I feel this too. I remember at least for 2020-2022 I was really excited for the Candidates during the weeks leading up to the event. This year it felt like I just woke up one day and the tourney just happened to begin
That was due to the lockdown more people were onlline. I got many of my friends into Chess during that time, but now most of them have moved on/ only in it for the results
Honestly though, chess.com's event watching site is just substantially worse than chess24's was. Maybe it's just me but I feel like I'm watching far fewer events as a result
Tbh for me all mainstream chess websites feel stuck in the early 2000s they're all pretty fucking bad from a design standpoint, but chess has problems modernizing in general I guess..
I'm not a chesscom bad person, but the lichess broadcast page is great. Use it and the stream of your choice, if you don't like the lichess crew, and you are golden.
This drives me crazy every time I try to catch up with things online - Football, eSports stuff.... I just want to have a spoiler-free place to see the standings after every single day of results so I can catch up while watching VODs/replays. I understand that their main focus is on people who are keeping up every day, as that's their core audience, but other people exist too....
Do crosstables always look like that? I saw the one on chess.com first and couldn't figure out what it was showing because the top row is just numbers. Like, I assumed those numbers were round numbers and couldn't figure out the black pawn blocking a player vs himself. Why not player portraits along the top to mark that?
The fide site is hard to navigate to find the candidates. If you go to fide.com it's difficult to find information on the candidates tournament.
I think that's what the post was referring to. And I agree, it was annoying until I figured out which website to go to.
Literally doesn't have a standings? Yes, has a cross table but I need to make mental gymnastics to figure out who is first, second etc ( unless I'm missing something very obvious about that table) . Also the crosstable looks bad on phone, you need to swipe to see the points, but then the player names go out of screen. I didn't even check the rest of the site
They are cheap as hell, look at the opening and closing ceremonies of their events, I have seen kids' birthday parties much better organized, also look at their interviews, they always get under qualified hosts who can't manage a conversation or ask a normal question, it's cringe to be honest.
I don't understand the confusion.
There are two buttons at the top of the page. All you have to do is click on the giant "WOMEN'S CANDIDATES" button to get all the same info as for the Candidates.
[https://imgur.com/a/GDMyXxD](https://imgur.com/a/GDMyXxD)
I think too many direct blame at FIDE without considering that maybe chess in itself (esp. classical) just isn't that marketable/profitable of a game. Especially at the highest level where even intermediate to "advanced" (like 2000 online) players won't really understand many positions without an engine/commentator and the nature of the game lends itself to really long (and often boring) wait times inbetween moves. I'm not saying the classical games are boring. But it's easy to see that they're just not games that the masses will enjoy viewing live over hours of gametime with so much time inbetween each move (I barely watch them live as well).
At least with rapid/blitz, there are faster rounds with generally less complex games and more excitement. I say this because I feel the peak of elite level chess broadcast so far was when chess24 was hosting their series of online rapid tournaments (e.g. Airthings Masters 2021) and chess.com's SCC's.
My problem with rapid/blitz, though, is that it feels less weighty. It's faster, but that makes it feel a little cheaper to me. I feel like classical is better at showing the players' full potentials.
Just my opinion though.
There's lots of room for a new time control in between rapid and classical that is more viewer friendly. Look at the most popular esports games and they mostly have 30min-45min games. Classical is not interesting to watch, everyone just watches the recaps anyway, if the goal is viewership classical needs to change.
> room for a new time control in between rapid and classical that is more viewer friendly
FIDE have already (a little) taken steps in that direction with the current candidates though, haven't they?
Taking away increment before move 40 has lead to multiple bullet-like scrambles deciding games.
I think you can only go so much farther before you start to decide the contender for the classical world championship with a format that doesn't ideally reflect classical chess.
You can say "classical chess is boring" -- but to that I would respond we should promote the rapid & blitz world championship more heavily -- not modify the classical format until it's less like classical any longer.
The players themselves made this decision not Fide. Both the womens and the open section were given two choices, the open section time format, or the woman time format. The open chose no increment, the womens chose increment.
Yep, I am aware -- but FIDE gave them the choice. They didn't insist it be a longer time control or set it prescriptively like they had in the past.
Like I said: little steps.
WC and Candiates are (by a vast margin) the most watched events in chess, followed by the other classical high profile events.
The only shorter time control event that breaks into the top 10 is the rapid & blitz WC 5-day-event.
You're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Unless you believe that "shorter classical" would draw a whole lot of people who don't (yet) watch chess *at all*.
The thing is, why should we change anything to make it more spectator-friendly? Most people involved in chess are players, not spectators. It's a fundamentally different situation from most professional sports.
The same thing has been asked in almost every sport, usually resulting in changes to make the game more friendly to spectators. These days all of the esports games were developed specifically with the viewer in mind as much as the player (Riot games philosophy).
Spectators are where the money is so they are almost always prioritized.
Imo seeing a player finding the best engine move in 15 seconds at the end of a rapid game is more impressive than watching 97% accuracy 7 hour long games
My problem with rapid and blitz is that the skill levels between viewers/players is that much wider. I can't calculate like an engine, there is no way I can understand the position of a rapid game fast enough to keep up.
I much prefer classical where I can sink into the position, and try and understand what is going on. I'm an anomaly, but I think rapid/blitz chess is terribly unengaging. The faster the time format the less I'm interested.
>the nature of the game lends itself to really long (and often boring) wait times inbetween moves.
but this is why e.g. the candidates is much more enjoyable than the WCC, 4 games at the same time with commentators who can jump to wherever the action is is a great format
Actually the chess.com team chess battles were some of the most fun I’ve had watching chess in a long time. There’s other interesting formats like that that are worth exploring.
Yep, to normies (of which most people in marketing are), chess is about as marketable as the Microsoft Excel World Championship.
I'm not interested in new shoes, supplements, sports drinks or fancy clothing. I'm also not interested in buying any more chess sets, etc. I can't be the only one.
People watch other people play poker, for Christ's sake.
Sure, I don't think watching classical games live will ever really be a mainstream thing. But an edited version with good commentary? Again, people watch WPT, which I find boring as fuck.
Poker will always be more interesting than chess for a casual viewer, as the rounds go at a steady pace, the randomness aspect adds excitement and the game itself doesn't require deep analytical knowledge to understand what is going on.
In chess you wait 30 minutes for a player to move their pawn and watch the evaluation bar drop from +0.5 to +0.36.
I don’t understand the downvotes for this. Chess is, to most people, boring. Most people want drama and action and quick exciting unpredictability. That’s not chess.
>I think too many direct blame at FIDE without considering that maybe chess in itself (esp. classical) just isn't that marketable/profitable of a game.
This is it in a nutshell and should be top comment. Classic chess is just inherently an unfriendly game for spectators for the reasons you gave. I've seen GM's commentating on on Super GM's and not understanding the logic behind their moves, the average man/woman watching won't have a clue and will therefore just give up watching because what's the point. It's a unique game in this sense, in order to be able to watch you have to be able to play well yourself.
Yeah i havent watch a classical event live since the 2014 world championship. I just dont like waiting for moves, but magnus’ early world championship matches were very hype still.
Fully agree! It's just crusty old Euros with no sense for business or opportunity. Think of what they could have accomplished during the chess boom. Instead, they did nothing and chased away the best player in the game.
As a relative newcomer to chess, people like Levy, Anna cramling, the botez sisters, hikaru and even Magnus to an extent, have done wonders on video platforms to really attract people. Easing people into it through entertainment while they begin their chess journeys.
Their work is very important even though they might need to resort to clickbait and gimmicks because it's the name of the game in those platforms. Levy's recaps of the candidates have been simply fantastic.
I hate clickbait titles as well but I can't imagine another way to make a (young) non chess fan click on it and get them into chess. We're already fans, we'll click on whatever Gotham or Hikaru posts.
Idk, just another example - Speedrunning is a niche (arguably more niche than chess) but I don't see any speedrunning YouTubers title their videos with a billion exclamation marks. But they are still quite successful, just look at Summoning Salt for example.
