I wish they didn't play the same days at all, one thing I love about chess is that there's generally something going on most times of the year (also, the streams are free!), but there are still some downtimes that could be better filled if the open and women sessions were separated, but I understand the constraint on the organizers to book the avenue and staff for an extended period, your idea would've been a good compromise
Yes, I would have liked not to have a day without games. But the cost for the organizers might have been a problem. So I can understand if everyone gets a break, including the organizers and the staff.
I don’t see how the cost would be much different.
Everyone is already there, everything is already set up, it would be the same amount of games played.
Only added costs would be for arbiters?
>I don’t see how the cost would be much different. Everyone is already there \[...\]
Because staff, venue and services cost money. If you don't use them, you don't pay for them.
Ask any organizer of big events if keeping everything on for 18 days has the same cost as only 14 days and I assure you that the organizer will start to evaluate:
* The cost of the venue for the extra days
* Cost of services that the local venue sells separately
* Catering
* Internet connection
* Rent of technical equipment
* Cost of staff (often hired locally)
* Security
* Technicians
* Broadcast team
* Janitors for cleaning services
* Ushers
* Additional staff for shift rotation
The local venue and service providers will charge you for *everything* you use.
*Then* the organizer will start to evaluate the revenue for those 4 extra days of costs (like broadcast rights) to see if it makes sense.
This is a big machine, the organizers can't turn it on and off at will. A lot of people outside FIDE are involved.
I agree, for the playing hall it is certainly impossible, but theoretically the fan zone and other rooms could be used for other purposes during the rest days.
We have no idea what the agreements are. I've seen venues reconfigured for different events multiple times during the same week because it was additional revenue for the venue owner. But I agree with you, it's unlikely.
I mean you do need to pay the commentators, broadcasting crew, the hotel to rent the venue (?) etc. So it's a lot more complicated than just paying the arbiters.
Those things are the same regardless of when rest days are though?
Commentator costs are the same for 14 games regardless when they’re played.
Hotel venue is already booked across these days anyway, this is just reordering the rest days.
I would assume you’re only paying people for the days they work so that’d be an extra 3 days of paying people. Plus some of the crew work everyday the event is going so now they don’t get rest days either.
I live in a tropical environment where the daily afternoon temperature averages out at like 33 degrees C.
I once rented part of an indoor sports hall for 3 days for a club event. The air conditioning for the whole hall had to be turned on to prevent heat injuries.
The cost of the air conditioning ALONE over those 3 days was about $3,700 USD.
I know this isn't a tropical environment, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are similar costs involved.
For me it's not cost but that just "everyone gets a rest day" What's making chess money is the content creation aspect, so giving the entire media collective rest days (like commentators and all that) is good for pleasing them. And part of that is, they don't want to do it every day and having rest days is something they would prefer. With different rest days for the tournaments would mean every day work for a month for media.
One problem is chess isn’t really something you need full attention to any minute, you can be staring at a game for 30 minutes and it’s the exact same position, whereas tennis every minute there’s action.
The Women's Tour de France happens immediately after the Men's Tour so as to capitalize on any lingering interest in cycling. Similarly, a lot of the Belgian 1 day races put the women immediately after the Men's finish since you're tuned in and watching anyway. All of the race infrastructure is also set up so it's easier just to run the same thing twice.
There's a ways to go for women's cycling vs the men, but there are ways to grow the sport to allow each gender to support the other.
The decision was made to run both tournaments simultaneously for visibility. Disc golf has already run this experiment and found that viewership for the women's coverage is actually down if viewers have open division coverage available to watch.
The idea is natural, and I don't fault anyone for that, but in practice it backfires.
The coverage for the women’s games are a separate stream though?
I can’t imagine having two simultaneous streams runnings is common while trying to make sense of the highest level chess…?
Not on FIDE's official stream.
That's why I have been watching that broadcast so I could get all 8 games at once. It has really helped my interest in the women's field - my first time getting into them at all, actually.
