This week marks another round in the FIDE World Chess Championship. Grantland writer Spike Friedman explains the game:
The FIDE World Chess Championship pits the reigning world champion against the winner of a qualifying round-robin tournament between eight of the top players in the world. The finals is a best-out-of-12 tournament with draws earning half a point. If the finals end in a draw, four rapid-chess matches are played as a tiebreaker. If those draw, then blitz chess, played with a three-minute starting clock, serves as the final tiebreaker.
Chess is a global fascination — the worldwide audience members of the games last Saturday, November 9th, crashed several websites. The Netherlands version of the BBC broadcast the game and boasted numbers of 700,000 watching –14% of their whole population.
However, the BBC is unimpressed, with 10 reasons why chess will always lack mass appeal for the sport. They hit on the lack of insight on the game, the fact that personal, local games in the park have more draw than a hermetically sealed international, and the romantic notions of chess – used in media to show how brainy, strategic someone can be – are definitely not supported watching in international play.
And really, it’s nothing compared to Ron Weasley’s chess playing in the first Harry Potter book
MEDAL-HEADS 