Полезно обратить внимание на следующую статью из Slate Magazine, частично перепечатанную Ф. Фриделем на сайте chessbase.com. Приводится с сокращениями.
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...As the tournament began on Aug. 27, Carlsen was mired in an ongoing faceoff with FIDE, the international governing body of chess. There are a few things you should probably know about FIDE—or the Federation Internationale des Echecs, if you’re feeling continental. FIDE is, by all accounts, comically corrupt, in the vein of other fishy global sporting bodies like FIFA and the IOC. Its Russian president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who has hunkered in office for nearly two decades now, was once abducted by a group of space aliens dressed in yellow costumes who transported him to a faraway star. Though I am relying here on Ilyumzhinov’s personal attestations, I have no reason to doubt him, as this is something about which he has spoken quite extensively. He is of the firm belief that chess was invented by extraterrestrials, and further “insists that there is ‘some kind of code’ in chess, evidence for which he finds in the fact that there are 64 squares on the chessboard and 64 codons in human DNA.”
One of the many conspiracy theories bandied about in the fever swamps of the chess world’s collective imagination has it that Ilyumzhinov (and his friend Vladimir Putin) yearn for a return to the glory of Soviet-era chess supremacy. Such a shift in the chess world order would require a demotion of this impudent Norwegian tyke and the promotion of a proper Russian world champ. Another theory holds that Ilyumzhinov resents Carlsen for having supported Garry Kasparov when Kasparov launched a (doomed) campaign to unseat Ilyumzhinov as FIDE president. Whatever the underlying issues, the upshot is that Carlsen and the governing body have been squabbling over the Scandinavian’s upcoming FIDE title defense...
...Carlsen seemed reluctant to sign on. Rumors swirled in St. Louis that if he didn’t cave soon, his title might be stripped from him. Some whispered that he’d already chosen to forfeit, unwilling to accede to the conditions proffered by FIDE and its alien-obsessed president. FIDE insisted it could accept Carlsen’s final word on the matter no later than Sunday, Sept. 7—one day after the last round of the Sinquefield Cup
In St. Louis, all of this seemed to be weighing heavily on Carlsen’s enormous brain...
Rex Sinquefield was born with a cleft palate. By the time he was 7, he’d lost his father and been left in the care of a St. Louis orphanage. Despite these humble beginnings, he went on to earn an MBA from the University of Chicago and, in 1973, to invent what many believe (and he insists) was the first passively managed, market-weighted S&P 500 index fund.
When Sinquefield retired, his bank account bulging, he returned to St. Louis—this time in possession of considerably more wealth and influence. He joined the boards of various charities and cultural institutions, and backed conservative economic causes. (Sinquefield is not a big fan of taxes or teachers unions.) In his spare time he attempted to rescue American chess...
...The lone American entrant is Nakamura, a 26-year-old who often chugs Red Bull at the chessboard. Though he is ranked seventh in the world, he seems to consider himself Magnus Carlsen’s chief rival, as evidenced by this November 2013 tweet in which he equates Carlsen with a mythological necromancer.
Starting to realize that I am the only person who is going to be able to stop Sauron in the context of chess history.
6:01 AM - 19 Nov 2013
It’s a bold pronouncement coming from a man with a record of 0–11 (plus 15 draws) against the champ. Carlsen, for his part, seems less than threatened. In an interview with a Norwegian media outlet, he once referred to Nakamura as—I believe this was correctly translated—“inept.”
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Yet, by day five of the Sinquefield Cup, Carlsen was an afterthought. Something bigger was happening.
Fabiano Caruana [photo left by Lenart Ootes] learned to play chess at a synagogue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. At 14, he became the youngest U.S.–born grandmaster...
When I asked him about his hobbies outside of chess, he smiled and allowed that he basically has none. He watches movies to relax (he particularly enjoyed the Indonesian martial arts films The Raid and The Raid 2) and sometimes reads (he mentioned his fondness for The Iliad and David Sedaris). But mostly, he stares at chess games.
