'In The Tour Everyone Starts On The Same Playing Field,' — Events Commissioner Michael Brancato

Chess.com's Events Commissioner speaks to Director of Written Content Nkosi Nkululeko about the Champions Chess Tour, double-elimination, division systems, and how he envisions chess formats in the future!

Michael Brancato is a former competitive Super Smash Bros. player, also known as Nintendude, who peaked at no.17 in the world rankings. Brancato is not a one-hit-wonder, though. He is a seasoned veteran in esports, a former Tournament Director for Super Smash Con and various other top events, as well as the League Operations Lead for Twitch.

Who better to forward the competitive landscape of chess than Michael Brancato, who came over as Chess.com's Events Commissioner back in 2022? IM Danny Rensch had a Staff Spotlight interview with Brancato so the community could get a formal introduction...

...but who could predict the massive innovations that would be brought to online chess soon after?

Now's our chance to dig deeper with the man who has heightened the game on our screens. Get a behind-the-scenes look at the mind in front of it all.

This interview was conducted virtually. Text may have been edited for clarity and length.

Hello, Michael. It's so good to meet you. How has it been this past year as the Events Commissioner for Chess.com?

It's been so much fun, very rewarding to be able to have an impact on a game that I love and care about a lot and that people around the world care about very deeply. I think we've done a lot of really awesome things this past year and I'm looking forward to carrying that forward into 2024 and beyond.

One of my questions is about your views on the legacy of the Champions Chess Tour. How do you reflect on where it came from and where it's going?

So the Champions Chess Tour (CCT) was kind of the first really major professional online event. It was born during COVID as the Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour. It became the CCT. We had events like the Speed Chess Championship before that, but rapid is kind of a different beast. You see a higher quality chess, and all the best players in the world are playing.

I think it was the origin of online professional chess. We've been trying to figure out over the past few years, "what is the best way to present that?" The best way to organize it is in terms of the format, the spectator experience, and the player experience. It's still honestly in its infancy. It’s only entering year five. There's still a lot that we're figuring out, but I think we're getting closer. I'm excited to see how it goes this year. 

How does the standard of Round-Robins and Swiss tournaments play into everything?

There's a lot of things you have to balance when designing an event. The most important thing is the event should produce the best player as the winner of the event. You have to balance that against the logistics. To give a crazy example, you can't run a Round-Robin with 100 players. It would take literally forever. So you have other options like brackets and Swisses and whatnot, and you really have to find what satisfies all the constraints. So in the case of Round-Robins and Swisses, they're really good for logistics. They have predictable schedules. Everyone plays every round but I think they're a bit flawed in producing the best player at times.

The most important thing is the event should produce the best player as the winner of the event.

So in a Round-Robin, you might be playing someone when they're super motivated early in the tournament. They're playing their heart out, they're giving a really tough battle. But let's say the player isn't doing well by the second-half of the event and they're feeling less motivated. Now someone else plays a less motivated person, a less motivated version of the same person you played. You have to hope that person beats them for it to be better for your standings. Basically you're not really in control of your own destiny in a sense.

One example is the Candidates tournament. Only first place in the Candidates truly matters. Sure, there's prize money, but their motivation is not the prize money. Their motivation is to become the World Champion and you only really get that chance if you win the tournament, or I guess in more recent cases, second place also got a chance because of Magnus Carlsen withdrawing.

What you get is people who, after a few rounds, are not really in contention for first place anymore. They're still playing the rest of the tournament, but they have games that, in a sense, don't matter, and it influences the results of the overall event. This illustrates some of the downsides of a Round-Robin.

This illustrates some of the downsides of a Round-Robin.

In the case of Swiss, I think it’s really good at taking a large field of people and roughly sorting them into performance tiers. It's like, "these people performed the best, these people next best, and these people the worst." But I think it doesn't do a good job at ordering people in a very definitive way, as in "this is the best player, this is the second best, and this is the third best." So, in my opinion, this makes it not very good for determining a champion. It's very good logistically, especially at a club event or a big open. You want to give everyone an opportunity to play a lot of games and a fun event. It pairs people who are at a similar skill level because of the way the Swiss pairing system works. So it'll always have a place in the club level or big opens but I don't think it has as much of a place as the sole determiner of a champion.

I don't think [Swisses have] as much of a place as the sole determiner of a champion.

