The Hindu : Sport / Chess : Depleted field for World championship

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Thursday, Apr 29, 2004

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Sport - Chess

Depleted field for World championship

By Our Sports Reporter

KOZHIKODE, APRIL 28. The World chess championship will be held in Libya; that's confirmed. But it promises to be the weakest World championship in the history of the sport.

Of the top 10 players in the world, seven will not be there when the World championship opens at Tripoli on June 18. Among the seven is India's Viswanathan Anand, the World No. 2 and World champion of 2000.

The world chess governing body FIDE's deadline to receive the players' undertakings of their participation expired on Tuesday. And FIDE has informed 114 of the 128 players have signed the undertakings. But among those who did not sign are indeed the cream of world chess.

So from the World's top 10, there would be just three: Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, the World No. 5 who would be the highest ranked player in the championship, Alexander Morozovich of Russia and Michael Adams of England, ranked seventh and ninth in the world respectively. The top players who have chosen to stay away from Libya are the World No. 3 Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, No. 4 Peter Leko of Hungary, Peter Svidler of Russia, Judit Polgar of Hungary (the world's finest ever female player by a long distance), defending FIDE World champion RuslanPonomariov of Ukraine, Alexei Shirov of Spain, who challenged Anand in the 2000 World championship final in Teheran, Boris Gelfand of Israel and Evgeny Bareev of Russia.

So whoever wins the World championship in Libya, which is scheduled to conclude on July 13, may well have even less credibility than Alexander Khalifman of Russia, who won the 1999 World championship in Las Vegas. Incidentally, Khalifman is among the players who have opted out of the Libya tourney.

Though Khalifman's opponent in the 1999 final was an equally less fancied player in the form of Vladimir Akopian of Armenia, that championship had many top players, including Kramnik, Leko and Shirov, who were knocked out in the earlier rounds. Even then Khalifman was hardly referred to as the World champion, he was called the FIDE World champion; the chess world at large refused to believe that he deserved to be its true champion. The plight of the new champion from Libya could hardly be any different.

That so many players have pulled out of this championship is hardly surprising. Ponomariov had cried foul claiming that FIDE did not honour the promise it had made to him of a match with Kasparov, conveniently forgetting that he himself had been extended deadlines by FIDE to sign the contract for the match. But he received support from the Association of Chess Players (ACP), which also asked its members not to sign FIDE's `one-sided contract' for the Libya championship. The ACP came up with its own version of the players' contract, which was not entertainedby FIDE.

So FIDE's grand plan of having a unified world champion of chess holds little promise, for now. It had already scrapped the original Prague agreement towards the unification and was hoping that the proposed match between the new champion in Libya and the World No. 1 Garry Kasparov would once and for all settle the dispute.

Now even if that match were to take place, how can you call it a World title match, when Kasparov is not required to meet any of the top three players in the world after him, namely Anand, Kramnik and Leko?

Meanwhile Kramnik and Leko have found a sponsor at last for their match. But even it hasn't got that much significance following the failure of the Prague agreement. It will be played in the good old classical format of the World championship match alright, but we will have to bear in mind that Leko had come through as the challenger against Kramnik (the winner of the Briangames World championship against Kasparov) from the Einstein tournament that had no Anand.

So the quest for a true World chess champion agreeable to everyone will continue for a few more years.

There's a silver lining though from the Libya. Its leader Colonel Gaddafi has offered visa for all the participants, including those from Israel, which is a rare gesture, coming as it does from an Arab nation. FIDE's original plan was to conduct one leg of the championship in Malta, featuring the Israeli players. This could be another positive step from Libya in its quest of improving international relations.

As for chess, the fans across the world are hoping for better relations and understanding between the players and the administrators.

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