Congratulations to Ding

I moved from being rather emotional and sad (wasn't nice to see Yan breaking while at the same time it was beautiful to see Ding getting emotional) to what I can describe as obtusely discombobulated.
It's not just that Ding wasn't supposed to be there, it's that he wasn't even supposed to finish second at the candidates.
He then arrived at the match under-prepared and out of shape, lagged behind, had twice as many bad positions than Yan and twice as many losing positions Yan should have won but either drew or lost.
I do think that out of everyone currently playing yet not named Magnus he is the most worthy... at least in theory.
To me this proves the whole system is self-defeating. It's as though the very concept is a moot point that can't prove it-self. If a guy who was supposed to finish third at the candidates and was behind throughout the match eventually becomes champion than the system itself that we honour and consider efficient at rendering out the best is obviously ineffective. At the very least it's just not the best system to systematically prove who is the best.
Please understand my point. I don't want people to attack me out of misunderstandings. I'm not saying the issue is Ding, nor am I saying he isn't champion-material. I'm saying the approach of the system at allegedly bringing about the so called best player is obviously conceptually flawed.

My feelings are very similar to the way Dubov looks at things:
(I'm starting the video at the relevant section but I recommend watching it in full!)
youtu.be/3nq9ueqiLKw?t=558

Last game wasn’t bad! Ding took his chance.!

@MorphyNumberZero said in #21:
> To me this proves the whole system is self-defeating. It's as though the very concept is a moot point that can't prove it-self. If a guy who was supposed to finish third at the candidates and was behind throughout the match eventually becomes champion than the system itself that we honour and consider efficient at rendering out the best is obviously ineffective. At the very least it's just not the best system to systematically prove who is the best.

The best player refused to play, and coincidentally the match ended up being between the 2nd and 3rd best players in the world.

In virtue of this, it seems to me that the selection of the most worthy players worked out pretty well ?

@esmiro said in #23:
> The best player refused to play, and coincidentally the match ended up being between the 2nd and 3rd best players in the world.
>
> In virtue of this, it seems to me that the selection of the most worthy players worked out pretty well ?

When you look at it like that then you have a point. Although, still, the key word you yourself used is "coincidently".
On the other hand you have Caruana who is the third highest rated player in history and was number 2 for a long time and Magnus couldn't beat him in the classical section as well as Aronian who has been number 2 for a long time as well and he never got the chance to play at all.
The last two years of Anand as a champion he was ranked between 7th and 10th in the world.
If you look at it further back then Alekhine was the guy to not only beat Capablanca but also out play him and he won several tournaments as champion as well as a few championships but forwhatever reason when he played a non championship against Pislbury he lost. So what? No one considers or considered Pislbury to be better.
Similarly, the very first ever champion - Steinitz became champion by beating Zukertort yet, funnily enough, just before that "legitimate" competition they played another one and in that one it was Zukertort who beat Steinitz!
Then you have Botvinnik who essentially lost all the matches he ever played then won the rematches.
To my mind, much like Dubiv said, this is not the system to show who is the best it's just a system that show's who won x-tournament but even then, again like Dubov said, the winners are typically the luckier ones (because they lean on the one or two losers).

@MorphyNumberZero

Do you think the issues are mainly with the candidate tournament, with the actual wcc match format, or with both?

What would be, in your opinion, a better alternative?

It’s pretty complicated to answer.
If we consider the means at which those who played in the candidates actually qualify then we see that they qualified in very different ways. Some by winning designated tournaments (like MVL) while other, by not winning any one given tournament but merely having kept a steady level of elo across the year (like Giri).
Some people (like Anand) are far more gifted at matches than they are at tournaments. Others are better at one time-control but not so much at a different time control (like Caruana).
Even Carlsen himself has by far the worst (in comparison to himself) score(s) in rapid. He’s far better at classical and blitz than he is at rapid. That’s not to say he isn’t amazing at rapid (he’s the world champion in an open tournament) but in comparison that’s where he is the most likely to get outplayed. On the other hand Duda’s best results are in rapid and Nakamurra is obviously a highly gifted blitz player.
Consider this... for all we know, if there was another time control that is even longer than classical where games would stretch across 12-16 hours, maybe someone else would become champion.

Also, lets say Caruana would have won one more game and became champion, does that mean he’s a better player?
Obviously that’s ridiculous, right?
Just a few weeks ago they played a blitz match and Carlsen beat him 22-4 where the 4 were draws, not loses.
There’s no question who is better.

Similarly, if you combine all the winners of Titled Tuesday they still barely match Nakamurra’s score!

So my point having provided all this information is to stress the best method that we have and that is - body of work.

Nakamurra won 50 Titled Tuesday. Caruana won 4. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who is better at this specific time control and style of tournament.

Much like Dubov said, whoever has the highest rating + the highest score + the best over all record across various different time controls in various different styles of tournament = the best player.

Even Carlsen can lose matches.
So what?
It’s just not how chess works and we all know it.
We all know that if you play 100 games straight you’re not going to win all of them.

