Former UAE prodigy rides to the rescue of ‘chess Wimbledon’
Leonard Barden
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 7 March 2009 00.05 GMT
When an Emirates consortium took over Manchester City and poured millions into buying Robinho for the Premier League soccer club, chessplayers were miffed. Why?
The architect of the UAE bid, Sulaiman Al-Fahim, has a curriculum vitae which includes having been a chess prodigy ‘ranked fifth in the world at age nine’. In the late 1980s very young players were starting to acquire official international ratings, so I guess that Al-Fahim was No5 on an under-10 list.
His playing career ceased early but now he is president of the UAE chess association. Hence the typical grandmaster reaction to the Robinho news was on the lines of “Why can’t he spare a few megabucks for us?”
Last week he did. The elite tournament at Linares, Spain, known as the ‘chess Wimbledon’ has had budgetary problems in recent years, which were temporarily solved by playing the first half of the tournament in Merino, Mexico.
This year the Mexicans pulled out and it seemed that Linares’s future was again uncertain. Then came an announcement during the current event that from 2010 onwards the tournament would be shared between Spain and the UAE. Al-Fahim commented that “We will pay the expenses of the players and the prizes, I think around two million euros.”
This indeed sounds like the jackpot, and I guess that in the coming months the world top GMs will be clamouring for one of the eight invitations to Linares-Dubai or Abu Dhabi 2010.
Here is the full article.
Money is everything.