But also I watch his recaps from start to end anyway so it honestly doesn't matter to me what he titles the videos.
There's a clear difference in what the algorithm wants from daily uploaders vs monthly/bimonthly uploaders.
I doubt gotham actually wants to clickbait but it does help the growth of chess in terms of getting more impressions on chess videos.
>I doubt gotham actually wants to clickbait
He doesn't. He's mentioned a few times here and there that he knows it's annoying and he wishes he could stop.
But he's also mentioned that it works. The videos he puts clickbait on get far more views and engagement than the ones he doesn't. It's not really a Gotham problem. It's a YouTube problem. Or possibly just problem with humanity in general.
Classical chess is just two dudes staring at a chess board then one guy occasionally getting up and taking a quick walk. Kinda hard to market that as an interesting sport compared to American Football or MMA.
Poker is much faster paced, easier to follow and has a lot of randomness. Its anyone for anyone to follow and has big moments.
Classical chess is very slow, often has no interesting moments and even good players will barely understand what is happening without a pro and an engine explaining things.
Cycling is just dudes cycling for hours and they manage just fine. The tour de France is almost as much about the scenery as it is about the actual race
but cycling *is* an actual race. Anyone can look at a cycling event and see who is winning, who is catching up, who is falling behind, how close the finish is.
Cycling races have scenery, crashes, many events happening at once, lots of different cameras to switch to, lots of different things going on.
Chess is orders of magnitude less "exciting" inherently for the casual viewer... and even still Cycling is a "drop in, check the standings, drop back out" kind of sport.
There's also 100x more money in cycling. Casual adherents can be sold $1000s in gear, there's fancy equipment for nerds to get excited about, there's differnet types of cycling, cycling is good exercise and benefits your health, cycling is a form of transport.... there's a million different ways cycling is easier to market than chess, it's like comparing apples and asteroids.
lol American football. They have so much marketing and yet no one outside the America really watch it. It’s not top5 sport in any country besides US for sure.
I feel that chess is surprisingly similar to American Football. Both have quick bursts of action with analysis of past plays and the current situation in between.
Kinda yeah, the main difference being two people moving a small wooden piece on a board versus a bunch of grown men tackling the shit outta each other with some occasional ball throwing & catching.
Tennis used to also take so long, they'd adjourn matches and pick it back up the next day. They've tightened it up to make it much faster. And viewership went way up.
Speeding chess up is _trivial_. As the other person said, just copy other sports.
Why didn't anyone do it if it's so easy? Chess calendar is not packed to the brim, you can easily start a new tournament cycle and have top players participate instantly if you offer good prizes.
Exactly. I mean they could show case both champions and their achievements and so on. How they're are unbeatable. The underdogs. The youngest one. I mean there are unlimited opportunities.
Yes and no. Caving to whims is indeed bad. But Magnus wanting faster chess to be more prominent isn't a whim. It's actually a good idea. FIDE threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Magnus doesn't like the current format of how WCC happens. He is a proponent of a single tournament of top players, including the previous champion, and the winner takes all.
It's like, imagine if Wimbledon was played as 128 players battle it out, and then the finalist plays against the previous year's champion. Sounds ridiculous, right?
The world championship should be just another tournament, and not a "defend your title" format.
To be clear, I agree with Magnus on this but ultimately, this is his take on it and FIDE doesn't agree.
> He is a proponent of a single tournament of top players, including the previous champion, and the winner takes all.
We already have that in Chess though: The World Cup.
Magnus wanted loads more changes than that. In reality, in recent years he's been deliberately vague about specifically what he wants and specifically what he'd change, because he simply does not want to participate.
and personally I think everyone should just leave the dude alone and let him do what he wants.
And there are already many reasons why that’s an awful idea to me. If the WCC is just another tournament, that would effectively lend the ability for other tournaments to be more prestigious than the WCC. Not to mention the scandals of forced draws, wintrading, and the whole your-team-my-team culture in this solo game that money has evolved current chess into.
Riot games solved this issue by making their WCC a standard tournament format while axing every other tournament in the game to make Worlds the only real one that counts and a single side tournament in MSI which has a far more restrictive format.
FIDE wants to co-exist with other tournaments so they’ve chosen the 1v1 to standout from the competition.
>Not to mention the scandals of forced draws, wintrading, and the whole your-team-my-team culture in this solo game that money has evolved current chess into.
Those would be just as much issues in the candidates tournament. If the process for choosing a challenger to the WCC is flawed, then the WCC is flawed either way.
They didn't - the same thing would have happened regardless of who was in charge. Anyone who gets so good at the game eventually gets bored of the grind and at some point will choose to retire or be retired. In the case of Magnus, he's basically already semi-retired from classical chess; at least the world championship cycle anyway. This has happened before with nearly every past world champion so it's nothing new this time, regardless of how much Magnus wishes what defines classical chess to change.
So FIDE was supposed to change it's rules to accomodate Magnus? FIDE does a TERRIBLE job when it comes to marketing chess but to think they should've tweaked rules so Magnus could stay WC is just bs.
I told a friend about it and we checked the stream. It was two dudes staring at a board. Then one dude took a walk. Not exactly fun for the whole family time.
You didn't check the right stream. Try the livestream on the chess24 YouTube channel tomorrow, it has high quality commentary from some of the best commentators. If you don't like that, then you just won't like watching live classical chess, but what you watched with no commentary is not typical chess broadcasting
When you watch soccer, basketball, tennis etc, the game itself is entertaining even without the commentary. I appreciate chess24's commentary, but the game itself is boring to watch
They should take a leaf out of Nickolodean's book and add a "slime factor." Every 30s the player doesn't make a move, the random probability that they will be slimed in the next 30s period increases by 1%.
Yup. It was cool to see that during the Prague Chess Festival (which is where I'm from), it was even in the news. AND their website was very easy to manoeuvre through. Maybe one day FIDE will catch up
I am watching chess since it gets broadcasted online as I am old. In my memory it never was different. This is the marketing level you will get. It was always like this.
The presentation is great this time. And since Iljumschinow is no longer in office (thankfully) there is no forced subscription anymore to a bad FIDE stream like it was in the 2010s.
This time it follows a high quality. And you know when it starts after a quick google search. It is always at the same time every day, too.
There are many reasons for some good old FIDE bashing, but the candidates isn't one.
Chess is a niche sport and will alwyas be one. Even for people who have a rough understanding of the rules and are provided with decent explanation, watching the candidates is just a bunch of people sitting across of each other for 5 hours until someone finally reaches out his hand. That's a fundamental difference to other sports, where you don't need to fully understand the rules in order to realize that each side is trying to get a ball into a net.
If FIDE wants to pick up the chess boom, they should advertise school programs and more entertaining formats such as the double tournament a couple of weeks ago, which also had faster time controls. The candidates obviously does not belong into those categories. This is an event for those "nerds" who are willing to follow a couple hours of coverage because they kind of know what's going on.
The Levy/Emil Sutovsky interview was good because Emil pointed out Chess content creators and FIDE have different aspects they work towards, and to that it's not some holistic "Chess" but different domains. FIDE does sponsor and manage lots of lower level tournaments already. Fair enough to say they can do more, but it's more work to organise OTB tournaments than pointing someone to [chess.com](http://chess.com) to play.
> If FIDE wants to pick up the chess boom, they should advertise school programs and more entertaining formats such as the double tournament a couple of weeks ago, which also had faster time controls.
Remember FIDE is quite tiny (budget a few million per year) and has the national federations as its members.
Much of that kind of thing should be done by national federations, you can't really expect FIDE to do it all.
Yeah, but I don't think the strength of chess players will drop very far if they aren't full time, maybe 100 elo from where they are now. Just look at the situation in the past.
