The new chess project Armageddon Championship Series ended with the victory of Jan-Krzysztof Duda

The pilot release of one of the most unexpected projects in chess in recent years – Armageddon Championship Series – ended with the victory of Polish grandmaster Jan-Krzysztof Duda, who beat American Wesley So in the final match. And the preliminary commercial results of the series, which is an attempt to break the existing stereotype about the “non-telegenic” species, have already forced its organizers to announce a continuation of the series.

This year the Armageddon Championship Series joined the list of major commercial competitions, of which quite a few have appeared in chess this decade. And what turned the project into a very noticeable event was, first of all, the specifics of its format, which gave it the features of a rather bold experiment.

A series of offline tournaments with a total prize pool of €420 thousand was launched by World Chess. For a long time she was responsible for conducting almost the entire championship cycle in chess, and now she has concentrated on chess innovations related to both the system of competitions and the features of their display. In the Armageddon Championship Series, which consisted of four qualifying competitions and a Grand Final, World Chess used an unusual double elimination scheme, which is now used, for example, in the Russian Football Cup – with a second chance for the loser in the playoffs. But the main “trick” of the project was still its focus specifically on television broadcasts, in defiance of the stereotype already rooted in chess about its low “telegenicity” and loyalty to the form exclusively of the Internet audience. World Chess called it “the first attempt to bring chess to the global television screen,” pointing out that previously the obstacles to such a breakthrough were primarily the unpredictability of games in terms of their duration, as well as the “high barrier to understanding” of a complex game with classical time control for ordinary players. spectators.

The organizers tried to eliminate barriers with the help of two innovations. One was to ensure the “compactness” of each play-off round of two games in blitz while adding, in the event of a draw, an “Armageddon” – a fight with super-tight time control, in which Black is considered the winner, even after making a draw: such regulations guaranteed an almost fixed time for the micro-match – no more than 80 minutes. The other is an unusual demonstration of fights from a Berlin studio with special effects and infographics.

The head of World Chess, Ilya Merenzon, told Kommersant that the company will learn the final figures illustrating the demand for the Armageddon Championship Series in about a month and a half, but the preliminary ones look “worthy” and prove that “the priority task of the project made for television has been solved.” According to Ilya Merenzon, live broadcasts of the games in the series were carried out by 18 TV channels, among which were, say, CNBC, BeIN Sports and Fox Australia, and about 20 more showed at least their “significant parts” and highlights. Mr. Merenzon is confident that World Chess has received a positive answer to the question of whether chess can end up on television, saying that the structure is already preparing for the next release of the project in 2024 with an even richer set of “unconventional graphics” that “attracted huge attention.”

This statement is quite difficult to argue with. For example, on one of the largest and most popular online chess resources, ChessBase, data on players’ heart rates, which World Chess measured during games, became a hit. It turned out that for many grandmasters, at critical moments, it reached levels corresponding to energy-intensive sports like athletics from the point of view of physical effort, and for two – the Romanian Richard Rapport and the American Wesley So – it came close to the mark of 180 beats per minute.

So, world number ten in the classics, reached the decisive match in Berlin. In it, however, the American lost to another titled grandmaster, the winner of the 2021 World Cup, Pole Jan-Krzysztof Duda, who earned €88 thousand in prize money, who, compared to his rivals, was distinguished by relative calm: his maximum heart rate was 144 beats per minute.

Alexey Dospehov