Introduction: Ranking the World Championship Matches
A schema for judging the best and worst world championship matches of the 21st century.
The world championship match between Ding Liren and Gukesh Dommaraju is less than a month away, and I have questions. What kind of match are we going to get? Is Gukesh going to run away with it? Will the chess be exciting? Will both players win games, and if so, who will strike first? Will there be tiebreaks?
To answer these questions and more, I decided to take a trip down memory lane. I looked back over the last quarter-century of world championship play, analyzing each match and then ranking them from best to worst. To do this I assessed each match in four different categories and then added up the scores (12 points for first in each category, 11 for second, etc) to determine a final score.
Legitimacy
Anyone who gets to the world championship match has had to prove their mettle at the highest level. That said, not every match includes two players who seem truly world championship caliber (although sometimes the results of a match can confer a sense of legitimacy where it didn’t previously exist).
Legitimacy isn’t the same as rating—a match between the two highest rated players is often the most legitimate, but sometimes there’s so much bunching at the top that anyone in the top 5 or top 10 could be a legit world champ. With that in mind, I developed the following set of questions:
Would I accept either player as a worthy world champion if they won the match?
Is there someone (or someones) obviously missing from the match whose presence would make have made the match feel more legitimate?
How highly does the challenger rank on the FIDE rating list?
What kind of path did the challenger take to reach the world championship match? Did they have to compete against other players with legitimate claims to a title match?
Is the world champion still reasonably in their prime and playing good chess or have they been surpassed by a new generation of potential champs?
The good news is that the world championship cycle usually produces pretty good matchups. The bad news is that the length of the cycle sometimes excludes rising stars, and the lack of a clearly defined cycle in the early 2000s led to some notable shenanigans.
Excitement
I found it surprisingly difficult to define what makes a match more or less exciting. Sometimes a close match is very exciting, at other times it can be a little dull. Generally more decisive games is a better outcome, but not if the match becomes one-sided. I also didn’t want the excitement ranking to mirror the chess content category described below.
In the end I came up with a promising method: in addition to looking at how competitive the match was overall, I considered the peak of the match, the most exciting three-game stretch, and asked the following questions:
What story does the peak of the match tell us about how exciting the match was overall?
Could either player still plausibly win the match during this peak?
How early or late in the match did the peak occur?
Were there multiple exciting peaks? Conversely, was the match so balanced or dull that it’s hard to find a peak at all?
Chess Content
For this category I decided to use math to make my subjective assessments of the games look more objective. I ranked every game in the match on a rubric from one to five, then averaged the score for the match.
Here’s the rubric, organized from 1 (worst) to 5 (best):
The dreaded grandmaster draw, a game with little to no chess content because the players shook hands right out of the opening. Similarly, a decisive result by forfeit. Either way, the kind of game where the spectators demand their money back.
A draw in which the players went through the motions but didn’t produce much in the way of chess content, perhaps because neither player was particularly ambitious. This category also includes decisive games in which one player blundered so badly that the game lost much of the interest or tension that it might have held.
A fairly normal grandmaster effort, a draw or decisive result with only a few interesting moments or decisions. If drawn, the game was typically balanced throughout, if decisive, it was rather one-sided, with only a few critical moments overall.
An above average game in terms of interesting moments, either decisive or drawn. The sort of game in which one or both of the players posed interesting and difficult problems, often reaching the endgame. These are the games that get annotated after the match is over.
An exceptional game with unusual and fascinating ideas. Generally the sort of game that is very difficult through all its phases (opening, middlegame, and ending). There’s a kind of transcendent power of games at this level; they stick in your memory of the match years after it is over.
In the end I got a pretty reasonable bell curve: more than 40% of world championship match games were 3s, whereas 1s and 5s each accounted for only 5-10% of the games played. There are some other subjective qualities that I decided to leave out, such as the range of openings played. If the players found ways to play fascinating chess in a narrow range of opening systems, I didn’t want to penalize them for it.
Legacy
Some matches change the landscape of top level chess, others fade into the palimpsest of history. There have only been 17 world champs in the match-play tradition; it’s a big deal when a new champion is crowned. But the identity of the title-holder isn’t the only aspect to consider when assessing the legacy of a match. Some matches introduce new opening systems, some have forced FIDE to make changes to the format of the match. Other matches are notorious for less positive reasons: so many draws, accusations of cheating, that sort of thing.
Ultimately, this category comes down to a couple of key questions:
What (if anything) are we still thinking or saying about this match today?
Would chess history be any different if the match had never happened?
Stay tuned for the next update in this series: the worst three matches of the 21st century. We’ll take them three at a time until we get to the top, with a final piece summing up the trends that lead to great matches and some predictions for the Ding-Gukesh match.
LFG