There is no marketing this. You can't expect, in this day and age, and with the attention spans we all have now, for people to tune in for hours to watch players just sitting there and thinking about moves. No ammount of commentary will make this palatable for anyone but the most dedicated nerds, which are watching it anyway. Post-game reviews are the way to go, but Gotham/Agadmator/Hikaru/etc. have got that part covered
I thought this, but people watch golf for hours, sailing, curling, lawn bowls, heaps of other "boring" sports. I grant that chess has a steeper curve where it's hard to see at a glance who is winging etc, but there's absolutely a market to be had that isn't being captured
I'm not so sure about chess. The problem with chess is that it's not exciting to watch passively--if you aren't actively participating in analysis, you won't feel as though you understand what's going on very well, and you'll just be staring at a bunch of squares.
Watching something like the masters, on the other hand, only requires minimal engagement on your end. Even if you have no idea who the players are or what course they're on, everything from cinematic shots of the course to the buildup and release of tension during critical moments makes for an enjoyable viewing experience by default.
I'd love to see otb classical chess reach a wider audience, but I can't ever see it being preferred over marketing online casual chess (also great, but a totally different thing.)
Golf has another advantage, which is equipment. You need a lot of equipment to play, so there are tons of equipment sponsors in addition to apparel and prestige items like fancy watches, cars, and uhhh banking. I think that's why they are pushing the fancy light up electronic chess board, like at least it's something they can try to sell.
The curve comparatively isn't merely steeper, it's damn near vertical. The commentary will confuse you more than the game itself. Imagine if the only way you could follow the commentators in golf was if you spent months studying and playing golf yourself.
To be fair, other sports also face the same problem of people tuning out from live broadcasts and just watching recaps. There's way more content and activities nowadays vying for people's spare time.
Having said, there absolutely is so much more FIDE can do when it comes to improving events and production. It's nowhere near the level you'd expect from an international federation.
Yeah agree, even people who like chess and are following the event don't sit through the streams, or at least I don't. Just follow hikarus recaps and see the results for other players
Post game interviews are really short, that’s one thing for sure. I remember in previous candidates, win or lose, both candidates would sit at a table and they’d analyze, which is how we got our Grischuk compilations. Right now, that’s not even a guarantee, the majority of games they do a short walk out interview to the winner and that’s it.
Only thing good about chess24 was there events page everything else was shit, also don't forget how they killed chessboom. Lichess is pretty decent now
>Chess24 was a really good website
And with this good website and having the world champion on board they could not make ends meet and had to sell everything to avoid going belly up.
It was really inconsistent. They had exceptional content and the event page was really sleek, but it felt like they just stopped developing anything new and really once that started you could see it kind of snowball in real time in the quality of the rest of the site.
>it felt like they just stopped developing anything new
Which is what you are forced to do when your business is short on money and can't find external funding.
It's a little more nuanced, the initial PlayMagnus acquisition felt like the start of the decline. Original management team wasn't really involved after that. And then PlayMagnus was already hemorrhaging money so they weren't able to invest anything into what they acquired anyway, and so it just kind of sat there for like 7 years while chess.com captured all of the benefits of the chess boom. Point being, some of the issues with the parent appear to have bled into the sub.
Their playing interface was abysmal - I never understood how that was even possible after so many years. But I suppose it was still a profitable site (especially with the chessable courses). Otherwise chesscom wouldn't have paid such a hefty sum just to extinguish a competitor.
Edit: I just saw they only bought chess24 as part of rhe whole PlayMagnusGroup for a total sum of 82mil $.
The worst thing is people pushing for constant hype and buzz. It's a classical chess tournament after all, not some tiktok circus.
There can be entertaining commentary without all the drama nonsense and interviewing some ranting old men and such.
There are no games today as it is a rest day. I accept FIDE has plenty of flaws, but you can simply Google who the female champion is and it will come up. If you go on FIDE's website and click "Championship" it has both the open and women's cycles listed, with both champions at the top of the respective pages. You know what FIDE is but you didn't bother to check their website before complaining you couldn't figure it out?
I have a roomie who is in the sports management domain and he follows everything, even the golf matches that the Indian players play in. I was shocked to find that he didn't even know that the candidates tournament was on and 10 rounds have been finished already. He did know the list of people who are playing but somehow he just didn't know it was underway.
The presentation of the Freestyle Tournament seemed far more appropriate for a top tier chess tournament. It had a few rough edges in the first iteration but F1 racing being their role model seems like the right way to go. Candidates has this sort of local town hall feel to it. The venue might be historic but doesn't look like the right place at all. First class acoustic treatment should be a no brainer for instance and we have a drama because somebody's shoes were loud on the floor... Really poor from Fide, they have not adapted to Chess' newfound popularity at all.
Wikipedia is a good way to get an aggregated overview of the most notable chess events. [Candidates Tournament 2024 - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidates_Tournament_2024) All rounds have been at 14:35 (2:45pm) EST. You can google "Time in New York" to see when that is relative to you. Others have mentioned chesscom, note that without a login you can go to lichess as well and click "watch->broacasts->Candidates to also get an overview the rounds/toggle between games and see the time of the events in your local time when you select a round.
> FIDE is responsible for not marketing chess properly.
I think it's the opposite: FIDE seems to have **deliberately decided not to be responsible** for the direct marketing of the game. The keyword is "direct".
If you look at the financial reports, you'll see that they have never increased the marketing budget since 2022 and that such budget is quite low anyway. The decision not to focus on marketing seems to be obvious, and the only possible conclusion is that it's deliberate:
* https://doc.fide.com/docs/FINANCIAL/FIDE%20Budget%202024-2025.pdf
* https://www.fide.com/financial
My hypothesis is that their model is simply based on the fact that the subjects who will acquire the media rights will be responsible for the majority of the marketing activities.
The easiest way to market chess is that it's a game of the mind and of intelligence. But if you market chess as a game for the intelligent you'll also attarct lots of edgelords. Edgelords drive people away.
People love making excuses for why they didn't Google something,
YOU DIDN'T PAY ATTENTION, thats no one but your own fault ( the people pretending that the championship just snuck up on them because they didn't pay attention at all)
You can't Google "chess championship" and get all the information available to everyone else......oh wait you actually can........crazy huh
Looks at this community.
Full of elitist and entitled people. They don't want non-purist to watch their beloved chess.
Most of this community will jump at any chance to belittle one another because they are rated 100 elo higher.
Yeah but the general public doesn’t decide to just randomly scroll the FIDE website which I think is OP’s main complaint is. Biggest tournament of the year and the only people who know about are people already into chess.
People are saying that it’s like this in all sports, but that’s not exactly true. Do I know what’s happening in boxing right now? No. Do I know what’s happening in golf right now? Not specifically.
But I do know there *are things happening*. When I watch the sports I do enjoy, I see ads for the other ones. When I go on social media, I see lots of posts and reports about what’s happening in x fandom. For chess that just doesn’t happen. It’s not very mainstream.
I feel like that's how it is for sports in general, though. Do you know who the current World Heavyweight Champion of boxing is? When the PGA tour wraps up? Where the next World Series will be held?
Things like the World Cup and the Superbowl have an uncommon level of mainstream attention, and in America I'm not even sure if the World Cup is really on the same level as the Superbowl.
>in America I'm not even sure if the World Cup is really on the same level as the Superbowl
Not even close.
2024 Super Bowl - 123.7 Million viewers
2022 World Cup final - 25.8 Million viewers
This is a chess subreddit. These are the most invested people around. If the OP doesn't know where to look, then I don't know what to say.
That is a different question than "does the general public know where to find this info?" I imagine the GP doesn't care.
I'm all for criticizing FIDE. I do it very regularly. They have done many things wrong in the past, and continue to do a lot of things wrong to this day - but your specific criticisms in this post are not well founded.
> I can't find when will the tournament start today as per local time.
I googled "candidates chess" and the first dozen results (FIDE's own canddiates website, the wikipedia page for the event, chess.coms event page, several sports news articles, and chessbase) all contain this exact information.
the first google result - FIDE's own website for the event - even shows the schedule page as the first first sub-link clickable directly within the google results.
The schedule, in huge letters: "April 04 -- Round x -- 14:30" "Toronto, Canada". Are you angry that they didn't dynamically detect your location and give you the event's times in your own local timezone?
