Word: timman
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Once the U.S. began bombing Baghdad, al-Timman's mission changed. He raced from one bomb site to the next, noting the physical damage and assessing casualties, keeping an eye out for leadership figures among the dead and wounded. At an appointed time each night, using a satellite phone, he called in his assessments to an I.N.C. contact, who passed them on to the Americans, who could then decide whether to hit old targets again or move on to others. "I considered it the most important thing I could do because it would bring an end to the war sooner...
Meanwhile, the official World Chess Championship had opened a day earlier, with considerably less hubbub, in the small town of Zwolle, the Netherlands. There, former world champion Anatoly Karpov faced Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman for prize money of roughly $1.4 million...
...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...
...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...
...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...