The 2011 Chess Candidate Matches are a joke.

So as a chess player I’ve been following these matches since they started last week. I have to say that I’m really disappointed and almost every match so far has come down to a blitz crapshoot. Grischuk is known to be a good blitz player, and his strategy so far has been to draw every classical game and hope to win in the random blitz games. So far his strategy has been very successful, as he’s been able to beat both Aronian and Kramnik, who were probably the 2 biggest favorites coming into the matches. Still, the way he’s playing these matches is almost disrespectful and shows how stupid the format really is.

I mean the whole goal of these candidate matches is to find the strongest player in the world other than the current world champion, Vishy Anand. I don’t think anyone would say that Grischuk or Gelfand is the strongest player in the world other than Anand. Honestly, both are 2nd tier GMs who have absolutely no shot at beating Anand in a match. Already the World Championship is a joke and we don’t even know who is gonna be in it.  We’d be better off just selecting the highest rated player in the world other than Anand and let them play for the world championship.

The way these candidate matches have gone makes Magnus Carlsen look like a genius. He was able to foresee how retarded these matches would be and refused to be a part of it. I don’t understand why FIDE couldn’t just make these matches 12 games long instead of 4. I’m sure all the players would be for it, except maybe the ones who suck, since they want to add as much variance/randomness to the result as possible. But who cares about them, we don’t want them to win anyways.

Anyways the whole thing is a huge disappointement, especially compared to the last World Championship match where we had Topalov and Anand fighting it out. I doubt I’ll be following the remainder of this World Championship cycle very closely. I hope somebody taps me on the shoulder in a couple years when the next cycle comes around so I can start following chess again.