May 2004 Archives

It's been all Kasparov all the time here in New York over the past week. From fundraisers for the Kasparov Chess Foundation charity to teaching sessions for the US women's training squad to appearances and interviews about chess, Russia and Iraq, Garry Kasparov has been a whirlwind in the Big Apple.

Free time he spends with his daughter or hunched over his laptop looking at analysis of Bobby Fischer games for the upcoming third volume of his "My Great Predecessors" books. "These Fischer games are incredibly complicated," he says, "but we are finding all sorts of amazing stuff." He showed me several examples - including one from the Karpov section - of famous masterpiece games that have flaws that have gone undiscovered for decades. I won't spoil the surprises, but I did dig through my own over-large collection of books without finding the main lines Kasparov was talking about.

One of these, in a Fischer win that won the Informant's best game prize, a natural move leading to a draw late in the game has apparently escaped notice. (I say "apparently" because there are countless chess books out there and you can't have or read them all.) In a way it's always a shame when an immortal game meets a refutation. The canon of golden games took a beating when computers and their ruthless objectivity came fully into effect in the 90's. Now Kasparov and his co-author (with help from the latest and greatest from Intel and ChessBase) are grinding the mill finer than ever before. That is, after a lamentable lack of rigor in the first edition of the first volume.

When the Kramnik-Leko world championship match was announced for Brissago, Switzerland, I hope I wasn't the only one whose first reaction was "Where?" I consider myself geographically informed for an American. I can name the leaders of Canada AND Mexico, something fewer than 10% of my countrymen can do. (Weep weep.) I've even been to Switzerland, but the tiny (population 1,981) resort town on Lake Maggiore stumped me. It wouldn't have had I remembered my Hemingway. It's the town where Frederic and Catherine escape to from Italy in A Farewell to Arms. (My memory was refreshed when the 1932 film version with Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper was on cable today.)

Brissago looks charming and I hope a chess match there will receive at least as much attention as the 1999 FIDE KO did in that other chess Mecca, Las Vegas. For cigar-maker sponsor Dannemann the Leko-Kramnik match is a boutique highlight for their various cultural sponsorships. They aren't trying for the major media coverage and PR a bigger sponsor would want. So they are holding the match in their backyard. According to the Brissago website (conveniently in Italian and German) one of the main attractions in Brissago is the old tobacco factory. For pure chess PR purposes, a larger metropolis would be nice, but some great matches have been played in out of the way places. Reykjavik, for example.

FIDE has released the "final" list of players for the 2004 FIDE world championship in Tripoli, Libya starting on June 18. No Israelis are on the list. Smirin was the top reserve and had sent in his agreement so I hope this will be explained. Perhaps he was a little put off by the tournament organizer calling him the enemy. American Boris Gulko is on the list, something of a surprise after his impassioned letter. I'm not sure he answers e-mail on Shabbat but I'm hoping to get the full story from him this weekend. Perhaps he felt that FIDE had done all it could to let his fellow "Zionist infiltrators" into the event, even if it is being run by a lunatic. Or maybe the list is simply wrong; it would hardly be the first time.

[ Update 1hr later: GM Gulko just informed me he will NOT be playing and tells of his e-mail exchange today with FIDE veep Israel Gelfer. FIDE seemed to be of the opinion that all of the issues Gulko raised in his letter were invalid ("denied" is the word they use). Gulko disabused them of this notion, and writes "until the Libyan authorities renounce the notorious statement of the President of the Libyan Organizing Committee, Mohammad Qaddafy, I will not be participating in this tournament." ]

Even without Kasparov, Kramnik, Karpov, Khalifman, Ksvidler, and Kbareev, there are 19 (!) Russians on the list of 128 players. The USA is next with seven six players. Kasparov opines that there is a 99% chance of one of the top six "heavyweights" winning the event. Topalov, Morozevich, Adams, Grischuk, Ivanchuk, Short. For FIDE the dream is for a Russian to win, making it much easier for Ilyumzhinov to negotiate unification plans with a Kasparov match in early 2005. The FIDE wet dream is for FIDE VP Azmaiparashvili to win!

