A Century of World Championship Format Changes
Since Steinitz and Zukertort contested the first official World Championship in 1886 (see our full piece on that match), the way a challenger actually earns the right to play for the title has been rebuilt repeatedly, almost always in direct response to a crisis. This is that history, format by format.
Era one: privately arranged matches
From 1886 until FIDE took administrative control of the title, challengers had to personally negotiate a match, and its financial terms, directly with the reigning champion, who held enormous leverage over whether a challenge happened at all. This is exactly the dynamic that let Capablanca struggle for years to arrange a title shot against Lasker, and later let Alekhine avoid a Capablanca rematch entirely.
Era two: the Candidates round robin (1950-1962)
FIDE's postwar system selected a challenger through a round-robin Candidates Tournament, exemplified by Zurich 1953 (see our full piece on that event). This era ended abruptly after the 1962 Curaçao Candidates, where Fischer's collusion accusations against three Soviet players (covered in full here) proved credible enough that FIDE abandoned the round-robin format entirely.
Era three: interzonals and knockout matches (1962-1993)
Replacing the round robin, this system routed challengers through zonal tournaments, an Interzonal, and then head-to-head Candidates knockout matches, a structure specifically designed to make Curaçao-style coordinated draws far harder to arrange. It held until 1993, when the Kasparov-Short breakaway (our full account here) fractured the championship into rival FIDE and PCA lineages entirely.
Era four: the FIDE knockout experiment (1997-2004)
FIDE briefly replaced the entire championship with a single, Wimbledon-style knockout event, short two-game matches deciding each round, a radical departure that produced champions but never fully satisfied a chess public used to a single defending champion facing a single challenger. Reunification via the 2006 Kramnik-Topalov match (covered in full here) effectively ended this experiment.
Era five: today's Candidates and the Circuit
Since 2013, an 8-player double round robin Candidates Tournament has restored a single, clear qualification path to a single champion. FIDE's 2026-2027 Circuit system now feeds that Candidates cycle with a season-long points structure rather than a single qualifying event, the latest iteration of a century-long pattern: every format eventually breaks under its own specific pressure, and gets rebuilt rather than patched.