“Hundreds of games are played each day all around the world,” he noted, in a voice that is oddly deep and authoritative given his slight frame and wispy moustache. “And a lot of them are important. They’re all available online, but you have to put in the time to look at them all. And you need to analyze, find new trends, keep trying to find new ideas to use against specific opponents.”...
“There’s always been a higher chess truth which is pretty much impossible to grasp.”
Fabiano Caruana
Caruana oozed confidence when he sat down with me on the rest day at the tournament’s halfway mark. You’d be confident, too, if you’d just destroyed the world’s best competition in a contest measuring the highest intellectual capabilities of humankind. Caruana is, on the whole, very respectful of his opponents, but his matter-of-fact tone suggested some deeply internalized assumptions about his own awesomeness...
Stumped for further superlatives with which to describe Caruana’s excellence, one chess expert resorted to the highest possible praise: Caruana, he said, was “Fischer-esque.”...
Those days are long gone. Six years after Fischer’s death—his greatness sullied by a late-life torrent of anti-Semitic, anti-American rambling—chess remains a useful cultural referent, our go-to metaphor for strategic thinking. (A recent cover of the Economist showed Vladimir Putin walking amid giant, toppled chess pieces. The accompanying story was not about chess.) Movie set designers will forever place chessboards in the lairs of villains and on the bunk beds of child prodigies. But the game itself has dwindled in popularity. Chances are you didn’t tune in to the live stream of last year’s title fight between Carlsen and Anand. Chances are your 12-year-old nephew hasn’t begged you for a copy of Aron Nimzowitsch’s My System.
If there’s been any recent hope for a chess resurgence, it’s rested entirely on Carlsen’s broad shoulders. Young, good-looking, non-Russian, and blessed with genuinely transcendent skill, he’s the most marketable player to arrive on the chess scene this century. While at the table, he wears jackets and shirts emblazoned with the logos of his sponsors, like he’s a NASCAR driver: Nordic Semiconductor on his shoulder, Simonsen Vogt Wiig, a large Norwegian law firm, on his breast...
The goat rodeo that is FIDE, with its corruption and its hidebound ways, does the game no favors...
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Caruana won his sixth game against Topalov, and then his seventh in a rematch with MVL. He remained undefeated and undrawn. Onlookers couldn’t believe this was happening.
“He’s not making any mistakes,” said a shell-shocked MVL in a post-game interview. “It’s the most amazing thing I’ve seen by quite some margin.”
“We’re gonna need to start calling him Fabiano Fischer,” suggested Maurice Ashley. One of the live stream commentators theorized “chess fans in the future will ask each other, ‘Where were you in September 2014?’ ”...
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The day after the tournament closed, Magnus Carlsen made his long-awaited decision. He would play in Sochi in November against Anand after all, just as FIDE had demanded.
Anand vs Carlsen
Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen played for the chess world championship in 2013, with Carlsen winning 6.5–3.5. They will face each other this November in Sochi, Russia.
Photo by Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images
Other than a possible general distaste for the way FIDE operates, why had Carlsen stalled? According to chess insiders, he: 1) was unhappy with the size of FIDE’s prize purse, which had shrunk considerably since the previous title event; 2) wasn’t altogether thrilled about the security situation in Russia, given the brink-teetering possibility of a hot war with NATO; 3) was maybe less than psyched to spend a fortnight in a barren, crumbling, Slavic ghost town; 4) was not 100 percent clear about who, precisely, would be funding the event.
This last concern mattered. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the extra-terrestrial-philic FIDE president, had at one point suggested the championship could be bankrolled by Alexander Tkachyov, governor of Russia’s Krasnodar region. Tkachyov has managed to secure himself a spot on an EU blacklist by dint of his role in “undermining Ukraine's sovereignty.” He is under sanction—meaning a travel ban and an asset freeze. Were Carlsen to accept Tkachyov’s dirty rubles, the blowback from goodhearted fellow Norwegians, from politically savvy Western chess fans, and, not least, from disapproving EU officials, might sully the youthful grandmaster’s image...
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http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sp … ingle.html