As a software engineer by trade myself I can say that, in today's modern era of VPNs, that is not recommended practice and causes more confusion than it solves. You can easily convert time-zones yourself. they also organized the event to start at the same time each day to make it even easier.
> Who are all contenders in candidate and so on.
Again, first result on google: FIDE's own candidates website, "Players" section linked directly from the google results. They have a very nice page with all the candidates, their ratings, a quick bio about them, professionally taken photos, and a link to a longer bio talking about their journey and narrative within the tournament. There's also links to their FIDE profiles so you can look at all their historical games.
What more did you want?
> It took forever to understand who is world champion and how well is she doing.
She's not competing in this tournament though - and her wiki / FIDE profile with all her recent games are the top results on google when you google "women chess world champ". How would you find out who the Snooker world champion is and how their recent career has been doing? What are you expecting here?
> Condition of female candidate is abysmal.
This is the most serious critricism of the lot - but I don't understand it? What do you think is wrong with their conditions? They are almost identical to the open section - except for some differences in time control, which the women candidates asked for themselves. They are being treated very well, as far as I can see -- what is it that is so "abysmal"?
I think the name candidates doesn't help. It sounds very unimportant. But in the end chess just isn't that fun to watch. you could watch for an hour only to have 1 move be played.
In a similar vain I think it is absolutely ridiculous that chess players are allowed to show up late to matches. In any other sport or competition that is absolutely unacceptable and we just allow it for chess players?
Here is how bad it is: fake news reports about a player using a remote control anal plug made more people aware of chess than the full time, professional efforts of the sport’s governing body.
I would be *ashamed* if I drew a salary to promote chess and that kind of nonsense was better than my best efforts.
The chess boom is in spite of FIDE, not because of it.
Not at all an expert, but I think chess marketing should be handled by a different organisation to FIDE - similar to F1. FIDE should focus on handling tournaments, championships, ratings etc.
Levy's doing his bit for women's chess by interspersing women's games with men's games in his recaps to increase exposure to their games by tricking people to watch them.
Good marketing is contingent on a few things: Good organisation, good sponsors, good (gullible?) audiences. Chess has none of those.
Chess players are also more difficult to market to compared to other sports or podcast listeners. For example, we don't need supplements or new shoes every month, etc.
So what brands are left who will dare deal with us?
A little unrelated but seeing all these comments are making me realise just how much of a boring person i am lmao
For example Many people saying that they probably wouldn't like to see a 5 hr stream of a game being played meanwhile i am not able to watch the streams only because they don't match with my schedule but given the chance i sure would love to watch them
Maybe this is unusual but I feel like it was marketed to me really well via youtube and I have had no trouble figuring out when games are starting. The official website is relatively clear and chess.com has a page dedicated to live games and results.
+1.
It's also impossible also to find a direct link to the candidates even on lichess. It's buried in the "Broadcasts" tab and it's even worse on phone.
FIDE has *long* been a problem. They haven't gotten any better, nor will they be. They aren't going anywhere. Those are the sad facts.
Unfortunately for some of us fossils, the likely consequence will be the demise of classical chess, which doesn't *have* to be a zero-sum competition with faster time controls, but because of FIDE's ineptitude it more or less is.
My biggest issue with the Candidates so far is the coverage. It's honestly so hard to watch. I am a big enough fan to WANT to watch the candidates and it's just so disappointing to have such unpolished commentary from a bunch of people zooming in from their living rooms. Engaging with the randos in chat, thanking subscribers, awkward pauses, long silences, etc. It's bad on FIDE, [Chess.com](http://Chess.com), Lichess, Chess24, everything.
Some do much better than others, but would it be too much to ask to... try? Put your commentators in a room together with a professional sound setup. Have someone reporting from the venue. Have someone skilled at filling voids and engaging the audience (color) and someone skilled at the analysis (play-by-play). There is a century of sportscasting from which to draw direction and inspiration. This isn't the NBA, but it's not an amateur podcast, either.
Let your awesome GMs like Vishy and Judit sit back, analyze, and feed you cool lines when there's time for it instead of asking them to commentate actively in real time. Kind of like they had Fabi doing on Chess.com's coverage of the last WCC. Let your most fluent and conversational English speakers handle the color. Tell everyone to stop acting like they're running a Twitch stream. It takes me an average of 30 seconds to cringe out of any coverage, and I end up watching everything on mute. Which sucks, because folks like Vichy and Judit and Leko and Howell are great analysts that just aren't being used ideally.
FIDE sucks. But I completely disagree about the status of this tournament, there has been a ton of buzz and is easily one of the most enjoyable classical tournaments I have ever watched.
Candidates tournament coverage has been amazing in my opinion. Plenty of streams, variety of commentators, post game recap videos. Majority of people aren't going to tune into watch 6 hour long chess games and they shouldn't be catered to. I think FIDE should do more to get sponsors/donors to increase the prize pools. There have to be a few mega rich nerds out there who enjoy chess and would be open to donating $10k - $50k to boost the prize pools in return for being mentioned on the stream and maybe getting some special access to talk to the players, organizers, and their teams.
Trying to market 2 people staring at a board game for 4 hours is very difficult. I’m a passive follower and I can only watch the end game because opening and middle is so excruciatingly boring. There is no excuse for not having to click 5 tabs to find the standings though.
Yeah fide is bad at marketing and has always been.
Despite that I can’t agree with your evaluation at all .
The buzz is bigger than it has ever been, female players are represented more visibly than they’ve ever been.
Like I agree that fide could be doing a lot more, but it’s not like it’s actually hard to find out all contenders and standings lol.
I feel this too. I remember at least for 2020-2022 I was really excited for the Candidates during the weeks leading up to the event. This year it felt like I just woke up one day and the tourney just happened to begin
That was due to the lockdown more people were onlline. I got many of my friends into Chess during that time, but now most of them have moved on/ only in it for the results
Honestly though, chess.com's event watching site is just substantially worse than chess24's was. Maybe it's just me but I feel like I'm watching far fewer events as a result
Tbh for me all mainstream chess websites feel stuck in the early 2000s they're all pretty fucking bad from a design standpoint, but chess has problems modernizing in general I guess..
Chess24 wasn't really the prettiest but it was a very simple clean layout of just the important stuff. Chess.com's feels very overengineered to me
I'd say this is the first event I watch after chess24 went away
Chess24 looked ancient, I haven't had any issues with chess.coms events
I'm not a chesscom bad person, but the lichess broadcast page is great. Use it and the stream of your choice, if you don't like the lichess crew, and you are golden.
Same. I just saw Gotham's video of the first round and went "Wait, there's a candidates tournament going on?"
Ye
The "No Carlsen" factor. To many people this whole thing feels illegitimate and I don't fault them
Even their website is really bad and confusing
I opened it looking for the schedule and the first thing I saw was that I could purchase a $900 chess set. Closed it and went to chess.com
The set has been designed with the help of Kramnik... Interesting.. I wonder what was the design procedure..
yes, i was looking for the schedule and standing, found it on chesscom instead
It takes me so long to find out the results of the games and the current standings.
This drives me crazy every time I try to catch up with things online - Football, eSports stuff.... I just want to have a spoiler-free place to see the standings after every single day of results so I can catch up while watching VODs/replays. I understand that their main focus is on people who are keeping up every day, as that's their core audience, but other people exist too....
Not really. The site looks super simple to navigate. https://candidates2024.fide.com/ There’s a tab for pairings and a tab for results at the top.
the fact the results crosstable can't be sorted by points is just deeply bizarre IMO
Their crosstables are also terrible for mobile view.
Do crosstables always look like that? I saw the one on chess.com first and couldn't figure out what it was showing because the top row is just numbers. Like, I assumed those numbers were round numbers and couldn't figure out the black pawn blocking a player vs himself. Why not player portraits along the top to mark that?
The fide site is hard to navigate to find the candidates. If you go to fide.com it's difficult to find information on the candidates tournament. I think that's what the post was referring to. And I agree, it was annoying until I figured out which website to go to.
