Our friends at ChessBase just reported that Vladimir Kramnik and his wife Marie had a baby girl in the early morning of December 28, 2008. She is named Daria (Dasha). Congratulations to Vladimir and Marie!

Vladimir also spoke about the totally unfair new World Championship cycle.

Here is one of the quotes:

I can only speculate. It is pretty clear that in the new system there are two people who are gaining a lot of advantages. They are Topalov and Kamsky. First of all there is this match between the two of them, which actually should never have happened – it was basically created out of nothing. Now the loser of this match is getting a chance to play, without qualification, in the final stage of the next world championship. That is quite a serious privilege. You can speculate yourself why this was done. I really don’t know.

The only thing which I can personally say – I mean it is concerning my personal position in the cycle – is that I am very unhappy, to put it mildly, with the situation that the loser of the Topalov-Kamsky match is inside the final stage of the qualification, and I, as the loser of my parallel match with Anand, am not. I believe that is totally unfair. I would like you not to misunderstand: I am not asking for any privileges. The only thing I am asking for and insisting on is that I must have exactly the same rights as the loser of that match. If the winners have the same rights I do not understand why one loser has much less rights than the other. This is something that has absolutely no logical explanation. The only thing I can understand is that there are certain powers inside FIDE who simply do not want to see me in the cycle. Unfortunately I have to draw this conclusion, because I do not have any other explanation.

The rest can be read here.

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Chess Daily News from Susan Polgar
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