Yesterday, my friend Gata Kamsky forwarded to me and other top players in the world the following letter which he sent to FIDE. He brought up some very good points. What do you think?

This is what Gata wrote:

Dear Sirs,

I’m absolutely aghast at the new proposal that was published on FIDE’s website. Frankly, I’m surprised at how Candidates were being handled. Of course having 16 candidates is a problem, but we cannnot be blamed for lack of sponsorship or interest when FIDE wasn’t doing much in promoting or organizing the event. Every time I spoke with someone from FIDE, I got the response that FIDE right now is WAITING on bids, or it’s WAITING on elections, or its WAITING on re-unification match.

Second, I absolutely PROTEST the tendency to give the world champion a privilege dating back to Karpov era, where champion was waiting for the challenger to go through cycles. The democratic and fair knockouts of the last decade, including the tournament of the 8 were fair ways to find a champion, and as such should not be treated lightly in giving back champion privileges from a time before that.

Third, I’m absolutely against any mini-tournaments, collusion, despite whatever minimal chance, has no place in fair competition. Every winner has to be determing based only on his own result against his opponent, nothing less, hence the match system that proven and remains strong.

Fourth, I’m surprised as to why the original system which was proposed before Khanty-Mansiisk changes was not implemented. The original system had 6 or 8 candidates and had the challenger and world champion being seeded into Candidates. Then the number of candidates was considerably grown and Last Chance tournament eliminated.

Hence, the solution speaks for itself. I propose either to reduce the number of players in the knockout or go back to Interzonal swiss system down to 64 players. reduce the number of Candidates from the Knock-Out down to 6 (rapid games should eliminate the other 2 in the knockout, or however many others in the Interzonal swiss. I mean if rapid games were good enough to declared the unified world champion in the Topalov-Kramnik match. Then rapid games should be good enough to declare the winner for the candidates spot)

In the next step, these 6 candidates play matches of 6 games each so that 3 winners remain. (This means that the FIDE will only have to ACTIVELY look for sponsors for ONLY 3 matches , which should be pretty easy to organize)

The current world champion joins the 3 winners and they play matches of 8-10 games each. The final 2 winners are declared to be playing a match for the world championship title in a 12-16 games series.

The main point that I protest is allowing the world champion having old privileges which were revoked ever since the 1993 split between FIDE and Kasparov. The current success or for some shame of the re-unification match hype as well as interested of the world champion should not be taking precedence over the interests of fair play, fair competition and other professional players.

Response from FIDE

Dear Mr. Kamsky,

Thank you for your interest and comments to the proposal.

Regards,
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov
President

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