‘Income Negotiation’
Here I sit between rounds at the Western Open, watching the same scene play out once again. Short, quick draws as the players jockey themselves into position to share out the prizes.
It’s a problem in chess, but it’s a problem that really cannot be solved with any practical effect. Banning draw offers simply opens the door to repeated positions, such as the known line in the Austrian Attack that leads to a forced draw. Refusing to divide cash prizes and instead awarding them on tiebreaks, like trophies, simply creates another problem: no tiebreak system is completely fair, and there’s nothing to stop the players involved from redistributing the money on the way out the door, anyway.
The plain truth is there is no way to make players play if they don’t want to.
But there’s a problem there. When the top players in an event simply play 5-6 half-hearted moves and shake hands, it becomes impossible to sell the event to the public. And it’s also hard for the public to take chess seriously as a competitive event.
So, what to do? Do we just shrug our shoulders and accept the way it has always been? It’s an impossible task, so don’t worry about it, just relax and enjoy it?
As I see it, there’s only one way to handle it. Chess tournaments, as they are today, have to be scrapped completely. The whole idea is flawed, and we’re seeing the flaws writ large in today’s events.
The draw has to go. Oh, the draw is a completely proper result to some games, no arguing that point. But it has to be eliminated as an acceptable result in a tournament.
There are two ways to do this. One is being seen in a few places right now: the elimination tournament. This makes chess into a competition like tennis. You have brackets, and players move through one match after another. Win and you keep playing. Lose and you go home.
The only other way I see is to add a ‘tiebreaker’ procedure to every game in every round of an ordinary tournament. Then, if the ‘regulation’ game is drawn, the tiebreakers kick in until a definite winner is obtained. No more half-points on the tournament table; only full points or zeroes allowed.
Why would I want to tamper with tradition, I hear you ask? I’m not. Truth to tell, tradition is on the side of “draws don’t count”, not the draw. The earliest events were elimination events, not round robins.
Paul Keres once complained that ratings and norms were killing tournament chess, because they gave players something else to play for besides the win. It’s past time we bring back the importance of winning, if we want competitive chess to ever break out of the ghetto it’s currently in.