Magnus Carlsen to give up World Championship title

Time to change the format. It's understandable you don't want to spend your whole career preparing for these long matches all the time. For the challenger it's 6 months of preparing, but for Carlsen it would've been his 6th time of preparing for this in a few years.

They have also become less entertaining. 12 matches is long (edit, 14 now), but no one dares to take any risks. Caruana was just defensive and all games ended in a draw. Karjakin they both at least won each their game, but still had to go to rapid tie-breaks. And against Nepo it was a steamroll, understandably meeting him again isn't that exciting.

It's also almost impossible for a new person to get a chance. Even Carlsen didn't like the format and didn't participate in the Candidates for a few years, and when he first did he almost didn't win it to be allowed to play the WC match. Even though he clearly was the best player at the time.

I wonder how this will affect the status of the title, when it's in practice is now a title-fight between the second best players.

Also what will happen to the hype in Norway? Each WC match has so far been live streamed on all big news pages, biggest TV channels etc. It will still be a Christmas tradition to watch the rapid WC tournament I guess, but I'm afraid this will lead to less coverage. But just to tell how big Carlsen is in Norway: This is the top news on all outlets at the moment.

Good for him, and a great lesson for chess fans:

Play the kind of chess that makes you happy, be it globetrotting super-GM invite-only tournaments or 500 games of back-to-back bullet on Lichess.

I understand his decision but still I'm disappointed.

I'm pretty sure 99% of Carlsen's fans expected him to do this since he has talked about it for a long time now. And as the article points out, he's still going to remain _very_ active in the Chess community, tournaments in particular.

I know next to nothing about competitive chess, other than watching the Magnus documentary about a younger Magnus. What kinds of things are chess players doing to prepare for a match for 6 Months? Is there something they're memorizing, studying video (what would they be looking fro)? I'd have always just thought they were good to play at any time. This sounds super stressful.