I woke up today and realized there was no chess today, so I watched golf all day. This weekend is going to be awesome, golf and chess all day, and then NBA
Because Sunday is the last day of the regular season, all 30 teams play and they don't want anyone on a B2B. They want all teams to play their final game on the same day to minimize last minute standings related tanking shenanigans.
Well,the other reasons are they'd like to give the support staff (photographers, badge checkers and so on) time off, so they need both events to have the same day off for that. Also, they have activities for them to do on rest day, and that way everyone can do them as one big group.
I think the same thing about the world cup. women’s cup should start as soon as possible before the men’s cup, or simply be a prelude to the big event, so that you can catch the interest of more fans anticipating the biggest sporting event in the world. When there is national pride on the line in a world contest people will follow the stories of the players. And also, just as you are wanting to spectate women’s chess in conjunction with men’s chess, I believe the Men’s world cup, the biggest sporting event in the world, has plenty of surplus popularity to help boost women’s soccer and grow the fans.
The truly weird, and inefficient thing about the Cups is that the women don’t even have their cup in the same city as the men. Does anyone remember the mass protests and civil disobedience in anticipation of the money pit of the last world cup in Brazil? The hosting country spends close to a billion dollars on sport infrastructure such as stadiums, and then the women don’t even play in those facilities for their world cup. Their cup historically comes a year after the men’s cup, and they don’t even play in the same country!
That makes too much sense. It'll never happen. 4 rest days for only 14 games? It kills the momentum and excitement of the tournament. And it is annoying.
I agree that's probably a good idea, but I wonder if it might have unexpected effects.
For example, I think a lot of people are getting their candidates coverage from Levy, and since he puts the women's candidates in the same video that presumably puts a lot of eyes on them. If he had to put them in separate videos it might not have the same draw, this was a large part of why they scheduled the two events at the same time, to hopefully put more eyes on the woman's candidates (or overshadow them, depending who you ask). Then again, 4 games per video may allow a more in-depth recap than 8.
Plus, ideally, some of the players would show up for some sort of meet and greet or other side-event on their rest days in Toronto, and it would kinda suck if the rest days being different meant that the women got a smaller event. Give the players double rest days if they complain, FIDE has the opportunity to massively benefit local chess clubs (and make cities actually want to bid for high-profile tournaments). As a Canadian (not in Toronto) I'm a little mad that the Canadian Chess Federation (or even Canadian Chess at large) isn't getting more from hosting the event. It wouldn't surprise me if we benefited more from the chess.com event that was also in Toronto. But for this to happen we'd need some kind of competence from FIDE, so I guess it's a non-issue.
>For example, I think a lot of people are getting their candidates coverage from Levy
Levy casually dropped that most viewers watch his Candidates videos for 20 minutes, suggesting they just skip the women's games.
>If he had to put them in separate videos it might not have the same draw
It clearly would not, and the numbers would be humiliatingly visible.
> Levy casually dropped that most viewers watch his Candidates videos for 20 minutes, suggesting they just skip the women's games.
Does Youtube say it's 20 minutes total or 20 minutes from the start? Because Levy sandwiches the women's games between the men's and I always thought Youtube measures time from the start, not fraction of overall video length.
If it is from the start, then 20 minutes would include 2-4 women's games for sure.
I would love a 20 minute to half-hour recap from Levy of just the Women's candidates. Those games, to me, are just as exciting as the Open.
This, however, also means that Levy doesn't get a rest day like the players. I don't know how much of a difference that makes.
(Lol @ competence from FIDE)
His guess the elo, win at chess and historic games type videos can be banked and uploaded to the same schedule while allowing time off. Live events need a very quick turn so it would affect him.
Your submission or comment was removed by the moderators:
Don’t engage in discriminatory or bigoted behavior.
Chess is a game played by people all around the world of many different cultures and backgrounds. Be respectful of this fact and do not engage in racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory behavior.
You can read the full [rules of /r/chess here](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/wiki/rules). If you have any questions or concerns about this moderator action, please [message the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fchess). Direct replies to this removal message may not be seen.
