MIA FIDE champion (de jure) Ruslan Ponomariov and/or his spokespeople in the Ukrainian sports federation have popped up with another letter. (Given in full below.) This time instead of just complaining he wuz robbed, they suggest an alternative unification solution....
My recent Mig on Chess (the "Back-scratch Fever" part) caused a flare-up of that old bugbear, accusations of not being objective. Apart from the obvious "no one is, not even in calculus," I've always said opinion is what I'm giving....
This Times of India story reveals that world #2 Vishy Anand is one of the invited players yet to sign and submit his player contract for the 2004 FIDE world championship in Tripoli (June 18-July 13). Today FIDE announced that...
Score a point for constant harping. It looks as though Libyan leader Khaddafi may let the Israel players into Tripoli for the 2004 FIDE world championship. (Here on March 8 I wrote "In light of all the movement inside and...
You might have missed the eloquent comment from US Women's Champion Anna Hahn that she posted today to the April 21 story, so we give it here in full: The statement published by Mig has stirred up quite a furor....
I don't believe in the black helicopters, the second gunman, or crop circles. But I stumbled onto something more than curious while I was looking around for the current and previous qualification regulations for the US Olympiad teams. I'd heard...
Saint Francis probably said it first, but Shaw said it best: "Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well." The hailstorm of e-mail and comments about the April 21 entry on Anna Hahn and...
To continue with the Yanqui-centric theme of the week, the US Chess Federation today announced that Rusudan Goletiani has won the lucrative 2004 Samford Chess Fellowship. My congratulations to her. The 23-year-old from Georgia (the country) is the first woman...
Don't worry, she's still alive, but it's hard to imagine more being done to bury a player than what the US chess scene has seen this year regarding Hahn. In January, 2003 she committed the terrible crime of winning the...
There used to be something in the water in Georgia that turned out great women chessplayers. Now the rivers of the former Soviet republic seem to be tainted with the famous local wines. The past week has seen a barrage...
Thanks to the good folks at Movable Type there's a whole new look here at the Daily Dirt. We'll be tweaking and designing for a few days yet, as well as importing all the old dirt, which is still available...