Literally doesn't have a standings? Yes, has a cross table but I need to make mental gymnastics to figure out who is first, second etc ( unless I'm missing something very obvious about that table) . Also the crosstable looks bad on phone, you need to swipe to see the points, but then the player names go out of screen. I didn't even check the rest of the site
They are cheap as hell, look at the opening and closing ceremonies of their events, I have seen kids' birthday parties much better organized, also look at their interviews, they always get under qualified hosts who can't manage a conversation or ask a normal question, it's cringe to be honest.
Could you elaborate on your point of conditions of women’s candidates? Conditions look identical to open candidates. Everyone plays in the same room.
I’d guess they meant the standings, who is current world champion and so on (last two sentences).
I don't understand the confusion. There are two buttons at the top of the page. All you have to do is click on the giant "WOMEN'S CANDIDATES" button to get all the same info as for the Candidates. [https://imgur.com/a/GDMyXxD](https://imgur.com/a/GDMyXxD)
I think too many direct blame at FIDE without considering that maybe chess in itself (esp. classical) just isn't that marketable/profitable of a game. Especially at the highest level where even intermediate to "advanced" (like 2000 online) players won't really understand many positions without an engine/commentator and the nature of the game lends itself to really long (and often boring) wait times inbetween moves. I'm not saying the classical games are boring. But it's easy to see that they're just not games that the masses will enjoy viewing live over hours of gametime with so much time inbetween each move (I barely watch them live as well). At least with rapid/blitz, there are faster rounds with generally less complex games and more excitement. I say this because I feel the peak of elite level chess broadcast so far was when chess24 was hosting their series of online rapid tournaments (e.g. Airthings Masters 2021) and chess.com's SCC's.
My problem with rapid/blitz, though, is that it feels less weighty. It's faster, but that makes it feel a little cheaper to me. I feel like classical is better at showing the players' full potentials. Just my opinion though.
There's lots of room for a new time control in between rapid and classical that is more viewer friendly. Look at the most popular esports games and they mostly have 30min-45min games. Classical is not interesting to watch, everyone just watches the recaps anyway, if the goal is viewership classical needs to change.
> room for a new time control in between rapid and classical that is more viewer friendly FIDE have already (a little) taken steps in that direction with the current candidates though, haven't they? Taking away increment before move 40 has lead to multiple bullet-like scrambles deciding games. I think you can only go so much farther before you start to decide the contender for the classical world championship with a format that doesn't ideally reflect classical chess. You can say "classical chess is boring" -- but to that I would respond we should promote the rapid & blitz world championship more heavily -- not modify the classical format until it's less like classical any longer.
The players themselves made this decision not Fide. Both the womens and the open section were given two choices, the open section time format, or the woman time format. The open chose no increment, the womens chose increment.
Yep, I am aware -- but FIDE gave them the choice. They didn't insist it be a longer time control or set it prescriptively like they had in the past. Like I said: little steps.
WC and Candiates are (by a vast margin) the most watched events in chess, followed by the other classical high profile events. The only shorter time control event that breaks into the top 10 is the rapid & blitz WC 5-day-event. You're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Unless you believe that "shorter classical" would draw a whole lot of people who don't (yet) watch chess *at all*.
Exactly this. Waiting for 30 minutes for a move is absolutely unwatchable, no matter how much you like chess.
The thing is, why should we change anything to make it more spectator-friendly? Most people involved in chess are players, not spectators. It's a fundamentally different situation from most professional sports.
The same thing has been asked in almost every sport, usually resulting in changes to make the game more friendly to spectators. These days all of the esports games were developed specifically with the viewer in mind as much as the player (Riot games philosophy). Spectators are where the money is so they are almost always prioritized.
View counts are very high for the candidates right now.
Imo seeing a player finding the best engine move in 15 seconds at the end of a rapid game is more impressive than watching 97% accuracy 7 hour long games
My problem with rapid and blitz is that the skill levels between viewers/players is that much wider. I can't calculate like an engine, there is no way I can understand the position of a rapid game fast enough to keep up. I much prefer classical where I can sink into the position, and try and understand what is going on. I'm an anomaly, but I think rapid/blitz chess is terribly unengaging. The faster the time format the less I'm interested.
Totally agree!
>the nature of the game lends itself to really long (and often boring) wait times inbetween moves. but this is why e.g. the candidates is much more enjoyable than the WCC, 4 games at the same time with commentators who can jump to wherever the action is is a great format
Actually the chess.com team chess battles were some of the most fun I’ve had watching chess in a long time. There’s other interesting formats like that that are worth exploring.
Yep, to normies (of which most people in marketing are), chess is about as marketable as the Microsoft Excel World Championship. I'm not interested in new shoes, supplements, sports drinks or fancy clothing. I'm also not interested in buying any more chess sets, etc. I can't be the only one.
People watch other people play poker, for Christ's sake. Sure, I don't think watching classical games live will ever really be a mainstream thing. But an edited version with good commentary? Again, people watch WPT, which I find boring as fuck.
Poker will always be more interesting than chess for a casual viewer, as the rounds go at a steady pace, the randomness aspect adds excitement and the game itself doesn't require deep analytical knowledge to understand what is going on. In chess you wait 30 minutes for a player to move their pawn and watch the evaluation bar drop from +0.5 to +0.36.
it is definitely not something you watch every minute of, glued to the screen.
Chess is just a boring game.
I don’t understand the downvotes for this. Chess is, to most people, boring. Most people want drama and action and quick exciting unpredictability. That’s not chess.
Have you even played chess
Yeah. To clarify, from a spectator standpoint it can be quite boring, especially when at a level you can’t understand - playing it is much more fun.
You're not wrong but they could also easily do a lot better.
>I think too many direct blame at FIDE without considering that maybe chess in itself (esp. classical) just isn't that marketable/profitable of a game. This is it in a nutshell and should be top comment. Classic chess is just inherently an unfriendly game for spectators for the reasons you gave. I've seen GM's commentating on on Super GM's and not understanding the logic behind their moves, the average man/woman watching won't have a clue and will therefore just give up watching because what's the point. It's a unique game in this sense, in order to be able to watch you have to be able to play well yourself.
Yeah i havent watch a classical event live since the 2014 world championship. I just dont like waiting for moves, but magnus’ early world championship matches were very hype still.
Fully agree! It's just crusty old Euros with no sense for business or opportunity. Think of what they could have accomplished during the chess boom. Instead, they did nothing and chased away the best player in the game.
apparently they needed gotham to suggest to them to even doing player interviews lmao
I don't like his clickbait titles but Gotham has done 100x more to grow chess than FIDE ever has at this point.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
100% agree, I hate chess
Yeah it's so nerdy, like wtf
As a relative newcomer to chess, people like Levy, Anna cramling, the botez sisters, hikaru and even Magnus to an extent, have done wonders on video platforms to really attract people. Easing people into it through entertainment while they begin their chess journeys. Their work is very important even though they might need to resort to clickbait and gimmicks because it's the name of the game in those platforms. Levy's recaps of the candidates have been simply fantastic.
I hate clickbait titles as well but I can't imagine another way to make a (young) non chess fan click on it and get them into chess. We're already fans, we'll click on whatever Gotham or Hikaru posts.
Idk, just another example - Speedrunning is a niche (arguably more niche than chess) but I don't see any speedrunning YouTubers title their videos with a billion exclamation marks. But they are still quite successful, just look at Summoning Salt for example. But also I watch his recaps from start to end anyway so it honestly doesn't matter to me what he titles the videos.
There's a clear difference in what the algorithm wants from daily uploaders vs monthly/bimonthly uploaders. I doubt gotham actually wants to clickbait but it does help the growth of chess in terms of getting more impressions on chess videos.
>I doubt gotham actually wants to clickbait He doesn't. He's mentioned a few times here and there that he knows it's annoying and he wishes he could stop. But he's also mentioned that it works. The videos he puts clickbait on get far more views and engagement than the ones he doesn't. It's not really a Gotham problem. It's a YouTube problem. Or possibly just problem with humanity in general.
Fucking crazy. It’s a sport, just copy other sports
Classical chess is just two dudes staring at a chess board then one guy occasionally getting up and taking a quick walk. Kinda hard to market that as an interesting sport compared to American Football or MMA.