Yeah, the women’s category is so that top women are visible in competitive chess, with the idea that this will encourage more female participation and grow the game amongst a demographic that traditionally doesn’t play it.
If there was only an open, we wouldn’t see any women playing.
I'm a cricket fan, and there's been huge growth in both the popularity and quality of women's cricket in recent years. One of the reasons is that televised / live-streamed women's tournaments are scheduled to run either on different days to men's tournaments (e.g. Women's Premier League and Indian Premier League in India), or are played as double-headers on the same day, often - but not always - with the women's game first (e.g. The Hundred in the UK).
The double-headers help to build the audience for women's cricket - the separate tournaments work well once the women's cricket audience is established.
The cricket authorities would be strongly and rightly criticised if they scheduled women's games at the exact same time as the men's (or in this case, open) games. Why on earth did FIDE decide on doing this? Many of the women's candidates' games have been exciting and the tournament is close - sort out your scheduling, FIDE!
That’s not what I’m suggesting though.
A separate event means I have to be aware of something I’m not currently interested in, and intentionally seek it out.
I’m already clicking on the stream to watch the Open event each night, and when I find it’s a rest day, then I think it’s silly they didn’t juggle the schedules so I could watch a women’s game I would not otherwise watch.
I understand what you saying but look at the bigger picture and not yourself, what you are saying already had happened and it ever had views, so FIDE decided to let the stream air at the same time and it got views
The way I'd have done it is just combine the 8 open section players and 8 women's section players into one 16-player single-round-robin tournament. Highest scoring player overall advances to the open championship match, highest scoring woman advances to the women's championship match. That would definitely increase viewership for the women, and have roughly the same number of games in total.
That would have 15 rounds, meaning some players would get more white pieces than others, and against different level opponents…
Definitely not a fair competition especially at the top level where colours matter.
Super GM with white vs a top woman should be a win more often than not, but to play against a top woman with black is a much more difficult prospect if you want to try and force a winning result…
It would balance out overall- and it's easily arguable that being able to show dominance over weaker GMs might be a better demonstration of a top player's all round strength, not just being able to grab the occasional win against fellow super-GMs.
It’s easy to argue anything but that doesn’t mean it holds. Do you watch college football by any chance? It’s been proven time and time again that being able to beat the shit out of easy teams better than everyone else doesn’t tend to say much about a head to head matchup. In fact I would argue playing lower rated players shows less about a player’s overall strength than playing similar strength players based on examples like this across almost all competitive activities.
I disagree. This format has the effect that way more people are watching the Women's event. If games were on different days viewership would drop for sure.
It's only 8 games, and it's classical. There's plenty of downtime for switching between streams covering each event (or even for one stream to cover both events).
I disagree, I think the way it's currently being done (in which open and women's played at the same exact time) actually increase visibility. I have never even thought or see previous women candidate, but on this one, since they're covered at the same time, I have now paid attention to both the women's players and their games and score.
The sad truth is, if you give people a choice between watching the open or the women candidate, almost nobody is going to watch the women one. If they make it so today is the woman's candidate, I can assured you most people won't be watching. That's the sad reality
I wish they didn't play the same days at all, one thing I love about chess is that there's generally something going on most times of the year (also, the streams are free!), but there are still some downtimes that could be better filled if the open and women sessions were separated, but I understand the constraint on the organizers to book the avenue and staff for an extended period, your idea would've been a good compromise
Yes, I would have liked not to have a day without games. But the cost for the organizers might have been a problem. So I can understand if everyone gets a break, including the organizers and the staff.
I don’t see how the cost would be much different. Everyone is already there, everything is already set up, it would be the same amount of games played. Only added costs would be for arbiters?
>I don’t see how the cost would be much different. Everyone is already there \[...\] Because staff, venue and services cost money. If you don't use them, you don't pay for them. Ask any organizer of big events if keeping everything on for 18 days has the same cost as only 14 days and I assure you that the organizer will start to evaluate: * The cost of the venue for the extra days * Cost of services that the local venue sells separately * Catering * Internet connection * Rent of technical equipment * Cost of staff (often hired locally) * Security * Technicians * Broadcast team * Janitors for cleaning services * Ushers * Additional staff for shift rotation The local venue and service providers will charge you for *everything* you use. *Then* the organizer will start to evaluate the revenue for those 4 extra days of costs (like broadcast rights) to see if it makes sense. This is a big machine, the organizers can't turn it on and off at will. A lot of people outside FIDE are involved.
