The Lichess World Championship | Hacker News Reader

The Lichess World Championship

lichess.org

38 pointseklitzke10 comments

  > Some naysayers may point out that The World Championship match is always the high-water mark for interest in chess and watering it down with a series of dueling World Championship titles could cause damage to the sport as a whole. What those people don’t realize is how much money we’re going to make off of this! Perhaps in the long term a World Championship schism will “kill the golden goose” as it were, but in the short term? I want a Jet Ski!

Was this supposed to be a joke? I don't get it Lichess!

Click the first link in TFA - the entire post is tongue-in-cheek.

I’m not sure ;-)

Boxing has multiple world championships, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_world_boxing_c..., and so has chess boxing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing#WCBA_and_WCBO)

Why would chess be different?

In fact, chess _had_ multiple world championships for a while (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship#Split...)

Boxing having multiple world championships is not really a good thing.

You have the WBC, WBO, WBA (Super), WBA (Regular), IBF, The Ring and Lineal world champions. Having SEVEN possible different world champions at the same time doesn't seem like a great thing to me.

The only thing it does is increase marketability of more boxers and allow for more fights to be world title fights.

In Chess it might be good if we get some other "World Championship" that is more watchable than the FIDE version that can increase viewership. But I'm skeptical.

Well, there are 3 (FIDE) world champions in chess nowadays - classical, rapid and blitz. But the classical title seems magnitudes more important than the others. I doubt many people at all could name the rapid or blitz world champions in order. Maybe if rapid and blitz had the same candidates tournament and title matches that classical does, not just a single swiss tournament, they would be less random and more significant, maybe rivalling or overtaking the classical world championship one day. Not a bad idea.

Having different champions for different rules (even if they're just time-based) makes sense, kind of like how in pro wrestling you had the regular champion, the hardcore champion, tag champions, and so on, or in the case of boxing and MMA, weight classes.

However, the different boxing championship organizations are not really distinguished by ruleset, as the ring size, glove size, and even the judges are negotiated on a bout-by-bout basis, and certain title shots are for multiple titles. It's really sort of nonsense.

The whole page is a joke. If you click on the first link on the page, you'll get the joke, hopefully. It's a satire of chess.com's calling a chess.com competition the "chess.com world championship".

Chess.com's world championship is itself taken less than seriously. The event is real, the prizes are real, and so on. But they're not really hiding the fact that it's just a huge event.

Here is the [genuine] official trailer/advert/thing for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GijccIzh5YI

Yes, I wasn't suggest it's seriously meant to be a real world championship! (I guess more than a few people new to the scene will think it is the real thing though.)

p.s. Although I mostly have to avoid chess.com youtube channel because I can't stand Danny Rensch for a moment, recently I've been loving chess.com's Rapid Chess Championship, a huge event over 6 months or so, featuring what seems all the world's best players, in a regular Swiss + Knockout on successive days. I've found the Swiss just has too many games, but the Knockout is perfect chess viewing when some combination of Naroditsky/Hess/Yasser/Aman are commentating. Great chess + a lot of laughs.

https://www.youtube.com/c/chesscomlive/videos

I guess I need a Jet Ski?!

$1 million dollars in prizes. $250k+ in production costs. I'm expecting 10-20,000 registrants. We are going to make a KILLING!!!!!!!!!!

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