to the Candidates and qualify 4 from an open event, and the fourth would include the top rated player in the world not yet in the Candidates, while qualifying 5 from an open event.

Some rules of these events:

• anyone who plays in these events, makes a tacit agreement that they intend to play in the Candidates Cycle if they should win. If they don’t plan to compete in the cycle, they would be asked not to play.
• Once someone has qualified for the Candidates, they would no longer be eligible for these specific events
• The qualification via rating would be made by some logical method that rewards activity, recent strong play, and is difficult to game. Even if it is gameable, it’s a lot better to game a system to make a qualifying event to the Candidates, than to be able to game your way into the actual Candidates, which was something that players attempted to do this year.

These tournaments would be exciting because everyone would know that they are one of a very few ways that it’s possible to compete in the Candidates cycle. They would include the top players in the world by rating, and allow exciting fresh faces to join from open qualification tournaments.

• Two Open Swiss Tournaments:

I think that holding two open tournaments also makes a lot of sense as a World Championship qualifier. The Isle of Man tournament has always been exciting, and giving a big prize for the winner of such an event feels very appropriate. Something like 11 rounds feels just right, and the winner of each event qualifies for the Candidates tournament. Some important caveats:

• It would be difficult to prevent people from playing an open tournament if they have already qualified or if they don’t plan to compete in the Candidates tournament. My suggestion on how to deal with this would be as follows:

— If the winner has already qualified for the Candidates, whoever is next in the standings directly takes their spot.

— If they have not qualified for the Candidates, they would be asked after the tournament if they intend to play in the Candidates Cycle. This would not be a firm commitment, however it would allow for quick movement if someone like Magnus won. Then we could just listen to him when he says he isn’t going to play, immediately give the spot to the next player in line, and make sure that player won’t be seeded in any of the other Round Robin qualification events.

• One World Cup Knockout

The World Cup is a great event, but giving away three or even two spots, to the Candidates, seems a little absurd to me. One major shame of the event is that by the time the final round has come along, most people have lost interest. The Championship match is probably the least interesting of them all, because the main prizes of value, spots in the Candidates, have already been snapped up. Any tournament in which the Quarterfinals and Semifinals are much more interesting than the Finals, is a flawed format.

There is just one spot up for grabs in this event. If someone who has already qualified wins it, then give it to the next player in line.

Because the Round Robin events generally allow you to include only players who are eligible to make it into the Candidates, I would aim to hold them later in the cycle. Preferably the final two candidates spots would be decided by those events.

We also want to avoid the scenario from this year, where the last Candidates spot was not decided in a clear way, but instead by a bunch of players playing in random events trying to gain rating as quickly as possible. That is not an interesting way to do things, and it’s a waste of an opportunity to hold a high stakes competition for that spot.

• The previous World Championship Loser

For logistical reasons I propose putting them directly into the Candidates tournament. First of all it is always interesting for the Candidates to include someone who so recently fought for the World Championship. But from a more practical standpoint, the guarantee that the loser of this match will get to automatically compete, means that in the six months between the Candidates and the World Championship match, you can already begin holding events for the next Candidates tournament. Otherwise, for fairness reasons, you might have to wait until the World Championship match had concluded, which hurts your flexibility with timing a little bit.

If it’s no problem to hold all of the events from December 2024, until the Candidates (presumably in March 2026), then I think you could eliminate this proviso. But I would like to make sure that the loser in the World Championship match will have just as many fair opportunities to qualify as anyone else, and if that becomes difficult, I’d suggest just slotting them right in.

We need more high stakes events that lead directly to the greatest prize of them all: The World Chess Championship. Candidates spots should not be given automatically to high rated players, or to players who finished highly in some complicated drawn out grand prix tournaments that no one fully understands or watches. None of these spots should be wasted. They are an opportunity to run a high stakes event, where there is only one winner. We should take advantage of every chance to do this, so that we don’t have to wait two years between high impact chess tournaments, and so there can be more heart stopping moments that the entire chess world enjoyed in the 2024 Candidates tournament.