The Man of Man-Machine

I talked with Kasparov this morning before he left for the CNN offices. Among other things that will be covered in my long piece at ChessBase.com in the next day or two, he talked about his frustration with the effort to unify the world championship and uphold the Prague agreements. In particular, Prague was supposed to be about 1) establishing a calendar to unify the title and 2) preserving the classical time control. Now the Kramnik-Leko classical title match is foundering and organizers Einstein have spoken of postponing unification till 2004. (As Kasparov put it, "How can we begin the second cycle this year as agreed if we haven't finished the first one?!") And Ponomariov wants to use the fast time control in his FIDE title match with Kasparov. Oy.