13 December 2014

Design the Chess960 World Championship

Earlier this year I posted a series on my World Championship blog -- The Road to the World Championship: Part I, Part II, and Part III -- along with an opinion on my main blog, The Winning Formula, 'Has FIDE finally found the winning formula?'. The posts describe the qualification process for the FIDE World Championship.

Let's suppose we're tasked with designing a World Championship for chess960 using the same four-stage structure as the FIDE qualification cycle for traditional chess:-

Continental Championships -> World Cup -> Candidates Tournament -> Title Match

This structure uses four different types of event -- Swiss system, Knockout, Round robin, and Match -- corresponding to the four qualifying stages. For each equivalent stage of the chess960 championship,

  • How are start positions (SPs) chosen?
  • When are SPs announced to the players?
  • How many games are played with each SP?
  • What time controls are used?
  • How do tiebreaks work?
  • Is SP518 in use?

Lots of questions. Any opinions?

1 comment:

HarryO said...

It is a challenge to design a world championship for Chess960 because things can get chaotic when running large tournaments. Let me say a few things however about Chess960 match play.

1) At the start of the match, the lower ELO player starts as white.

2) If the match score is less than one point different, the players rotate colors as per normal match play.

3) If one player is down a single point (they have lost a game), they always start as white.

3) If one player is down two points or more (they have lost two games), they get to choose what SP they want to start with as white.

The advantage of this is it guarantees the match to be exciting, and the player who is really loosing badly, can prepare a start ahead of time with their favorite SP. This means that in the future, Chess960 players should have and will have a kit bag of their favorite SP's they can use in times of trouble.

Sounds like fun! Yes I am assuming that in Chess960, it is a bit easier to start as white. However I realize that one GM, MVL, has tweeted that he thinks black has the easier start!