Peace conference

The classical section of the elite Grand Tour event in St Louis, which ended earlier this week, resembled a peace conference rather than a chess tournament. Well past the halfway stage, less than 10 per cent of the games had been decisive. Something must be done about this tendency and there are various solutions.
 
The first and most obvious is to switch to considerably faster time limits. There has been a nod in this direction by Grand Tour organisers, with their addition in St Louis of both a rapid and blitz section. Ramping up time limits, however, means sacrificing the games’ quality, which diminishes as the time limits decrease.
 
The next solution is to turn to shuffled baseline chess — Fischer Random or Chess 960 — where the pieces are arrayed by chance at the start of the game. To me, all such aleatory distortions are heresy. If our traditional chess array needs adjusting, then by all means turn to Xiangqi or Shogi, respectively Chinese and Japanese chess.