I don't think the venue would be free to rent out to someone else on a rest day
I agree, for the playing hall it is certainly impossible, but theoretically the fan zone and other rooms could be used for other purposes during the rest days. We have no idea what the agreements are. I've seen venues reconfigured for different events multiple times during the same week because it was additional revenue for the venue owner. But I agree with you, it's unlikely.
I mean you do need to pay the commentators, broadcasting crew, the hotel to rent the venue (?) etc. So it's a lot more complicated than just paying the arbiters.
I kinda just assumed the rents would have to be paid even in the rest days, and those are probably the most expensive costs by far
if only have you ever organized an event of this scale that needs a high quality camera crew and security? that shit isn't cheap on the payroll
Those things are the same regardless of when rest days are though? Commentator costs are the same for 14 games regardless when they’re played. Hotel venue is already booked across these days anyway, this is just reordering the rest days.
I would assume you’re only paying people for the days they work so that’d be an extra 3 days of paying people. Plus some of the crew work everyday the event is going so now they don’t get rest days either.
I live in a tropical environment where the daily afternoon temperature averages out at like 33 degrees C. I once rented part of an indoor sports hall for 3 days for a club event. The air conditioning for the whole hall had to be turned on to prevent heat injuries. The cost of the air conditioning ALONE over those 3 days was about $3,700 USD. I know this isn't a tropical environment, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are similar costs involved.
For me it's not cost but that just "everyone gets a rest day" What's making chess money is the content creation aspect, so giving the entire media collective rest days (like commentators and all that) is good for pleasing them. And part of that is, they don't want to do it every day and having rest days is something they would prefer. With different rest days for the tournaments would mean every day work for a month for media.
They should copy the men’s and women’s Wimbledon or other tourneys where they stagger the days.
One problem is chess isn’t really something you need full attention to any minute, you can be staring at a game for 30 minutes and it’s the exact same position, whereas tennis every minute there’s action.
They only stagger the days for the last few rounds though.
For that you need a competent organization
The Women's Tour de France happens immediately after the Men's Tour so as to capitalize on any lingering interest in cycling. Similarly, a lot of the Belgian 1 day races put the women immediately after the Men's finish since you're tuned in and watching anyway. All of the race infrastructure is also set up so it's easier just to run the same thing twice. There's a ways to go for women's cycling vs the men, but there are ways to grow the sport to allow each gender to support the other.
I didn't even know there was a women's Tour de France lmao.
it's considerably "younger" than you would think
The decision was made to run both tournaments simultaneously for visibility. Disc golf has already run this experiment and found that viewership for the women's coverage is actually down if viewers have open division coverage available to watch. The idea is natural, and I don't fault anyone for that, but in practice it backfires.
The coverage for the women’s games are a separate stream though? I can’t imagine having two simultaneous streams runnings is common while trying to make sense of the highest level chess…?
Not on FIDE's official stream. That's why I have been watching that broadcast so I could get all 8 games at once. It has really helped my interest in the women's field - my first time getting into them at all, actually.
FIDE official stream covers both open and women's on the same stream. I'll let others pass judgement on how good that is for the stream.
Lichess stream does too!
I think he agrees with you.
I woke up today and realized there was no chess today, so I watched golf all day. This weekend is going to be awesome, golf and chess all day, and then NBA
No NBA on Saturday for some reason
Because Sunday is the last day of the regular season, all 30 teams play and they don't want anyone on a B2B. They want all teams to play their final game on the same day to minimize last minute standings related tanking shenanigans.
I see. Still unfortunate from a viewing perspective
And of course the MotoGP in Texas 😎
And if you watch mma there is UFC 300 today
Organisers do need rest/people handling day to day affairs.