Is Ding a better player than Nepo?
Hmm... dunno, go to chessgames and check the score and you’ll see Yan still has a plus score against Ding and like I said in the OP, Yan had twice as many better positions and twice as many winning positions in this match. I don’t think he lost because he’s less good. I think he lost because he has psychological/emotional issues. A player of his caliber doesn’t blunder away pieces like he did in the match against Carlsen.
It’s obviously not about chess skill, knowledge of talent.

To each his own.
To my mind if the classical world championship isn’t decided by classical games then something is weird about it.
Ultimately matches can be decided not by the classical section, not by the rapid section, not by the blitz section, but by a violation of all rules and principles in an utterly stupid armageddon game where one side has more time and must win while the other wins by drawing.
That’s not even chess.
The whole point of chess is its equilibrium. Meaning, my knight will always be the same as yours. It’s not stronger, it doesn’t have more power, it’s not faster, it’s not... more aerodynamic, or whatever else.
Once you change the rules to that degree it’s not even chess anymore it’s a variant of chess much like king of the hill or bughouse.
How is someone not winning the classical section and finally “winning” a game in a variant equals to a world champion?

So if you’re asking me I don’t think we need one style of competition to idiotically decide who is the champion. We can have an over-all calculation of scores across a period of time (likely a year) where players had to compete in all time controls and in both closed and open tournaments where in the end of said period we judge who is the best by simply checking who finished on top.

Otherwise what we end up with is a bitter taste in our mouth.
We all know Carlsen is better than Ding.
One of the most embarrassing things I remember is Anand’s last years as champion. He didn’t win any tournaments, worse, he barely finished at the top 5, he ranked 7th in the world, he essentially lost all his games to Nakamurra and started to have a negative score against most people at the top 5 (not over all score but rather score throughout the year), yet he kept edging out WCs (like the one against Gelfand).
It was obvious, literally for years before Carlsen beat him, who is the best player in the world. I mean, for Pitt’s sake, at some point Carlsen literally ranked 100 elo points above Anand. I mean seriously, that’s just insane.

On the other hand, this year alone, Carlsen won an open tournament (open!) to become the world blitz champion followed by an open tournament to become the rapid champion and if there was an open tournament for the world championship it’s not unrealistic to assume he’d win that as well.

So in conclusion, like Dubov said, why do you need these silly two year drag out systems where in the end the winner is not necessarily the best player and the qualifiers are often decided by luck as they lean on the results of others?

I also think that too many closed tournaments where too much can be prepped isn’t the way forwards.
That player X can prepare specifically for player Y impresses me less than his over all ability as a player.
More open tournaments + more time controls = best over all score.

@MorphyNumberZero said in #26:
> So in conclusion, like Dubov said, why do you need these silly two year drag out systems where in the end the winner is not necessarily the best player and the qualifiers are often decided by luck as they lean on the results of others?

" Why do we need world cup in football? Just give the cup to the team with highest FIFA ranking ! "

^ If this reasoning feels odd to you, it's because it is.

Competitions are fun, that's why they do them, and why we watch them.
In competitions, logically, sometimes the favorite doesn't win. If the outcome of a competition were inevitable the competition would be pointless.

Besides, Carlsen is by far the strongest player and indeed he has been champion for several years, suggesting that the wcc selection method is working just fine.

You’re reading between the lines and cherry picking the points that work in favour of your argument.
I can just as easily repeat information I already provided like Anand being champion for several years whilst not even remotely being ranked at the top, not finishing first, second or third in tournaments, and having a negative score against several players yet luckily edging out decisions suggests that it doesn’t.

More over, your personal opinion that competitions are fun is moot.
Fun and sport’s achievements have nothing to do with each other.
Top players don’t play the Berlin because it’s fun and/or crowd pleasing. They do it for practical reasons.

Plus, the very definition of sports relies on the premise that all else must be equal and that the rules must remain the same or else sustain an equilibrium of variability.
Somehow FIDE didn’t get this memo.
Chess isn’t being managed as a sport in this sense.
I’m referring specifically to my argument against Armageddon games where there are time-odds and one side gets to win by drawing.

Imagine the following:
Two runners at the 100 metre run in the olympics somehow finish first and somehow at the very same time. So, the Olympics decides that in order to have one winner they will make them compete again but... one needs to run 10 kilometres and the other 5 kilometres and the champion is decided by either the 5k guy finishing first or the 10k guy by proving a steadier pace per kilometre.

This... non-logic, doesn’t work anywhere else.
People are so used to it that they don’t stop to think about it.

I remember the candidates in Berlin 2018. good defender, well-calculating and overall nice.

Congrats!

What do you mean "my personal opinion that competitions are fun" ?
If you don't see an entertainment value in the game, why even playing it, or watching it, or discussing it?

I agree that Armageddon sucks, but what does it have to do with this match?
Ding Liren won because he outplayed Nepo in a rapid game.

You are making a mix of different topics unrelated to each other.
Anand might have temporarily been the champion while not being in his best, but so what? He did eventually lose to the strongest player, didn't he? And then, if we look at the past, the strongest players were champions most of the time. But this is beside the point, since in every sport very often the champion ends up being a team or a person who's not the strongest on paper, it's rather frequent, so I don't get what the problem is in the first place.