This is a single post from deeden.co.uk made during the period May 2002 to April 2009. During a previous grand redesign I decided to make a break with the past and consign the old entries to history. This entry is from September 2003 and lives here forevermore.

Chess, easier to play than organise

A few weeks ago it looked like the World Chess Championship was on track to be unified. Now things are slightly up in the air. Ponomariov has refused to play Kasparov resulting in the cancellation of their match. Instead there will be an old-fashioned 128 player classical tournament to decide the FIDE champion. That champion will then play Kasparov and the winner of that game will play the winner of the other World Championship competition, either Kramnik or Leko. The person who wins through all of that will be the World Champion.

The whole situation is ridiculous really. I welcome the return of the tournament format to the championship as it means that the title is open to all of the best players again, but I’m disappointed with Ponomariov and I’m bothered that we now have another situation where a player could claim to be world champion despite refusing to defend his title. I just hope that by this time next year we have one world champion and a process in place for organising future title matches.