Time to change the format. It's understandable you don't want to spend your whole career preparing for these long matches all the time. For the challenger it's 6 months of preparing, but for Carlsen it would've been his 6th time of preparing for this in a few years.
They have also become less entertaining. 12 matches is long (edit, 14 now), but no one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive and all games ended in a draw. Karjakin they both at least won each their game, but still had to go to rapid tie-breaks. And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting him again isn't that exciting.
It's also almost impossible for a new person to get a chance. Even Carlsen didn't like the format and didn't participate in the Candidates for a few years, and when he first did he almost didn't win it to be allowed to play the WC match. Even though he clearly was the best player at the time.
I wonder how this will affect the status of the title, when it's in practice is now a title-fight between the second best players.
Also what will happen to the hype in Norway? Each WC match has so far been live streamed on all big news pages, biggest TV channels etc. It will still be a Christmas tradition to watch the rapid WC tournament I guess, but I'm afraid this will lead to less coverage. But just to tell how big Carlsen is in Norway: This is the top news on all outlets at the moment.
> They have also become less entertaining.
The classical World Championship matches have never been entertaining to watch live.
In fact they used to take 2 days for one game.
> No one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive and all games ended in a draw.
Chess, in theory, with absolutely perfect play, is a draw. It's not a game of "risk" in classical time format. You can take risks in blitz and rapid, but in classical you have (almost) all the time in the world to calculate the line you're playing.
In theory, wouldn't the player who takes the first move have a tiny tiny edge? Or is the second mover always able to guarantee a draw if they play perfectly?
It's not a solved problem but our best players and best computers perform better with white. The edge isn't tiny either.
They don't anymore, at least not the computers. When you let them start from normal starting position and provide decent hardware and some time it's always a draw and has been for a few years now.
> always
Not always. Almost always.
No one is going to waste the CPU time running Stockfish (or GPU with Leela) against each other at classical time controls long enough to see a decisive game which might never happen anyway so we will likely never know. I think current Stockfish on a modern ThreadRipper with classical time control will never be beaten. I am not 100% sure I am right but I don't expect (but would love to!) to be proven wrong.
Stockfish won't solve it. We need a full game tree. Stockfish is not designed to build a full game tree.
Generating a full game tree would be a truly daunting undertaking, and I can't even fathom how much memory would it take.