You even hear that when people talk about the Grand Swiss giving a qualification spot to the Candidates. Top players will often say it's actually pretty random who wins that event. A really good tournament should produce the best player at the end. I don't think Swiss consistently does that because there's a lot of randomness with the pairings; and whether you get white or black is luck a lot of the time. You might play the second best player in the field in the penultimate round and your fate at the end might be based on a match you're not involved in. So there's all these extra factors outside of your control, kind of similar to Round-Robin, which is why I think it's not great for determining a champion.

Do you feel like constant change and additions to the format is necessary or is a format that might be “It?”

I never want to make changes for the sake of making changes. I actually think it's better if you don't have changes because every time you make them, everyone's got to relearn a new system. You kind of lose some of the legacy when you make an overhaul to it. My goal is to find the format that delivers on all the facets of an event that are important and then be able to stick to that and repeat that year after year without having to reinvent the wheel every time. So really establish the gold standard for what the format can be.

My goal is to find the format that delivers on all the facets of an event that are important...

With other sports and even just over-the-board chess, there's been decades to figure out what serves the needs of the players and community, and just repeat that over and over. I would like to do that for the CCT as well, and I think we're getting close.

I'm sure that your background has a lot of influence for these changes. What are those influences and how are they leading you to some of these alterations?

My background is in competitive gaming, esports, and I was a professional Smash Bros. player. I was ranked no. 17 in Super Smash Bros. Melee at my peak, and I've been involved in the industry for a very long time. 

Video games are unique in that unlike traditional sports, it was pretty much all brand new and we were inventing it on the fly. There was no established formula for how you run a video game tournament. I guess, in a way, that's gotten the creative juices flowing. Like if we think outside the box and do whatever we want, what can we come up with? There's a lot of things that gaming has done really well, in my opinion. In the Smash Bros. community, and fighting games in general, double-elimination is kind of like the de facto format. It balances finding the best player with also giving the best player experience and the best logistics.

Double-elimination is the perfect intersection of finding the best player with giving people chances and creating drama. And the community has really latched onto that.

I think bringing that to chess was probably the single biggest contribution I've made. So obviously the CCT had it, but also we've used it in the Bullet Chess Championship and the Puzzles World Championship. I think that it really resonated with fans to see that format.

Yeah, we're definitely looking forward to this year and seeing how it plays out even further. Are there any events that you're particularly proud of?

I am really proud of last year's CCT. It tried a lot of new ideas and was kind of a culmination of several things that I think overall turned out really well. For me, I really value open, merit-based competition and giving everyone a chance. It's a common criticism of the OG chess world that a lot of top players play primarily closed events and you don't see many opens where up-and-coming players get a chance to prove themselves versus the best players. In an event like the CCT, everyone starts on the same playing field. Everyone has a chance. All grandmasters can enter, and we saw a lot of upsets over the course of the year. 

You don't see many opens where up-and-coming players get a chance to prove themselves versus the best players.

I've had a lot of players express their appreciation for that opportunity. They specifically tell me “Hey, I don't get invited to any of these tournaments, but I'm just as hungry as these guys. I think I can beat them. When I get the opportunity to, I usually do well.” There's so many players who feel that way and the fact that we're giving them that opportunity makes me feel really proud of what we accomplished.

In an event like the CCT, everyone starts on the same playing field.

I want to talk about the division system because it's kind of a new concept that was brought to chess through the event.

It's giving a meaningful opportunity to play really important chess games with a lot of money and prestige on the line, even if you're not one of the “best." I think a lot of players appreciate that. It's showing that there's not just the best players in the world, there's also the players right under them. There's a system, where if you win Division II, you get to Division I next time. It's taking some inspiration from promotion/relegation systems in other sports. I feel that went really well, and a lot of players really get involved in the CCT because of that.

There's not just the best players in the world, there's also the players right under them.

Each event had 56 players playing in divisions, which is a much bigger scale than any round-robin or knockout tournament. I mean, obviously the World Cup has like 200+ players, but that's only one event per year. And that event also takes a whole month to run. So it's not really an apples to apples comparison with what we did with this.

What were your early aspirations in esports? And how does that translate into your vision now? How does Michael of the past look at Michael now?

A lot of it is honestly a series of accidents and coincidences. Me even getting into gaming professionally was just an accident. I really enjoyed playing Super Smash Bros. I was going to local tournaments. I was getting better and then started turning it into more of a side career. But then I realized that I had a knack for organizing events and all the logistics involved in that, whether it's floor plans or schedules and how the format of the event itself feeds that. It was a newfound passion at that point, like “I actually really like designing events and I think I have a lot of ideas I can bring to the table.” For me, it's been a blessing to work on chess.