Chess News for week ending April 23

[Jack Rabbit]

FIDE Presidential Contest Heats Up

FIDE delegates will meet in Turino, Italy, in June to select a president for another four years.

The incumbent President, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov of Russia, is seeking another term. Ilyumzhinov is also a political figure in Russia. He is the provincial president of Kalmykia and is allied politically with Russian President Vladimir Putin. His political side is summed up in the article from Wikipedia:

Ilyumzhinov is widely regarded as heading a corrupt regime that has proved itself incapable of developing the region. Residents of the Kalmyk capital, Elista, often hold protests and hunger strikes because of the shortage of basics such as water, and the lack of democracy. Ilyumzhinov's preoccupation is chess, and he spends his time flying around the world as president of FIDE. He built a now-crumbling "Chess City" for the 1998 Chess Olympiad, which was held a few months after the murder of leading Kalmyk opposition newspaper editor Larisa Yudina.

The main issue in the chess world is the division of the world championship. This began in 1993 when then-champion Garry Kasparov, frustrated with FIDE's incompetence and expressing personal animosity toward then-FIDE president Florencio Campomanes, formed his own rival organization with his official challenger, British grandmaster Nigel Short. The two played their scheduled championship match in London under the banner of the new organization, the Professional Chess Association (PCA). FIDE stripped Kasparov of his title and refused to recognize the result of the PCA match, in which Kasparov crushed Short. Former champion Anatoly Karpov was restored to the title, although the world at large continued to think only of Kasparov as the champion. Campomanes was re-elected president in 1994, but forced in 1995 to step down in favor of Ilyumzhinov with Karpov's support.

In 2002, an agreement was reached in Prague that was to lead to a reunification match between the classical world champion (by this time the title was held by Vladimir Kramnik) and the FIDE-recognized world champion. Under Ilyumzhinov, FIDE had changed the world championship was changed from a series of qualifying tournaments and matches that would select an official challenger to the champion to a "knock out" tournament, which is a single elimination event in which competitors play short two game matches against each with rapid and blitz game used as tie breaks if necessary; the winner of each match goes on to the next round and the loser is out. However, the honor of winning the tournament and gaining the title of world champion gives one no more privilege than to be seeded in the next tournament. As a result, the FIDE world championship has passed from some champions, such as India's Viswanathan Anand, comparable to the luminaries who have held the title in the past, to some who couldn't hold the shoes to any of them. Only in the last cycle was the knock out format abandoned in favor of a tournament among eight of the strongest players in the world held in San Luis, Argentina. This tournament, reminiscent of the AVRO Tournament of 1938 in The Netherlands and the World Championship Tournament of 1948 played in The Hague and Moscow, finally produced a credible FIDE champion, Veselin Topalov, currently the world's highest ranked active player. Last week, Ilyumzhinov announced plans for a reunification match between Topalov and Kramnik to be held in Elista in September and October.

For his part, Ilyumzhinov claims his presidency has worked to reunify the world title and charges that his critics are attempting to divide World Chess.

Ilyumzhinov's critics claim he really has little to which to point. Former world champion Karpov, who briefly entertained the idea of challenging Ilyumzhinov earlier this year, said in January "Chess could disappear from the face of the earth." American grandmaster Yasser Seirawan, who helped engineer the Prague agreement, recently detailed his views of Ilyumzhinov and FIDE, calling Ilyumzhinov's eleven-year tenure a "reign of error." Seirawan charges that FIDE is no longer taken seriously by potential corporate sponsors and the institution of the world championship has been all but destroyed.

Opposing the Ilyumzhinov slate is a slate of candidates called The Right Move, headed by Dutch businessman Bessel Kok. Kok and his team pledge to overhaul FIDE's "outdated business model" and to secure financial support for chess from commercial sponsors. Kok and The Right Move have the support of some leading players, including Judit Polgar, Michael Adams, Boris Gelfand, Vasily Ivanchuk and Nigel Short. Also supporting The Right Move are most western European chess federations, the US Chess Federation, and chess enthusiasts Vaclav Havel and Milos Forman. The Ilyumzhinov slate claims support from sixty chess federations, mostly in Asia and Africa, and of FIDE World Champion Topalov.

Wolfgang Unzicker dies

German grandmaster Wolfgang Unzicker, 80, passed away in Portugal last Thursday. He was the West German national champion seven times. Always considered an amateur player, he was a lawyer by training and became a judge.

Wolfgang Unzicker vs. Bobby Fischer, International Tournament, Buenos Aires, July 1960 (Sicilian Game: Najdorf Defense).