World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen is abandoning classical chess for another new format. Players say they “want games that are spontaneous tests of chess skill rather than endless duels of memorized sequences.” Sounds familiar when compared to football.

Andrew Beaton and Joshua Robinson reporting for the Wall Street Journal in a piece titled “The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Is Bored With Chess”:

So while the classical championship pits the world No. 5 Gukesh Dommaraju against the defending champion and world No. 23 Ding Liren, Carlsen and Caruana will be playing a version of the game called Fischer Random chess, where the pieces on the back rank of the board are lined up in random order.

Their match is more than a gimmick. It’s a loud statement about why the game is booming in popularity—and it’s not because of painstaking matches that take hours and leave audiences cold. Top players and casual hobbyists alike want games that are spontaneous tests of chess skill rather than endless duels of memorized sequences.

[…] “It shouldn’t be this hard to actually create winning chances,” Carlsen says. “Or to get a game at all—it should be more free-flowing than that.”

We always say that football is becoming more and more like chess, and it appears that actual chess is ahead of the curve.

We shouldn’t want to replicate chess, where we are running a series of memorized sequences and endless anticipated duels. We should want to replicate what Magnus is craving: a spontaneous game that makes it easier to create winning chances (goals) or a game that is more free-flowing.