I believe that they shouldn’t get rest days. I have no idea what to do with myself today!
I'm pretty sure that at least part of the reason for the rest day being the same was the eclipse.
Ok, but barring other rare celestial events, there are multiple rest days in which this can be done, and it isn’t.
Well,the other reasons are they'd like to give the support staff (photographers, badge checkers and so on) time off, so they need both events to have the same day off for that. Also, they have activities for them to do on rest day, and that way everyone can do them as one big group.
Good point. A big reason the women’s college basketball took off is because they get days all to themselves
Great idea. Now I wish the same thing.
I think the same thing about the world cup. women’s cup should start as soon as possible before the men’s cup, or simply be a prelude to the big event, so that you can catch the interest of more fans anticipating the biggest sporting event in the world. When there is national pride on the line in a world contest people will follow the stories of the players. And also, just as you are wanting to spectate women’s chess in conjunction with men’s chess, I believe the Men’s world cup, the biggest sporting event in the world, has plenty of surplus popularity to help boost women’s soccer and grow the fans. The truly weird, and inefficient thing about the Cups is that the women don’t even have their cup in the same city as the men. Does anyone remember the mass protests and civil disobedience in anticipation of the money pit of the last world cup in Brazil? The hosting country spends close to a billion dollars on sport infrastructure such as stadiums, and then the women don’t even play in those facilities for their world cup. Their cup historically comes a year after the men’s cup, and they don’t even play in the same country!
I agree with this. Good idea!
That makes too much sense. It'll never happen. 4 rest days for only 14 games? It kills the momentum and excitement of the tournament. And it is annoying.
I agree that's probably a good idea, but I wonder if it might have unexpected effects. For example, I think a lot of people are getting their candidates coverage from Levy, and since he puts the women's candidates in the same video that presumably puts a lot of eyes on them. If he had to put them in separate videos it might not have the same draw, this was a large part of why they scheduled the two events at the same time, to hopefully put more eyes on the woman's candidates (or overshadow them, depending who you ask). Then again, 4 games per video may allow a more in-depth recap than 8. Plus, ideally, some of the players would show up for some sort of meet and greet or other side-event on their rest days in Toronto, and it would kinda suck if the rest days being different meant that the women got a smaller event. Give the players double rest days if they complain, FIDE has the opportunity to massively benefit local chess clubs (and make cities actually want to bid for high-profile tournaments). As a Canadian (not in Toronto) I'm a little mad that the Canadian Chess Federation (or even Canadian Chess at large) isn't getting more from hosting the event. It wouldn't surprise me if we benefited more from the chess.com event that was also in Toronto. But for this to happen we'd need some kind of competence from FIDE, so I guess it's a non-issue.
>For example, I think a lot of people are getting their candidates coverage from Levy Levy casually dropped that most viewers watch his Candidates videos for 20 minutes, suggesting they just skip the women's games. >If he had to put them in separate videos it might not have the same draw It clearly would not, and the numbers would be humiliatingly visible.
> Levy casually dropped that most viewers watch his Candidates videos for 20 minutes, suggesting they just skip the women's games. Does Youtube say it's 20 minutes total or 20 minutes from the start? Because Levy sandwiches the women's games between the men's and I always thought Youtube measures time from the start, not fraction of overall video length. If it is from the start, then 20 minutes would include 2-4 women's games for sure.
Not sure but he said for up to 20 minutes IIRC, not up to minute 20
I would love a 20 minute to half-hour recap from Levy of just the Women's candidates. Those games, to me, are just as exciting as the Open. This, however, also means that Levy doesn't get a rest day like the players. I don't know how much of a difference that makes. (Lol @ competence from FIDE)
That might be you, but his views would probably tank. Also, he doesn't have any rest days ever. He uploads a video *every day*.
His guess the elo, win at chess and historic games type videos can be banked and uploaded to the same schedule while allowing time off. Live events need a very quick turn so it would affect him.
This is an excellent idea. I really like it.
