Notes from Bill Kelleher, FIDE Vice President

FIDE Presidential Board Meeting
Antalya Turkey
January 26-28, 2007

Below is a synopsis of the issues discussed in Antalya.

Move to Lausanne: FIDE’s office will not be moving to Singapore, as was proposed at the last Presidential Board meeting. Kirsan has a new “bee in his bonnet”. He wants to move the office back to Lausanne and into a building owned by the IOC. He is intent on making a new effort to join the Olympics. To this end he suggested that FIDE rent a 200sq meter office in the IOC building. The Board balked at moving the entire office back to Lausanne, and we suggested opening a small liaison office instead. Kirsan did not like this approach, and announced that he personally would rent the space at the IOC. He is obviously hoping to ram this idea through the board at a later meeting.

On February 1st after the PB meeting he traveled to Lausanne to meet with IOC president, Jacques Rogge. It’s difficult do understand what he hopes to accomplish since Rogge is on record as saying that the Olympic Games are currently too unwieldy, and that he wants to reduce the number of sports participating in the games and not increase them.

Zonal Realignment: The initiative to realign the FIDE zones is dead, at least for the moment. It was basically the idea of Deputy President Makropoulos, but since the rapprochement between Kirsan and Bessel Kok, and the consequent alienation between Kirsan and Makro, the steam has been taken out of the initiative.

Friends tell me that Makro has not been in the FIDE office in Athens since the Elista World Championship Match, even though the headquarters of the Greek Chess Federation, of which he is president, is located only 200 yards away from FIDE.

Topalov Challenge: Veselin Topalov submitted a challenge to Vladimir Kramnik for a revenge match. He found sponsors who were willing to guarantee a $2 million dollar prize fund with match taking place in Sofia, Bulgaria. Topalov was taking advantage of a recently introduced FIDE rule stating that any player rated over 2700 who can find at least $1 million in prize money can challenge the world champion to match.

However the fine print of the FIDE rule states that the challenge is subject to the approval of FIDE. After a lengthy debate we decided to reject the challenge. The following excerpt from a FIDE press release summarizes our reasoning:

In order to organize this match within regulation, and the fact that a challenge match must be concluded no later than six months before the start of the next World Championship Tournament in Mexico City 12th September, this year, the match would have to start no later than 23rd February, 2007.

The challenger additionally would need to deposit the required sum of money involved, into the FIDE bank account within 45 days before the commencement of the match in accordance with the regulations which has already passed.

Global Chess: Negotiation between Global Chess, Bessel Kok’s company, and FIDE are on going and have so far been successful. However Kirsan failed to make a payment to Global Chess of $1.9 million which was due on January 26th. Needless to say, the sunny FIDE press release about relations between the two entities made no mention of this fact. In fairness to Kirsan, he is always late with his payments, but in the end he always pays.

Titles: Bryan Smith, Bercys Salvijus and the redoubtable Emory Tate were awarded the IM title. Frank Berry was awarded the International Organizer title, but I was unaware that he had even applied. The timing on this is odd since we are currently trying to secure his IA title. Jon Haskell was also awarded the IO title.

Matches and Tournaments:

The Candidates’ matches, including Kamsky – Bacrot, will be held in Elista, May 26 – June 14th.
The World Championship tournament will be held in Mexico City, September 11 – October 1.

The knockout tournament for the next World Championship cycle will be held in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, November 23-December 14th.

Bill Kelleher
Vice President FIDE