It's a little early to start handicapping, but Adams always comes to mind in these events. It's a lottery, especially when you have very strong players like former Russian champion Lastin seeded 53rd!

Does that remind anyone else of an old Groucho Marx song? (MP3 here) And it's something like a Marx Brothers movie, too. "A Day at the Camel Races" maybe. GM Joel Lautier of the ACP took a break from promoting the Kramnik-Leko match to write this strongly worded letter castigating FIDE and Ilyumzhinov for having the event in Libya, where Israeli players will be at a serious disadvantage if indeed they are allowed into the country at all.

Great, if a bit on the late side. I started ranting about this in February, about two months before "Libya" was mentioned by the ACP, and that was only in regard to the player agreement. If the ACP has any clout at all, which is still an open question because their members seem to prefer to sacrifice the other guy's pieces, so to speak, it needed to be exercised immediately, the moment FIDE announced Libya. If you can show overwhelming resistance to something this stupid quickly enough you can get results. (E.g. Ilyumzhinov backing down from playing the 1996 FIDE WCh in Iraq.) Waiting three months allows FIDE to say it's too late to make changes and gives the impression you really don't care that much.

Of course FIDE did use the bait-and-switch with the Malta alternative venue in order to gain time. No one said they were stupid. No, wait, I just did. But they have been crafty. American writer Paul Hoffman is determined to attend the WCh in Tripoli and has been jumping through an amazing number of hoops with the State Department to do so. The best part? You can't use American credit cards or traveler's checks there, so it's cash only. Then they warn you about the high level of street crime! Libyan thieves, take note!

Over at ChessBase.com we've basically given up trying to keep up with all the plans to save the chess world and are forced to post them in packs of three or more. As well-meaning as Seirawan, Ponomariov, Levy, Kasparov, and Lautier may be, most of these plans are utopian. They willfully ignore how certain participants would have to go against their own best interests to make these plans work. And for the most part they are putting the cart before the horse, or the format before the cash.

The 2002 Prague agreements were remarkable because they were made without any money on the table. Everyone committed in principle to unify the title for the greater good. We now see how far you get in the chess world relying on principles. Despite a two-year delay, as soon as he got sponsorship for his match with Leko Kramnik was quick to threaten to bail on Prague and FIDE. Of course now he's talking through the Kramnik Association of Chess Professionals, but the message is the same.

You have to wonder how many dues-paying (K)ACP members are going to be in Tripoli taking FIDE money while the ACP leaders declare FIDE and its titles irrelevant and invalid. As always, it's going to be about money. If the ACP can put together serious cash for a qualifying event, the players will play, just like they all showed up for the FIDE KO events when the Ilyumzhinov money was flowing freely and just like they played in the PCA events back in the mid-90's. Most players aren't ideological about it, they just want to play and get paid. That makes the ACP's haste to abandon FIDE misguided at best. If FIDE can get the money together for unification and a new world championship cycle, why not take it? [I meant that from the players' perspective, not mine. As long as FIDE can scratch together some money, the players will be there.]

A while back I wrote about a big Petrosian Memorial event to be held in June this year. (Not the controversially located one held in March in Stepanakert. Nor the one scheduled for Armenia in November.) Amazingly, nothing more has been heard about it. Even more amazingly, it's still on! I got the scoop from Kasparov last night.

It's in Moscow from June 9-15. It's a Scheveningen-format team tournament, classical chess (yay). Each of the six players on the "Petrosian team" will play each member of the "World team." The Petrosian team is Kasparov (half Armenian), Gelfand (Petrosian's top student), Leko (married to a Petrosian. His father-in-law Arshak will be the team's coach) and the top Armenian players Akopian, Lputian, and Vaganian. The World team is Anand, Svidler, Adams, Vallejo, van Wely, and Bacrot.