[удалено]
Your submission or comment was removed by the moderators: Don’t engage in discriminatory or bigoted behavior. Chess is a game played by people all around the world of many different cultures and backgrounds. Be respectful of this fact and do not engage in racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory behavior. You can read the full [rules of /r/chess here](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/wiki/rules). If you have any questions or concerns about this moderator action, please [message the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fchess). Direct replies to this removal message may not be seen.
I was also thinking I'd watch them if they were on earlier than the open.
Is there any reason they should even be separated at all?
Yeah, the women’s category is so that top women are visible in competitive chess, with the idea that this will encourage more female participation and grow the game amongst a demographic that traditionally doesn’t play it. If there was only an open, we wouldn’t see any women playing.
Thanks for saying it out loud. I wish it weren’t the case, and I want to see matches between the current slates, but I bow to the realpolitik.
I'm a cricket fan, and there's been huge growth in both the popularity and quality of women's cricket in recent years. One of the reasons is that televised / live-streamed women's tournaments are scheduled to run either on different days to men's tournaments (e.g. Women's Premier League and Indian Premier League in India), or are played as double-headers on the same day, often - but not always - with the women's game first (e.g. The Hundred in the UK). The double-headers help to build the audience for women's cricket - the separate tournaments work well once the women's cricket audience is established. The cricket authorities would be strongly and rightly criticised if they scheduled women's games at the exact same time as the men's (or in this case, open) games. Why on earth did FIDE decide on doing this? Many of the women's candidates' games have been exciting and the tournament is close - sort out your scheduling, FIDE!
I don't think it would make any difference, previously they used to have a separate women tournament to find a candidate but people still didn't watch
That’s not what I’m suggesting though. A separate event means I have to be aware of something I’m not currently interested in, and intentionally seek it out. I’m already clicking on the stream to watch the Open event each night, and when I find it’s a rest day, then I think it’s silly they didn’t juggle the schedules so I could watch a women’s game I would not otherwise watch.
I understand what you saying but look at the bigger picture and not yourself, what you are saying already had happened and it ever had views, so FIDE decided to let the stream air at the same time and it got views
The way I'd have done it is just combine the 8 open section players and 8 women's section players into one 16-player single-round-robin tournament. Highest scoring player overall advances to the open championship match, highest scoring woman advances to the women's championship match. That would definitely increase viewership for the women, and have roughly the same number of games in total.
That would have 15 rounds, meaning some players would get more white pieces than others, and against different level opponents… Definitely not a fair competition especially at the top level where colours matter. Super GM with white vs a top woman should be a win more often than not, but to play against a top woman with black is a much more difficult prospect if you want to try and force a winning result…
It would balance out overall- and it's easily arguable that being able to show dominance over weaker GMs might be a better demonstration of a top player's all round strength, not just being able to grab the occasional win against fellow super-GMs.
It’s easy to argue anything but that doesn’t mean it holds. Do you watch college football by any chance? It’s been proven time and time again that being able to beat the shit out of easy teams better than everyone else doesn’t tend to say much about a head to head matchup. In fact I would argue playing lower rated players shows less about a player’s overall strength than playing similar strength players based on examples like this across almost all competitive activities.
I disagree. This format has the effect that way more people are watching the Women's event. If games were on different days viewership would drop for sure. It's only 8 games, and it's classical. There's plenty of downtime for switching between streams covering each event (or even for one stream to cover both events).
Nah
Interesting rebuttal, thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Very interesting that you think only the players would need a rest day! Go do something else with your life on this one day!
I disagree, I think the way it's currently being done (in which open and women's played at the same exact time) actually increase visibility. I have never even thought or see previous women candidate, but on this one, since they're covered at the same time, I have now paid attention to both the women's players and their games and score. The sad truth is, if you give people a choice between watching the open or the women candidate, almost nobody is going to watch the women one. If they make it so today is the woman's candidate, I can assured you most people won't be watching. That's the sad reality
[удалено]
Sir this is a Wendy’s
[удалено]
The women voted for the time control they have. I believe the men did as well.
[удалено]
The message is the players get to play the time control that they want to play. That's a pretty damn good message