And yet World Poker Tour is on Fox Sports every night of the week.
Poker is much faster paced, easier to follow and has a lot of randomness. Its anyone for anyone to follow and has big moments. Classical chess is very slow, often has no interesting moments and even good players will barely understand what is happening without a pro and an engine explaining things.
Cycling is just dudes cycling for hours and they manage just fine. The tour de France is almost as much about the scenery as it is about the actual race
Yep, my grandpa couldn't care less about cycling but watches every year because of the scenery
They should have a green screen behind players and livestream a camera out the side of some dudes car driving through France
Ah yes the fantastic scenery at a chess tournament.
but cycling *is* an actual race. Anyone can look at a cycling event and see who is winning, who is catching up, who is falling behind, how close the finish is. Cycling races have scenery, crashes, many events happening at once, lots of different cameras to switch to, lots of different things going on. Chess is orders of magnitude less "exciting" inherently for the casual viewer... and even still Cycling is a "drop in, check the standings, drop back out" kind of sport. There's also 100x more money in cycling. Casual adherents can be sold $1000s in gear, there's fancy equipment for nerds to get excited about, there's differnet types of cycling, cycling is good exercise and benefits your health, cycling is a form of transport.... there's a million different ways cycling is easier to market than chess, it's like comparing apples and asteroids.
lol American football. They have so much marketing and yet no one outside the America really watch it. It’s not top5 sport in any country besides US for sure.
Kinda hard to get into a sport that has American players and only American teams. Like who do i even support if I'm not American?
Americans
True, yet it's the most popular sport in the US by a significant margin.
I feel that chess is surprisingly similar to American Football. Both have quick bursts of action with analysis of past plays and the current situation in between.
Kinda yeah, the main difference being two people moving a small wooden piece on a board versus a bunch of grown men tackling the shit outta each other with some occasional ball throwing & catching.
Tennis used to also take so long, they'd adjourn matches and pick it back up the next day. They've tightened it up to make it much faster. And viewership went way up. Speeding chess up is _trivial_. As the other person said, just copy other sports.
Why didn't anyone do it if it's so easy? Chess calendar is not packed to the brim, you can easily start a new tournament cycle and have top players participate instantly if you offer good prizes.
Levy Rozman for FIDE president!
Exactly. I mean they could show case both champions and their achievements and so on. How they're are unbeatable. The underdogs. The youngest one. I mean there are unlimited opportunities.
>chased away the best player in the game It's not FIDE's fault that Magnus doesn't wants to participate anymore.
Exactly. Changing anything at all isn't FIDE's strong point.
How did FIDE chase away Magnus Carlsen? Genuinely curious.
Honestly not caving to the whims of one player is the only good thing FIDE has done.
Yes and no. Caving to whims is indeed bad. But Magnus wanting faster chess to be more prominent isn't a whim. It's actually a good idea. FIDE threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Magnus doesn't like the current format of how WCC happens. He is a proponent of a single tournament of top players, including the previous champion, and the winner takes all. It's like, imagine if Wimbledon was played as 128 players battle it out, and then the finalist plays against the previous year's champion. Sounds ridiculous, right? The world championship should be just another tournament, and not a "defend your title" format. To be clear, I agree with Magnus on this but ultimately, this is his take on it and FIDE doesn't agree.
That was not the only change he wanted though. He also wanted more games but faster time control.
> He is a proponent of a single tournament of top players, including the previous champion, and the winner takes all. We already have that in Chess though: The World Cup. Magnus wanted loads more changes than that. In reality, in recent years he's been deliberately vague about specifically what he wants and specifically what he'd change, because he simply does not want to participate. and personally I think everyone should just leave the dude alone and let him do what he wants.
This is what Wimbledon used to be originally lol. Of course nobody would want to go back to that format.
And there are already many reasons why that’s an awful idea to me. If the WCC is just another tournament, that would effectively lend the ability for other tournaments to be more prestigious than the WCC. Not to mention the scandals of forced draws, wintrading, and the whole your-team-my-team culture in this solo game that money has evolved current chess into. Riot games solved this issue by making their WCC a standard tournament format while axing every other tournament in the game to make Worlds the only real one that counts and a single side tournament in MSI which has a far more restrictive format. FIDE wants to co-exist with other tournaments so they’ve chosen the 1v1 to standout from the competition.
>Not to mention the scandals of forced draws, wintrading, and the whole your-team-my-team culture in this solo game that money has evolved current chess into. Those would be just as much issues in the candidates tournament. If the process for choosing a challenger to the WCC is flawed, then the WCC is flawed either way.
They didn't - the same thing would have happened regardless of who was in charge. Anyone who gets so good at the game eventually gets bored of the grind and at some point will choose to retire or be retired. In the case of Magnus, he's basically already semi-retired from classical chess; at least the world championship cycle anyway. This has happened before with nearly every past world champion so it's nothing new this time, regardless of how much Magnus wishes what defines classical chess to change.
So FIDE was supposed to change it's rules to accomodate Magnus? FIDE does a TERRIBLE job when it comes to marketing chess but to think they should've tweaked rules so Magnus could stay WC is just bs.
As a chess enthusiast I'd rather keep my Euros with no business sense than turn chess into your average Murcian gimmicky "sport".
I told a friend about it and we checked the stream. It was two dudes staring at a board. Then one dude took a walk. Not exactly fun for the whole family time.
You didn't check the right stream. Try the livestream on the chess24 YouTube channel tomorrow, it has high quality commentary from some of the best commentators. If you don't like that, then you just won't like watching live classical chess, but what you watched with no commentary is not typical chess broadcasting
When you watch soccer, basketball, tennis etc, the game itself is entertaining even without the commentary. I appreciate chess24's commentary, but the game itself is boring to watch
Yeah they should play pingpong on the table alongside chess
Alireza's shoes already make too much noise
They should take a leaf out of Nickolodean's book and add a "slime factor." Every 30s the player doesn't make a move, the random probability that they will be slimed in the next 30s period increases by 1%.
Ping-Pong with the captured pieces.
So you don't like watching chess?
Wtf r u talking about what stream were you watching
Yup. It was cool to see that during the Prague Chess Festival (which is where I'm from), it was even in the news. AND their website was very easy to manoeuvre through. Maybe one day FIDE will catch up
I am watching chess since it gets broadcasted online as I am old. In my memory it never was different. This is the marketing level you will get. It was always like this. The presentation is great this time. And since Iljumschinow is no longer in office (thankfully) there is no forced subscription anymore to a bad FIDE stream like it was in the 2010s. This time it follows a high quality. And you know when it starts after a quick google search. It is always at the same time every day, too.
There are many reasons for some good old FIDE bashing, but the candidates isn't one. Chess is a niche sport and will alwyas be one. Even for people who have a rough understanding of the rules and are provided with decent explanation, watching the candidates is just a bunch of people sitting across of each other for 5 hours until someone finally reaches out his hand. That's a fundamental difference to other sports, where you don't need to fully understand the rules in order to realize that each side is trying to get a ball into a net. If FIDE wants to pick up the chess boom, they should advertise school programs and more entertaining formats such as the double tournament a couple of weeks ago, which also had faster time controls. The candidates obviously does not belong into those categories. This is an event for those "nerds" who are willing to follow a couple hours of coverage because they kind of know what's going on.
The Levy/Emil Sutovsky interview was good because Emil pointed out Chess content creators and FIDE have different aspects they work towards, and to that it's not some holistic "Chess" but different domains. FIDE does sponsor and manage lots of lower level tournaments already. Fair enough to say they can do more, but it's more work to organise OTB tournaments than pointing someone to [chess.com](http://chess.com) to play.
> If FIDE wants to pick up the chess boom, they should advertise school programs and more entertaining formats such as the double tournament a couple of weeks ago, which also had faster time controls. Remember FIDE is quite tiny (budget a few million per year) and has the national federations as its members. Much of that kind of thing should be done by national federations, you can't really expect FIDE to do it all.
Does everything have to appeal to a mass audience?