Great event, despite the lack of rest days due to the FIDE WCh starting in Libya on the 18th. It's going to be at the Hyatt Ararat hotel, bonus points if you know why that's fitting. It was to have finished on June 17, which would have been Petrosian's 75th birthday. He died in 1984.

mack posted an interesting clip in the message boards. A 1972 book "Mathematics" has this amusingly antiquated photo of a chess-playing computer. This was just a passing puff-piece reference, if a revealing one. The earliest literature on chess machines is composed mostly of academic journals full of technical language and equations. Huge strides in improving the chess algorithms were made every few years, quite a contrast to today.

Most of the programmers you talk to today say that it's all about steady incremental improvements in the search and evaluation. When a new version is sufficiently stronger than the last - and at least on par with its peers - it is published. Rather boring stuff, really. It is eternally interesting to watch how programs with roughly the same performance level play significantly different stylistically just as humans do. It makes you wonder how much style difference between human players is personality and how much is simply different math.

FIDE has hastily slapped together this site for the hastily slapped together women's world championship in Elista, the Kalmykian capital and hometown of FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. There's a nice photo report that doesn't explain who anyone is and none of the players are visible in the photos. Lots of Ilyumzhinov though, and the inevitable folkloric dancing. The website mentions live games, but doesn't say when they will start.

The top seeds are an interesting contrast. Former Soviet stalwarts Galliamova, Chiburdanidze, and Matveeva are at the top along with teen stars Koneru of India and Lahno of Ukraine. But there are plenty of powerful Chinese there as well, and they have held the title since FIDE stole it from Susan Polgar in 1999. Those champions, Zhu Chen and Xie Jun, aren't playing, however. It should be an interesting event, full of the usual so-called upsets that are just business as usual in a knock-out format with fast time controls. Trivia: Judit Polgar is rated over 200 points higher than the top seed in Elista.

The clever capitalists at the Wall Street Journal rarely give away any content for free, but the May 19 editorial by Garry Kasparov was made their feature article and can be viewed by lowly non-subscribers (likely Communists) here. Those eager to dismiss his stuff as "celebrity politics" (Streisand for Clinton, Maradona for anything, etc.) should realize that Kasparov has been writing for the WJS since 1991, over 30 articles. Even when he's not giving press conferences, testimony (today in DC), or interviews on politics, he's always up to date and looking for an argument. I like to tease him that he's a step to the right of Reagan and goose-step to the left of Mussolini. Agree or disagree with his politics, his work for pro-democracy groups in Russia is all good. But can he do both this and chess full time? His results of the past year or so suggest not. I think he should spend the next five years just on chess and then he'd still be young for politics. He's in danger of doing many things poorly instead of one thing well.

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As mentioned below, Kasparov just finished a lightning-quick trip to Italy to promote his Great Predecessors book series. He set his new record for books signed in one day, 570! "They were organized like the Ferrari racing team," was how he put it. I stumbled into this page in Italian about his visit to Turin a day earlier to promote the 2006 Chess Olympiad there. I Miei Grandi Predecessori well illustrates the differences between the various editions and translations. Like the Spanish version it includes an incredible number of historical photos while the English editions have none at all. Meanwhile the Germans want to chop the books into smaller volumes. Who out there will collect them all in every language?! More on the Bologna book signing here.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the series is that Kasparov is insistent that the publishers add the volumes of analysis improvements (mostly in Vol. 1) in future printings. Many people will probably end up buying the same (not cheap) book twice, maybe even three times.

This press release has been, well, released about the Helsinki Commission Hearing where Garry Kasparov will be giving testimony on human rights in Russia next Thursday. Note it calls him "World Chess Champion," which he seems content to use among hoi polloi (certainly not in chess crowds) as a sort of honorific instead of a sporting title.

There is precedent for this. National presidents usually keep that title, for example. But that's usually for retired presidents, and players. If I wrote "this variation is often played by world champions Karpov and Kasparov" it wouldn't sound bad. Having to write "ex-" and "former" all the time is annoying, especially when you assume 99.9% of your audience know what you mean. With Kasparov in front of non-chessplayers that's not the case, however, and "former" should certainly be used. "World's #1 chessplayer" would be a politically correct way around this since he still has the top spot on the rating list.

