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Mess in World Chess can't go on: Anand
Regretting that politics has taken over chess, Viswanathan Anand said due to the fighting between the two World chess associations.
- Indo-Asian News Service
- Updated: February 25, 2007 08:48 AM IST
Read Time:2 min
New Delhi:
Regretting that "politics has taken over chess", Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand today said due to the fighting between the two world chess associations -- FIDE and the rival body floated by Kasparov and Kramnik -- "the game is really suffering with the lack of clarity at the top". "The situation is a complete mess. The chess world can't go on like this. We all hope that by next year there will be some de facto unification if not a de jure one," Anand said. "Hopefully some time next year some thing will come up and we are all waiting for the unified World Championship," said Anand, who was in the Capital to promote NIIT's Mind Champions Academy. "Because of the prevailing world economic condition it is tough to get sponsors and still people are trying to hold three World Championship matches. The last three years was a circus. And the end result is that you don't have a single marketable person," Anand said, referring to the recent scrapping of the unification match between Russian Vladimir Kramnik and Hungary's Peter Leko by the London-based Einstein Group. The group announced last month that it was unable to raise the estimated $1 million-plus prize fund from sponsors for the Kramnik-Leko match planned for this summer. The winner of the Kramnik-Leko match was to play the winner of the match between former world champion Garry Kasparov and Ukraine's Ruslan Ponomariov, who holds the International Chess Federation (FIDE) crown, in an effort to end a division going back to 1993. (PTI)Topics mentioned in this article
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