Playing Conditions
The championship was a knockout tournament similar to other FIDE World Chess Championships between 1998 and 2004: the players were paired for short matches, with losers eliminated. The field of 128 participants was reduced to one winner over seven rounds.
Rounds 1–5 consisted of a two game match, followed by tie breaks at faster time controls if required. The time control for regular games was 75 minutes for the first 40 moves and 15 minutes for the rest of the game, with 30 seconds added after each move. Tie breaks consisted of two rapid chess games (20 minutes each + 10 seconds per move); followed by two blitz games if required (5 minutes + 10 seconds per move); followed by a single Armageddon chess game if required (white has 6 minutes and must win, black has 5 minutes and only needs to draw). The semifinals (round 6) were best of four games, and the final was best of eight games, with the same conditions for the tie-breaks.
In addition to previous criticisms of the knockout format (see FIDE World Chess Championship 1998#Controversies), this tournament was criticised by Garry Kasparov for using a faster time control, which Kasparov claimed was lowering the standard of the games.
Read more about this topic: FIDE World Chess Championship 2002
Famous quotes containing the words playing and/or conditions:
“Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)