Actually it's Aladdin, not the Mouse. This Disney press release talks about new chess software for kids. There is an "Aladdin-themed Adventure mode" and you can play against another person or the computer. No mention of online play. This might make for stiff competition for ChessBase's acclaimed Fritz and Chesster title. On the other hand, too often do software companies know far more about cool graphics than about teaching chess.

Garry Kasparov is on his way to Italy for a book signing event. His "My Great Predecessors" series is coming out in a remarkable number of languages. With the third book headed to the printers now and two more on the way, in a year or so there will be over 100 editions of the series in print around the world.

He is quite excited about the Fischer section in the third book. "The first serious modern analysis of his games." Ah, such modesty. Kasparov says much has been overlooked even in the 1972 world championship match, about which many dozens of books have been written.

I'll have more from Garry on Volume Three in a week or so. He's coming by to give testimony to the prestigious Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Washington DC. They are having a hearing on human rights in Russia and Kasparov leads a pro-democracy reform group.

If someone was going to break the omerta around FIDE's decision to hold the world championship in Libya, Boris Gulko was a logical candidate. (GM Sutovsky and the USCF have also spoken out.) The US GM and answer to the popular trivia question, "who is the only player to win the US (94) and USSR (77) championships?" has written an open letter to FIDE prez Ilyumzhinov. (See in full below.) Gulko is no stranger to speaking truth to power. He and his chessplayer wife Anna were famous refuseniks in the USSR and their hunger strike drew much attention. They were finally allowed to emigrate to Israel, where Gulko still holds joint citizenship.

The powerful letter protests staging the event in a country whose leaders denounce the "Zionist enemy" even while FIDE says all is well. Gulko and four other qualified American Jewish players will be absent from Libya, over half of the US contingent. (Goldin, Kaidanov, Stripunsky, and Benjamin are the others, although they have not stated their reasons to my knowledge.) Add Israelis Gelfand, Sutovsky, and Smirin and you have what should be a proper scandal.

Vishy Anand just won his third Chess Oscar for his near-total domination of the rapid chess circuit in 2003. He also won Corus Wijk aan Zee at the start of the the year. Peter Svidler also had an incredible year and I actually put him first on my ballot, classical chess snob that I am.

The news was deservedly trumpted in the Indian press, but many of the reports talked about Anand being "the only non-Russian other than Fischer to win the award." One even quoted Anand saying this. I thought this odd, because legendary Bent Larsen of Denmark won the first Oscar in 1967 and this is hardly unknown. Then I discovered that the "official" Chess Oscar site starts its list at 1968 with Spassky! No doubt the Indian journos got their info from that site and while trying to come up with a stat to further glorify their man, came up with the Fischer bit.

Oscar voting used to be a fairly closed affair, mostly people who knew the editor of the Russian magazine 64, Alexander Roshal, who runs the prize contest. Now it appears it has been opened up to all and sundry, not that it wasn't mostly a popularity contest anyway. For a long time Kasparov didn't even bother accepting his string of awards.

FIDE is trying to tap-dance around the recent denunciations by Libyan Olympic Committee President Mohammad Khaddafi that "We didn’t invite nor will we invite the Zionist enemy to the competition." In today's press release FIDE insists that the "LOC invitation to all WCC 2004 participants, dated 26-4-2004, is still valid."

Umm, hello? Which is it? The LOC President was quoted by the Associated Press saying "We know the Zionists will seize such occasions to enter the Arab society ... but we will not give up our principles even if that leads to canceling holding the tournament in Libya." That doesn't sound very welcome to me, or like it has anything to do with whether or not he extended a personal invitation to Israelis.

Nor does FIDE explicitly say that Israelis will be welcome to play in Tripoli, for an obvious reason: they can't because they aren't. They use the same weasel-words the Libyan invitation used. "All 128 players are welcome" when we know the only real question is whether or not the Israelis will be allowed to enter. They are hoping that by removing the Israelis from the list because they didn't send in their agreements, this dilemma will be swept under the carpet. FIDE wants to have its cake and eat it too. Or maybe that should be matzah.

