Vishwanathan Anand

15-th World Chess Champion

“I think in a sense it has retained its weight. Look at it this way. The younger generation without exception are very hungry for this title. It means a lot to them.

If you take people like Praggnanandhaa and, in fact most of the young Indians, though they are all big fans of the faster formats, they block time and they take classical chess very seriously and they try their best in the cycle and then you can see the same with the Turkish youngsters and the Uzbek youngsters and so on. They come they try and that’s happening to see.

But we now have a Rapid Champion, Blitz Champion, we are going to start the new Total World Chess Championship. Of course, if you have many competitions called “The World” there’s some possibility for people to get confused or focus on one, but what happens is people who enjoy one competition — come back for another, they simply want to enjoy a sporting event.

Well, why can’t we aspire to that? The total world champion cycle will give qualifiers for the candidates. So, we still try to maintain the traditional classical World Championship as the event 140-ear cycle roughly. Great tradition. We keep that, but we also keep up with the audience and keep up with trends in sports.”