World Championship Format Comparison

As always, opinions are my own, not those of Lichess.org.

As we speak, the FIDE World Cup and WESPA (Scrabble) World Championship are ongoing, with such a flurry of activity that I can't keep up! Many sports, shogi, and go lack world championships, instead having multiple prestigious events and champions. Many e-sports games have annual world championships, however board games (chess, draughts, Scrabble, xiangqi) have championships every 2-3 years. I suspect community/game growth is fueled by running annual events, until the point where it becomes too complicated to run annual championships (Wolfey can speak to that).

Looking back at the oldest chess world championships, organizing events wasn't so simple:

Until 1948, world championship contests were arranged privately between the players. As a result, the players also had to arrange the funding, in the form of stakes provided by enthusiasts who wished to bet on one of the players...After the death of world champion Alexander Alekhine in 1946, the World Chess Championship 1948 was a one-off tournament to decide a new world champion. (Wikipedia)

I somehow conflated Interzonals with world championship matches; howveer, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Interzonals were used to select the challenger for the next world championship, similar to today's World Cup (although it sends candidates to another tournament to determine the actual challenger). To me, large open events seem more exciting than drawn-out (albeit suspensful) champion-challenger matches, however with so much at stake I can see why organizers wouldn't want the difficulty of regulating a high-stakes open event. I believe a round-robin format would be even fairer (less prone to randomness) than a knockout format, despite political and potential tie-break difficulties...

I thought I'd have much more to write about. Sorry about that! Anyway, in conclusion:

• Having annual open events (championship or otherwise) is exciting for spectators and for participants, but perhaps too exciting for me.
• Costs of organizing world championships are not logarithmic with participant and spectator count (but perhaps linear or worse?) which places a large burden on large communities.
• Having world championship events detracts from the prestige of other events. This creates a political problem of the same nature as the train station transfer problem.

That said, the Japan Shogi Association and its tradition of professional-only events has a point: professionals support long-term growth of a sport (as it supports them). There is something beautiful about having multiple champion titles and well-respected traditions which gather public interest throughout each year (without fear of sponsorship drying up and events dropping like other sports).