I just had a long talk with Kasparov at his home in Moscow where he's doing prosaic things like playing Warcraft with his son and trying to get over a cold. We talked about the progress, or lack thereof, of unification, the ACP ("all they could do was reverse the letters") and corporate sponsorship in the chess world past and present. Tomorrow a full article based on this interview will appear at ChessBase.com. I guarantee you will be surprised. I digitally recorded the whole thing and will put up a few MP3 clips here and there, although the sound of a long-distance call from someone with the sniffles isn't exactly audiophile conditions.

The BBC reports here that Aslan Abashidze, leader of the Georgian region of Ajaria and thug-of-all-trades, has fled. This just days after the FIDE women's world championship was moved out of his capital for safety reasons. Nice of him to still hand over the money to sponsor the event while he was busy looting the treasury and packing his bags. Let's hope Ilyumzhinov cashed that check quickly! Ilyumzhinov is running out of friends and sponsors. First it was Saddam and Uday, and now his buddy Aslan.

In stunning, if not surprising, news, Libya is denying they ever invited the Israelis to Tripoli for the FIDE WCh and insists they are not welcome. An alert reader sent in this link to an Israeli news page (in Hebrew) and this translation: "Muhammad Gaddafi, son of Libya's leader, denied inviting Israeli chess players to the international tournament that will be held this summer in Tripoli. He said: "We did not invite, and will not invite the Zionist enemy to this tournament." Also here where it adds: "[Muhammad] Gaddafi said today that his country will not allow Israelis to participate in the tournament, even if that will result in Libya losing the right to host the event."

Now that sounds more like those lovable nutcases. (Chess pundit John Henderson wonders, "Who's Ghaddafi's chess advisor, Bobby Fischer?!") It was noted before that the invitation "to all 128 participants" sent out by aforementioned son, who is in charge of sports in Libya (much the same way Saddam Hussein's son Uday was in charge of sports in Iraq, coincidentally enough) did not explicitly invite anyone or mention Israel. But FIDE was quick to say that this meant the Malta venue wasn't needed anymore because everyone was welcome in Libya. The Israeli newspapers and chess federation talked about this breakthrough.

As mentioned below, at least one qualified Israeli GM, Sutovsky, signed and submitted his player agreement with the understanding he would be able to play in Malta, as FIDE promised. It is blindingly obvious that an alternative venue is still required. Of course for the Israelis but also for anyone else whose federation deems it unsafe for their players to go to Tripoli. Imagine if it was "no Russians" or "no Africans"!

I've now added ALL of the old entries to the archives from the old DD pages. It now goes back to December 22, 2002 with 221 entries including this one. Many of the links to newspapers and such are no doubt broken but are preserved for posterity. (And because I'm too lazy to check them all.) You can browse them month by month. The most useful aspect of the transition is the handy search feature on the left of the main page.

We mentioned this new book by Edmonds and Eidinow in the March 7 entry. Harper-Collins was kind enough to send a review copy so I could confirm most of my suspicions. The book tells the story of Fischer-Spassky 72, its run-up and post-mortem. It is told well and in great detail. It adds perspective but little new information to the well-known facts.

Chess fans who have a few of the match books will still enjoy the new focus on Spassky, who is usually in the distant background. The day-to-day haggling behind the scenes of the match is presented in great detail, probably too much detail. The appendix on Fischer's parentage and family has the most new information.

Of most value is how well the book reconstructs how the match was seen at the time. The post-script is suprisingly hasty, even considering how little solidly sourced information is available about Fischer since 1973. His 1996 appearance in Buenos Aires is not mentioned at all, and I don't bring that up just to say that's where I met him. The incredible attention his brief resurfacing received speaks volumes about Fischer's legacy, but the authors don't seem much interested in that.

