Rustam Kasimdzhanov

Former FIDE World Champion

“The problem with the broken World Championship Match cycle — is neither Gukesh’s nor Sindarov’s. It is simply Magnus Carlsen’s fault, because he did not fully fulfill his obligation to the chess world.

I know Magnus a little bit as a person. After all, we’ve been in the same world for a very long time. And Magnus is a man who doesn’t care what I think about him, he doesn’t care what the chess world thinks about him, and he doesn’t care about any obligations to history. That’s why he’s such a great chess player.

The World Championship Match Cycle is broken. Because it leaves room for speculation about whether a given Champion is legitimate or not.

Ideally, the Cycle works like this: the person becoming World Champion is the strongest chess player. And the new player must defeat them to become the strongest. And in this regard, it’s the World Champion’s sacred duty to, at some point, lose a Championship match to a new player, to avoid any questions of legitimacy.

We always have Champions who avoid that final match at all costs. Kasparov, for example, at some point started refusing to play matches, and so on. Magnus Carlsen also left the cycle before the moment when he would have lost the final match.

At some point in his life, a person will lose a World Championship Match to a new Champion. That is how we are all made. No one dies unbeaten at 96.

And I think it would have been better if Magnus had found the courage to lose a World Championship Match, say, to Sindarov. That would have made the victory even more significant.”