Recently we published an article on a unique personality: Werner Keym, a teacher (of French and Latin) and a musician, who in 2010 was elected Mayor of the German city of Meisenheim. In 2014, at 72, he retired from that post to devote more time to his family — he has five grandchildren — and to his hobbies. The foremost of them is problem chess. Keym sent me a signed copy of his most recent English language book, Chess Problems out of the box, which has given me immense enjoyment ever since.
Werner Keym is one of the most creative problemists I know. He specializes in chess puzzles involving castling, en passant captures, pawn promotion and retrograde analysis. For many years I have enjoyed his problems, which I often encountered. Many have the advantage of not being prone to instant solution by chess engines. They force you to think. Go buy a copy of Chess Problems out of the box — it's just €10 / US $12 (plus €2/$4 for postage). Outrageously good value for money.
On page 184 of his book, Keym makes an interesting out-of-the-box proposal regarding Chess World Championship matches. It was (partially) brought on by the 2016 match in New York. In the final twelfth game Magnus Carlsen, to the surprise of many, allowed a quick draw with the white pieces. It was a clever decision: the reigning World Champion felt that he was stronger than the Challenger, Sergey Karjakin, in rapid chess, and he proved that this was indeed the case by beating the Russian in the following tiebreak. "I have no objection to this outcome," Keym says. "There has to be a decisive outcome, and that can be achieved with rapid chess, blitz, Armageddon, etc. But it makes me feel uncomfortable that the World Championship in classical chess is finally decided by non-classical games..."
So Werner Keym has made a proposal to modify the way the Championship would be decided: if the result is a tie, don't have the reigning World Champion retain the title, and don't have rapid, blitz and Armageddon games, in the end, to decide who gets the crown. There is another way (we quote directly from his book)...
The Chess World Championship match should be decided neither by rapid chess nor by blitz chess nor by Armageddon, but instead by classic chess.
Proposal: The competition consists of two parts, prologue and match.
Prologue
Match
Comments
This proposal is interesting. In the prologue phase, a relatively minor condition for the main match is established, with rapid and blitz games. After that, the match is decided with classical games. It is easily possible that one of the players loses the prologue and gains the title by winning one more game than his opponent. A vaguely similar system was tried in the 2018 Altibox Norway Chess Tournament: it started with a blitz tournament which determined which five of the ten players would have one more game with White in the classic tournament. Fabiano Caruana qualified for the extra white game and won the tournament, ahead of Carlsen, Nakamura, Anand and Wesley So, all of whom had also got the extra White.
One possible modification of the Keym proposal: in closer keeping with the current system it might be better to start with just two rapid chess games and eleven (instead of 13) classical games. This could be the schedule:
The match would last two weeks, and in the final (11th) game, if it is necessary, White would need to win, while Black could keep or win the title with a draw. But the outcome would be decided in classical chess.
Naturally, it is of special interest to know what our readers — and chess experts around the world — think of this proposal. Please use our feedback section below to express your views.