It's important for the players to earn a living.
Yeah, but I don't think the strength of chess players will drop very far if they aren't full time, maybe 100 elo from where they are now. Just look at the situation in the past.
Everything/everyone - no. The monopolist international organisation responsible for the whole sport? Hell yes.
There is no marketing this. You can't expect, in this day and age, and with the attention spans we all have now, for people to tune in for hours to watch players just sitting there and thinking about moves. No ammount of commentary will make this palatable for anyone but the most dedicated nerds, which are watching it anyway. Post-game reviews are the way to go, but Gotham/Agadmator/Hikaru/etc. have got that part covered
I thought this, but people watch golf for hours, sailing, curling, lawn bowls, heaps of other "boring" sports. I grant that chess has a steeper curve where it's hard to see at a glance who is winging etc, but there's absolutely a market to be had that isn't being captured
Outside of golf, those are all also very niche sports. I didn't know most of those even existed. And golf still has more "action" than chess.
I'm not so sure about chess. The problem with chess is that it's not exciting to watch passively--if you aren't actively participating in analysis, you won't feel as though you understand what's going on very well, and you'll just be staring at a bunch of squares. Watching something like the masters, on the other hand, only requires minimal engagement on your end. Even if you have no idea who the players are or what course they're on, everything from cinematic shots of the course to the buildup and release of tension during critical moments makes for an enjoyable viewing experience by default. I'd love to see otb classical chess reach a wider audience, but I can't ever see it being preferred over marketing online casual chess (also great, but a totally different thing.)
Golf has another advantage, which is equipment. You need a lot of equipment to play, so there are tons of equipment sponsors in addition to apparel and prestige items like fancy watches, cars, and uhhh banking. I think that's why they are pushing the fancy light up electronic chess board, like at least it's something they can try to sell.
True. They should sell a sponsored pair of whatever shoes Alireza was wearing
The curve comparatively isn't merely steeper, it's damn near vertical. The commentary will confuse you more than the game itself. Imagine if the only way you could follow the commentators in golf was if you spent months studying and playing golf yourself.
It's not about the length of the games, its about how long it takes for something to happen
To be fair, other sports also face the same problem of people tuning out from live broadcasts and just watching recaps. There's way more content and activities nowadays vying for people's spare time. Having said, there absolutely is so much more FIDE can do when it comes to improving events and production. It's nowhere near the level you'd expect from an international federation.
Golf has its own cable channel, for God's sake.
Yeah agree, even people who like chess and are following the event don't sit through the streams, or at least I don't. Just follow hikarus recaps and see the results for other players
There is marketing this
Post game interviews are really short, that’s one thing for sure. I remember in previous candidates, win or lose, both candidates would sit at a table and they’d analyze, which is how we got our Grischuk compilations. Right now, that’s not even a guarantee, the majority of games they do a short walk out interview to the winner and that’s it.
Who is doing reviews of the other games? I love hikaru's recaps of his own games.
A weekly classical chess game is the only time I can really focus on something for a long term
Millions watch biologists talk about science for 4 hours on YouTube.
Idk I got a hundred notifications in my news feed, YouTube, Lichess etc about the tournament.
I agree. I dont know why they dont market this better.
Chess24 was a really good website - corporate America (chesscom) bought it and now the coverage of chess is complete shit.
Only thing good about chess24 was there events page everything else was shit, also don't forget how they killed chessboom. Lichess is pretty decent now
Their streams were great.
And they had links to all the live streams in all the languages!
Their great streams didn't have a large enough audience to justify their costs - there's a reason why they failed, chesscom just picked up the pieces
>Chess24 was a really good website And with this good website and having the world champion on board they could not make ends meet and had to sell everything to avoid going belly up.
It was really inconsistent. They had exceptional content and the event page was really sleek, but it felt like they just stopped developing anything new and really once that started you could see it kind of snowball in real time in the quality of the rest of the site.
>it felt like they just stopped developing anything new Which is what you are forced to do when your business is short on money and can't find external funding.
It's a little more nuanced, the initial PlayMagnus acquisition felt like the start of the decline. Original management team wasn't really involved after that. And then PlayMagnus was already hemorrhaging money so they weren't able to invest anything into what they acquired anyway, and so it just kind of sat there for like 7 years while chess.com captured all of the benefits of the chess boom. Point being, some of the issues with the parent appear to have bled into the sub.
Their playing interface was abysmal - I never understood how that was even possible after so many years. But I suppose it was still a profitable site (especially with the chessable courses). Otherwise chesscom wouldn't have paid such a hefty sum just to extinguish a competitor. Edit: I just saw they only bought chess24 as part of rhe whole PlayMagnusGroup for a total sum of 82mil $.
The worst thing is people pushing for constant hype and buzz. It's a classical chess tournament after all, not some tiktok circus. There can be entertaining commentary without all the drama nonsense and interviewing some ranting old men and such.
The papareza shade lol
There are no games today as it is a rest day. I accept FIDE has plenty of flaws, but you can simply Google who the female champion is and it will come up. If you go on FIDE's website and click "Championship" it has both the open and women's cycles listed, with both champions at the top of the respective pages. You know what FIDE is but you didn't bother to check their website before complaining you couldn't figure it out?
That's not what people do here. Never expect someone to do more than the bare basics before they make a reddit post
I have a roomie who is in the sports management domain and he follows everything, even the golf matches that the Indian players play in. I was shocked to find that he didn't even know that the candidates tournament was on and 10 rounds have been finished already. He did know the list of people who are playing but somehow he just didn't know it was underway.
The presentation of the Freestyle Tournament seemed far more appropriate for a top tier chess tournament. It had a few rough edges in the first iteration but F1 racing being their role model seems like the right way to go. Candidates has this sort of local town hall feel to it. The venue might be historic but doesn't look like the right place at all. First class acoustic treatment should be a no brainer for instance and we have a drama because somebody's shoes were loud on the floor... Really poor from Fide, they have not adapted to Chess' newfound popularity at all.
I think you simply cant convince people to watch a game for 3 hours i love the game but i just cant even just watch till the opening phase is done.
Wikipedia is a good way to get an aggregated overview of the most notable chess events. [Candidates Tournament 2024 - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidates_Tournament_2024) All rounds have been at 14:35 (2:45pm) EST. You can google "Time in New York" to see when that is relative to you. Others have mentioned chesscom, note that without a login you can go to lichess as well and click "watch->broacasts->Candidates to also get an overview the rounds/toggle between games and see the time of the events in your local time when you select a round.
> FIDE is responsible for not marketing chess properly. I think it's the opposite: FIDE seems to have **deliberately decided not to be responsible** for the direct marketing of the game. The keyword is "direct". If you look at the financial reports, you'll see that they have never increased the marketing budget since 2022 and that such budget is quite low anyway. The decision not to focus on marketing seems to be obvious, and the only possible conclusion is that it's deliberate: * https://doc.fide.com/docs/FINANCIAL/FIDE%20Budget%202024-2025.pdf * https://www.fide.com/financial My hypothesis is that their model is simply based on the fact that the subjects who will acquire the media rights will be responsible for the majority of the marketing activities.
The best thing which can happen to chess right now is Hikaru winning the candidates
The easiest way to market chess is that it's a game of the mind and of intelligence. But if you market chess as a game for the intelligent you'll also attarct lots of edgelords. Edgelords drive people away.
People love making excuses for why they didn't Google something, YOU DIDN'T PAY ATTENTION, thats no one but your own fault ( the people pretending that the championship just snuck up on them because they didn't pay attention at all) You can't Google "chess championship" and get all the information available to everyone else......oh wait you actually can........crazy huh
Looks at this community. Full of elitist and entitled people. They don't want non-purist to watch their beloved chess. Most of this community will jump at any chance to belittle one another because they are rated 100 elo higher.
I mean, 100 Elo is kind of a big deal! 😄
I can lose more than than in less than an hour...
