In the latest Perpetual Chess Podcast the host Ben Johnson and co-host FM Nate Solon talked to Chess.com CEO Erik Allebest on a number of topics – Online Cheating, the canceled Magnus-Hikaru match, Chess24’s closure, forthcoming Netflix chess documentary with Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann, and more.
One of the questions referred to GM Patrick Wolff’s proposal to form a new chess governing body with Magnus Carlsen and Chess.com on board.
In the lengthy answer where he elaborated why this idea is not viable, Erik Allebest revealed that Chess.com wanted to buy the rights and reform the World Chess Championship to make it more media-friendly.
Erik Allebest: I will say that we’ve tried to work with FIDE to evolve the game from an events point of view and from a commercial viability. We made a bid for the World Chess Championship to try to get the commercial rights to take it into the 21st century, maybe 25 years too late, but still try to take it there and that was rejected.
Ben Johnson: Was the offer for the World Chess Championship rejected on financial terms or on terms of principal?
FM Nate Solon: Was that an offer to FIDE as a sponsor?
“We offered to be the commercial partner for the World Chess Championship for the next 10 years. We will promote it, we will run it, we will handle the cycle, we will put it on TV, we will find sponsors, we will do the prizes, we will do this“, explains Allebest.
I think that it was rejected for three reasons, and we could have talked through a lot of these, but some of them were non-negotiable.
Sure we could have always talked about finances and how to split that but we never actually really got there. Our view was that we don’t want to operate an event that the top players and especially Magnus Carlsen doesn’t even want to play in. If the five-time World Champion doesn’t want to play in that event, then it’s not the event that’s going to get us excited to put on TV and really go forward.
It’s just the formatting, we couldn’t align on formatting. We wanted it to be yearly, we wanted it to be faster, we wanted it to be something like more akin to what we’re seeing in most other sports and games.
You can’t have a game that takes 9 hours long and that goes for 21 days straight and think that there’s a TV network or a media partner who’s going to put that on TV. It just won’t work in today’s world and then if you can’t make it commercial or media acceptable you can’t make it commercially viable. And so we came to an impasse around what the event would look like in formatting.
And then thirdly, FIDE didn’t want to be kind of in the back seat to let us drive on it, they want to be holding the steering wheel and I don’t blame them – like great, that makes sense for you.
Among other things, Erik Allebest revealed that Netflix prepares a documentary on cheating scandal that started with Carlsen-Niemann game. “Hans will be in it and interviewed, Magnus Carlsen will be in it and interviewed“, said Allebest. Read more about Netflix Chess Documentary on cheating scandal here.
See the complete podcast below.
