For those of us who don't follow this closely, why is the format such a problem?
Is it because its stressful, and demands too much work and prep from participants.
Just asking as competitive sport at the top level be it chess, football, or even swimming for that matter demands lots of work and a kind of work ethic not easy for most of us.
The format to the world championship in chess has historically always been a point of contention, and the current format is no exception.
The Candidates tournament has some seemingly arbitrary qualifications that players must meet, and you could argue that the format doesn't necessarily produce the strongest player to challenge the world champion.
The World Championship match itself is problematic because it gives the defending champion a fairly huge advantage, in that they retain the title if they can draw out the match, although more recently it goes to rapid chess tie breaker rounds. So in practice the Championship is decided by these tie breaker rounds, which doesn't really seem appropriate.
Given the prep time players have and the engines available, players go into these matches extremely well prepared and draws over the board are quite a typical outcome unless someone makes a mistake.
I believe Magnus wants the Championship to become a knockout tournament to reduce the advantage that so much prep time can give. There is a big difference between prepping for a field of 12 players versus prepping for a single opponent.
> The World Championship match itself is problematic because it gives the defending champion a fairly huge advantage, in that they retain the title if they can draw out the match.
This has not been the case for quite a while. All of Carlsen's matches (Anand, Anand, Karjakjn, Caruana, Nepomniatchchi) had tie breakers in the format, to determine a guaranteed clear winner. The Karjakin and Caruana matches were decided in this way.
The distinction is the fundamental difference between mental and physical effort.
An athlete can spend all day in the gym and then grab a shower and roll into bed. They may be sore as hell from head to toe but they will be so exhausted they can just pass out and get a great night's sleep. They also get the benefit of endorphins which make them feel good and rewarded for doing their exercise.
On the other hand, a chess player spending all day going over variations and practicing is going to have a difficult time sleeping with all of those lines and positions flying around in their head. They will be mentally exhausted but still active and alert. It is an absolutely miserable experience. So to prevent it you need to cut back on the hours which means spreading out the preparation over many days/weeks/months. It can also get very boring because you don't get the same rewards you get from playing and winning games. The only reward comes when you finally get to the WC match and then you actually have to win or it's utterly heartbreaking.
It takes months of preparation to prepare for the world championships, basically rote memorisation with a team of people. If he doesn't do that, he will lose.
This is time that could be spent playing tournaments.
This would be okay if the world championships was every four years, but it's every two, so a large fraction of Carlsen's time is spent preparing for this one match that everybody knows he's going to win anyway.
It's similar to the way that many professional teams are reluctant to allow their players to play in the Olympics (in e.g. Basketball, Ice Hockey, and Olympic Football is completely neutered). Carlsen clearly feels that the World Championship is not important enough to sacrifice a large chunk of his career for.
>>Carlsen clearly feels that the World Championship is not important enough to sacrifice a large chunk of his career for.
Which other tournaments are considered like the top levels of Chess competition, and what are the criteria for being the top chess player in the world(If not winning the world championship)?
The criteria is probably their rating. Since they use the ELO system, each game gives or loses points. So the ratings are a good measure in how good you are over time and meeting multiple opponents.
And Carlsen absolutely dominates the others, and have been the top rated player continuously for a decade. So no questions about who is the best, WC title or not.
Carlsen is right now 98 points above Nepo, the challenger, which is an insane difference.
The format is not a problem per se. It's grueling, sure but that's what a word-championship match should be. Magnus Carlsen just feels there's not much to gain anymore for him, by defending his title. That's all there is to it I think.
No idea their reasoning, but if I were a top football, swimmer, or other athlete and knew that a computer could outperform me even at my highest level would be pretty disconcerting.
That's already true of most sports, though. There's plenty of mechanical constructs that can move faster than the fastest human. The challenge is to be the fastest human using nothing but a human body, not to outrun a car or a boat (or even a humanoid running robot, which I assume we could build at this point, if anyone was interested in putting enough money behind it.)
Is it because its stressful, and demands too much work and prep from participants.
Just asking as competitive sport at the top level be it chess, football, or even swimming for that matter demands lots of work and a kind of work ethic not easy for most of us.