The book doesn't alter the convention wisdom around the match and the players. But it's thorough and a good read and not intended for those who are familiar with the story. I just wish they hadn't gone and perpetuated that idiotic bit about Morphy and the shoes...

I've spent a few days trying to get a straight answer about FIDE's latest excursion into the twilight zone, but so far without success. One of my favorite admonishments in the White Belt training newsletter is "DO THE MATH!" Many amateurs are afraid of complications and shy away from lines that require calculation, so they never get better at it. It appears FIDE needs to do the math as well. Even more troubling is the impression that the breakthrough of Libya accepting the Israeli players (see 28/4) might be a sham.

FIDE published a new list of players for the 2004 FIDE KO world championship to be held in Tripoli, Libya. They removed those who didn't send in their player agreement forms and added reserves. They gave the list of the 13 players removed and the 113 who qualified. Umm, that makes 126, not the 128 they need. The two who disappeared are Israeli Emil Sutovsky and American Alexander Goldin. FIDE now says that 115 have signed, so they seem to feel free to add new players to the main list without touching the reserve list. This gives them room to negotiate behind the scenes with marquee names like Anand and Svidler despite being past the signing deadline.

GM Sutovsky posted below: "Hi Mig, thanks for raising an issue. In fact, I signed the contract conditionally (''my confirmation is valid only if I am allowed to play all my matches in Malta''), but FIDE added my name to the list of confirmed players. I protested, they removed me from that list but didn't add to the list of those who refused. Suddenly, my name is just absent at all... But you could confidently enlist myself among those who refused to play in Libya :) Basically, according to the laws of Israel, I'm just not allowed to go there... So, Israeli players (Gelfand, me and Smirin - who is second reserve and would definitely get a place) are just ignored by FIDE and left out of KO. Quite an issue, isn't it?

This means that before FIDE announced that Libya would accept Israelis, they knew no Israelis had submitted signed agreements. Ouch! As Woody Allen put it, "No matter how cynical you are, you can't keep up." Just when I thought FIDE had done something decent and achieved something, it turns out they may have told the Libyans "don't worry, there aren't any Israelis on the list anymore so go ahead and welcome them. You'll get positive PR without having protests, security problems, or ticking off your Arab neighbors." Ow ow ow. There's no way to know this for sure, but the timing is very suspicious.

FIDE puts their event in a country to which it is illegal for one of their member federation's players to travel. They arrange an alternative venue for those players. Then they pull that venue out from under the players' feet. All in all this highlights the insanity of holding an event like this in such controversial location.

Thirteen players who qualified for the 2004 FIDE world championship in Libya have failed, according to FIDE, to sign and submit their player agreement contracts and so have been replaced by reserves. We knew Kramnik, Leko, and Ponomariov weren't showing up. The first two have their own classical championship match in October and Ponomariov is too busy sending out press releases.

More surprising are the absences of Vishy Anand and Alexei Shirov, who played in the final of the 2000 FIDE KO in Tehran, Iran with Anand winning the title. Also on the no-play list are stars Peter Svidler, Evgeny Bareev, Boris Gelfand, Anatoly Karpov, Judit Polgar, and 1999 FIDE champion Alexander Khalifman. Two top American players, Gregory Kaidanov and Joel Benjamin, complete the list.

That's hardly a list of nobodies and the Tripoli KO definitely loses much of its already limited appeal. Topalov, Morozevich, and Adams are the only top-ten players left, and there are no previous winners in the field. I've written to half of the drop-outs, but it seems obvious that there will be as many reasons as players. It's a long, grueling event in a location many deem unsafe. The prize money is good but far from what it used to be. The $80,000 first prize is 20% of that of the 2000 event.

Anand has long spoken of his desire to get another piece of Kasparov and a chance to avenge his 1995 world championship loss. Perhaps the prospect of a month in Libya just isn't worth it?

Meanwhile, the women's event was, inevitably, moved to the Kalmykian capital of Elista, home town of FIDE President Ilyumzhinov and perpetual venue of last resort.