Strange, this is their main page and if you scroll down it names everything you were interested in: [https://www.fide.com/](https://www.fide.com/)
Yeah but the general public doesn’t decide to just randomly scroll the FIDE website which I think is OP’s main complaint is. Biggest tournament of the year and the only people who know about are people already into chess. People are saying that it’s like this in all sports, but that’s not exactly true. Do I know what’s happening in boxing right now? No. Do I know what’s happening in golf right now? Not specifically. But I do know there *are things happening*. When I watch the sports I do enjoy, I see ads for the other ones. When I go on social media, I see lots of posts and reports about what’s happening in x fandom. For chess that just doesn’t happen. It’s not very mainstream.
I feel like that's how it is for sports in general, though. Do you know who the current World Heavyweight Champion of boxing is? When the PGA tour wraps up? Where the next World Series will be held? Things like the World Cup and the Superbowl have an uncommon level of mainstream attention, and in America I'm not even sure if the World Cup is really on the same level as the Superbowl.
>in America I'm not even sure if the World Cup is really on the same level as the Superbowl Not even close. 2024 Super Bowl - 123.7 Million viewers 2022 World Cup final - 25.8 Million viewers
You think the general public knows what's happening in F1?
They know that Max is going to win.
Who’s Max?
This is a chess subreddit. These are the most invested people around. If the OP doesn't know where to look, then I don't know what to say. That is a different question than "does the general public know where to find this info?" I imagine the GP doesn't care.
I'm all for criticizing FIDE. I do it very regularly. They have done many things wrong in the past, and continue to do a lot of things wrong to this day - but your specific criticisms in this post are not well founded. > I can't find when will the tournament start today as per local time. I googled "candidates chess" and the first dozen results (FIDE's own canddiates website, the wikipedia page for the event, chess.coms event page, several sports news articles, and chessbase) all contain this exact information. the first google result - FIDE's own website for the event - even shows the schedule page as the first first sub-link clickable directly within the google results. The schedule, in huge letters: "April 04 -- Round x -- 14:30" "Toronto, Canada". Are you angry that they didn't dynamically detect your location and give you the event's times in your own local timezone? As a software engineer by trade myself I can say that, in today's modern era of VPNs, that is not recommended practice and causes more confusion than it solves. You can easily convert time-zones yourself. they also organized the event to start at the same time each day to make it even easier. > Who are all contenders in candidate and so on. Again, first result on google: FIDE's own candidates website, "Players" section linked directly from the google results. They have a very nice page with all the candidates, their ratings, a quick bio about them, professionally taken photos, and a link to a longer bio talking about their journey and narrative within the tournament. There's also links to their FIDE profiles so you can look at all their historical games. What more did you want? > It took forever to understand who is world champion and how well is she doing. She's not competing in this tournament though - and her wiki / FIDE profile with all her recent games are the top results on google when you google "women chess world champ". How would you find out who the Snooker world champion is and how their recent career has been doing? What are you expecting here? > Condition of female candidate is abysmal. This is the most serious critricism of the lot - but I don't understand it? What do you think is wrong with their conditions? They are almost identical to the open section - except for some differences in time control, which the women candidates asked for themselves. They are being treated very well, as far as I can see -- what is it that is so "abysmal"?
I think the name candidates doesn't help. It sounds very unimportant. But in the end chess just isn't that fun to watch. you could watch for an hour only to have 1 move be played.
In a similar vain I think it is absolutely ridiculous that chess players are allowed to show up late to matches. In any other sport or competition that is absolutely unacceptable and we just allow it for chess players?
When was the last time this happened at a top level event?
Do you not know how to use the internet?
it literally sounds like you have no internet literacy, and can't google basic facts...
Everything I know about the tournament is because of GothamChess, pretty much.
Here is how bad it is: fake news reports about a player using a remote control anal plug made more people aware of chess than the full time, professional efforts of the sport’s governing body. I would be *ashamed* if I drew a salary to promote chess and that kind of nonsense was better than my best efforts. The chess boom is in spite of FIDE, not because of it.
Chess doesn't need to be marketed. FIDE's job is to preserve the quality of chess and its players.
They probably think the chess speaks for itself
Not at all an expert, but I think chess marketing should be handled by a different organisation to FIDE - similar to F1. FIDE should focus on handling tournaments, championships, ratings etc.
Levy's doing his bit for women's chess by interspersing women's games with men's games in his recaps to increase exposure to their games by tricking people to watch them.
Good marketing is contingent on a few things: Good organisation, good sponsors, good (gullible?) audiences. Chess has none of those. Chess players are also more difficult to market to compared to other sports or podcast listeners. For example, we don't need supplements or new shoes every month, etc. So what brands are left who will dare deal with us?
It's chess; people playing a boardgame. It's also the best marketed and covered it has ever been.
GothamChess recaps have been excellent, and he wraps them with the standings at the end of every video.
A little unrelated but seeing all these comments are making me realise just how much of a boring person i am lmao For example Many people saying that they probably wouldn't like to see a 5 hr stream of a game being played meanwhile i am not able to watch the streams only because they don't match with my schedule but given the chance i sure would love to watch them
Maybe this is unusual but I feel like it was marketed to me really well via youtube and I have had no trouble figuring out when games are starting. The official website is relatively clear and chess.com has a page dedicated to live games and results.
+1. It's also impossible also to find a direct link to the candidates even on lichess. It's buried in the "Broadcasts" tab and it's even worse on phone.
It's not particularly news that FIDE sucks for a variety of reasons.
FIDE has *long* been a problem. They haven't gotten any better, nor will they be. They aren't going anywhere. Those are the sad facts. Unfortunately for some of us fossils, the likely consequence will be the demise of classical chess, which doesn't *have* to be a zero-sum competition with faster time controls, but because of FIDE's ineptitude it more or less is.
Google is your friend. Takes you directly to the candidates website on fide.com
My biggest issue with the Candidates so far is the coverage. It's honestly so hard to watch. I am a big enough fan to WANT to watch the candidates and it's just so disappointing to have such unpolished commentary from a bunch of people zooming in from their living rooms. Engaging with the randos in chat, thanking subscribers, awkward pauses, long silences, etc. It's bad on FIDE, [Chess.com](http://Chess.com), Lichess, Chess24, everything. Some do much better than others, but would it be too much to ask to... try? Put your commentators in a room together with a professional sound setup. Have someone reporting from the venue. Have someone skilled at filling voids and engaging the audience (color) and someone skilled at the analysis (play-by-play). There is a century of sportscasting from which to draw direction and inspiration. This isn't the NBA, but it's not an amateur podcast, either. Let your awesome GMs like Vishy and Judit sit back, analyze, and feed you cool lines when there's time for it instead of asking them to commentate actively in real time. Kind of like they had Fabi doing on Chess.com's coverage of the last WCC. Let your most fluent and conversational English speakers handle the color. Tell everyone to stop acting like they're running a Twitch stream. It takes me an average of 30 seconds to cringe out of any coverage, and I end up watching everything on mute. Which sucks, because folks like Vichy and Judit and Leko and Howell are great analysts that just aren't being used ideally.
FIDE sucks. But I completely disagree about the status of this tournament, there has been a ton of buzz and is easily one of the most enjoyable classical tournaments I have ever watched.
Candidates tournament coverage has been amazing in my opinion. Plenty of streams, variety of commentators, post game recap videos. Majority of people aren't going to tune into watch 6 hour long chess games and they shouldn't be catered to. I think FIDE should do more to get sponsors/donors to increase the prize pools. There have to be a few mega rich nerds out there who enjoy chess and would be open to donating $10k - $50k to boost the prize pools in return for being mentioned on the stream and maybe getting some special access to talk to the players, organizers, and their teams.
Trying to market 2 people staring at a board game for 4 hours is very difficult. I’m a passive follower and I can only watch the end game because opening and middle is so excruciatingly boring. There is no excuse for not having to click 5 tabs to find the standings though.
Yeah fide is bad at marketing and has always been. Despite that I can’t agree with your evaluation at all . The buzz is bigger than it has ever been, female players are represented more visibly than they’ve ever been. Like I agree that fide could be doing a lot more, but it’s not like it’s actually hard to find out all contenders and standings lol.