Chess: movers and fakers

Chess: movers and fakers

Chess was invented as an alternative to war. But this most cerebral form of combat can involve as much skulduggery as the real thing. As the biggest match in the world is plunged into crisis amid claims that one of the players used ‘bathroom breaks’ to take advice from a computer, Dominic Lawson asks if the game will ever pick up the pieces

Published: 03 October 2006

You might think, given the celebrated eccentricity of chess grandmasters, that the Kofi Annan of the international game would need to be as sane and balanced as any man alive. You would be wrong. The president of the Fédération Internationale des Echecs (Fide), Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, astounded reporters five years ago by revealing that he had been temporarily captured by aliens: “The extraterrestrials put a yellow spacesuit on me. They gave me a tour of their spaceship and showed me the command centre. I felt very comfortable with them.”

The question is: did the extra-terrestrials feel comfortable with Mr Ilyumzhinov? I have met him only once, but I vividly recall the dead coldness of his eyes. Perhaps I was too much influenced by the knowledge that the editor of the newspaper Sovietskaya Kalmykia, Larissa Yudina, was murdered in 1998 while investigating Ilyumzhinov’s financial affairs.
There was more than money at stake: the chess-loving Ilyumzhinov had, three years earlier, become President of Kalmykia, a former Soviet statelet bordering oil-rich Kazakhstan. Since then, he has ploughed his money – or Kalmykia’s; it’s hard to distinguish between the two – into chess. It has bought him the presidency of Fide.

Earlier this year, despite opposition from the likes of Britain’s Nigel Short, he was re-elected. When things were looking a bit tricky for the Kalmuk leader, he swung the vote by announcing that he’d persuaded the Fide world chess champion, Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, to play a $1m match against Vladimir Kramnik, the Russian who in 2000 beat the hitherto invincible Garry Kasparov in a match organised by a body derived from the Professional Chess Association (PCA).

It was the unification match for which the chess world had been waiting since Kasparov broke with Fide in 1993 by playing his world championship match against Nigel Short under the auspices of their newly created PCA.

Short and Kasparov may have become business partners thereby, but it was still skulduggery as usual during their match. I recall visiting Nigel in his room at the Savoy Hotel on the afternoon before the first game and finding him in the company of two men with strange devices. One was attaching his to the telephone, the other was waving his contraption around the room. Nigel explained to me they were “debugging” his suite just in case Kasparov’s team tried any fancy Russian tricks.

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It is fear of Russian tricks – or the pretence of such fear – that has cast the Kramnik-Topalov unification match, now taking place in the Kalmykian capital Elista, into confusion. After four games of the scheduled 12, the 31-year-old Kramnik was leading Topalov, also 31, by two wins to nil with two draws. This was already desperate for the Bulgarian. Kramnik is famed for his defensive skills; Kasparov failed to win a single game against him in their 2000 match, and afterwards Kramnik told me that he had emulated Muhammad Ali’s “rope a dope” technique, seeing the big-punching Kasparov as the chessboard equivalent of George Foreman.

The rest of the article can be read here.