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Sub:
World Championship
confusion
Date:
11/6/2004 6:53:39 PM Mountain Daylight
Time
From: Mark Pinkston
To:
service@chess-poster.com
Hello,
I am confused by your site. Please help me understand your
thinking. You have a section on World
Champions that lists the 3 FIDE tourney winners
right after Kasparov. These 3 won a tournament, but that
is not how the World Championship is
normally passed.
A challenger has
to beat the champion in a match to
become the new champion. These 3 are World Champions in FIDE's
imagination only. But there is a World Champion who won
the title from the previous champion
in a match.
How can you not
list Kramnik as the 14th World
Champion following Kasparov? If you want to add the 3 FIDE
tourney winners in a side note, that
could be appropriate, but to include them in the main
list and exclude Kramnik makes a mockery of the title
"World Champion".
Am I wrong?
Sincerely,
Mark Pinkston
chess-poster.com
Dear Martin,
We found the
following:
"Not long after Kasparov became champion, the Soviet Union
collapsed, freeing Kasparov from the grip of the Soviet state.
This set the stage for a more lasting set-back to FIDE's system
when in 1993, Kasparov and challenger Nigel Short complained of
corruption and a lack of professionalism within FIDE and split
from FIDE to set up the Professional Chess Association (PCA),
under whose auspices they held their match.
The event was
orchestrated largely by Raymond Keene, who has been at the
centre of much off-the-board chess activity for a long time now.
Keene brought the event to London (FIDE had planned it for
Manchester), and Britain was whipped up into something of a
chess fever: Channel Four broadcast some 81 programmes on the
match, the BBC also had coverage, and Short appeared in
television beer commercials.
However, Short
lost by five points, and the interest in chess in the UK soon
died down. At the same time, FIDE held a championship match
between Karpov (who had been champion before Kasparov) and Jan
Timman (who had been defeated by Short in the Candidates final)
in the Netherlands and Jakarta. Karpov emerged victorious. Ever
since that time there have been two simultaneous World Champions
and World Championships.
Kasparov went on to defend his PCA title against Viswanathan
Anand, who had qualified through a series of events similar to
those in the old FIDE system. It seemed his next challenger
would be Alexei Shirov, who won a match against Vladimir Kramnik
to apparently secure his place. However, plans for a match with
Shirov never materialised, and he was subsequently omitted from
negotiations, much to his disgust. Instead, Anand was lined up
to play Kasparov once more, but here too, plans fell through (in
somewhat disputed circumstances).
Instead, Vladimir
Kramnik was given the chance to play Kasparov in 2000. Against
all expectations, Kramnik won. FIDE, meanwhile, after one more
traditional championship cycle which resulted in Karpov
successfully defending his title against Gata Kamsky in 1996,
largely scrapped the old system, instead having a large
knock-out event in which a large number of players contested
short matches against each other over just a few weeks.
In the first of
these events, champion Karpov was seeded straight into the final
(as in previous championships), but subsequently the champion
had to qualify like other players. Karpov defended his title in
the first of these championships in 1998, but resigned his title
in anger at the new rules in 1999. Alexander Khalifman took the
title in 1999, Anand in 2000 and Ruslan Ponomariov in 2002.
This left a chess world with two distinct championships: one
extending the Steinitzian lineage in which the current champion
plays a challenger in match format (a series of many games); the
other following FIDE's new format of a tennis-style
elimination--or "Knockout"--tournament with dozens of players
competing.
In May 2002, under the terms of the so-called "Prague Agreement"
masterminded by Yasser Seirawan, several leaders in the chess
world met in Prague and signed a unity agreement which intended
to ensure the crowning of an undisputed world champion before
the end of 2003, and restore the traditional cycle of qualifying
matches by 2005.
The semifinalists for the 2003 championship were to be Ruslan
Ponomariov vs. Gary Kasparov, and Vladimir Kramnik vs. Peter
Leko. The former match, organised by FIDE, had been scheduled to
take place in Yalta beginning on September 18, 2003, but was
called off on August 29 after Ponomariov refused to sign his
contract for it.
There is a proposal that Kasparov will instead play a match in
2004 or 2005 against Rustam Kasimdzhanov, who won the FIDE World
Chess Championship, 2004, in Tripoli, the capital of Libya, an
event which ran from June 18 to July 13, 2004, and which was
sponsored by Libyan leader Moammar al-Qadhafi.
This choice of
venue was extremely controversial: no Israeli players took part
in the championships, several other prominent players withdrew
and groups including the Association of Chess Professionals and
the Anti-Defamation League have criticised FIDE's choice. FIDE
announced that the Kasparov-Kasimdzhanov would be held in the
United Arab Emirates in January 2005, although a press release
from Kasparov makes this seem highly unlikely.
The Kramnik-Leko match was originally to be held in Budapest,
but funding collapsed and it was called off. The match was
rescheduled as a fourteen game match to be held in Brissago,
Switzerland from September 25 to October 18, 2004 and billed as
the Classic World Chess Championship sponsored by the cigar
company Dannemann.
The match was
drawn (and was surprisingly exciting, leading to a final game
which Kramnik needed to win and did), which meant that Kramnik
retained the title. Afterwards, Kramnik cast doubt on the
reunification process, suggesting that rather than a
Kasparov-Kasimdzhnov match to determine who would play him for
the unified title, there should be a match tournament involving
Kasparov, Kasimdzhanov, Ponomariov and Anand."
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_chess_
champion#Reigns_of_the_Champions
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visiting us,
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