Word: karpovs
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...going on around here? Since matches determining the best player on earth normally crop up only once every three years, the phenomenon of two such face-offs commencing during the same week left rank-and-file devotees with divided loyalties and confusion aplenty. On the one hand, the Karpov-Timman contest bore the imprimatur of FIDE (pronounced FEE-day), the Federation Internationale des Echecs, the powerful governing body that has been running world championship competitions since 1948. In the past, FIDE's authority would have been enough to convince chess fans that Karpov-Timman was the match to follow. Unfortunately...
Kasparov had his own reasons for warming to the idea. His resentments against FIDE date back to the mid-1980s, when he was challenging his compatriot Karpov for the world title. After an epochal, 48-game struggle, with Kasparov surging from behind and Karpov near collapse, FIDE president Florencio Campomanes suddenly declared the contest finished "without result" and ordered it to be replayed from the start. Outraged, Kasparov decided that the monolithic Soviet chess federation, which grudgingly tolerated him while championing Karpov, had leaned on FIDE and Campomanes to salvage Karpov's title, at least for a while...
...part, FIDE responded predictably: it expunged Kasparov and Short from its list of ranking grandmasters and decreed the Karpov-Timman match in Zwolle as the only true chess championship. No one, not even FIDE loyalists, took this claim seriously. Surreptitiously or not, chess attention centered on London...
Short's early chess successes came almost too easily. By the time he was 23, he was ranked No. 3 in the world, behind world champion Gary Kasparov and ex- champ Anatoly Karpov. By his own admission, he had never worked very hard at the game. He relied heavily on a natural chess sense that allowed him to play brilliant moves almost intuitively, as if they came out of his fingertips, not his brain...
...Jonathan Speelman in a preliminary round of the world championship, his ranking plunged to 18th, but he picked himself up, hired Czech grandmaster Lubomir Kavalek as his coach and rebuilt his career. Patiently he battled his way through the grueling qualifying rounds of the current championship, polishing off Speelman, Karpov and Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman...