On 2005-03-11, knucmo wrote:


It is simply not logical to conclude that an event such as Kasparov
retiring will therefore lead to low wages for all. That is like
saying, when Jean-Marc Bosman leaves football, will there be no more
Bosman rulings? If the players do not stop getting paid as well as
they deserve, you can be sure that players like Anand, Kramnik et. al
will not take that lying down.


The question might be what, exactly, could they do about it? In the
absence of an old-fashioned Soviet-style state sponsorship of chess,
masters getting paid well for chessplaying, or even getting paid at all,
becomes once more a traditional matter of corporate sponsorship and
patronage by amateurs, not all that different from what it was a hundred
or even a hundred fifty years ago. If the potential sponsors aren't
interested in a particular event or player, there is no leverage that a
professional player can exert to make them cough up so much as a dime.

Even a famous, money-generating dynamo like Kasparov couldn't raise enough
funds for a match that everyone, particularly potential sponsors expected
to be a one-sided wipeout, like the cancelled Kasparov-Shirov encounter of
the late '90s. Nor could FIDE do it when they could produce no better
matchup than the lackluster Kasparov-Kasimzdhanov affair. Ugh!

A century ago, Lasker drew a short training match with Janowski to make a
world championship encounter with the Polish master an interesting enough
proposition to lure Janowski's patron into putting up a match purse. I
don't see anyone among the petulant and pampered members of the
post-Kasparov ELO-elite who has sufficient showmanship to pull off
something similar. Certainly not Anand, Leko, or even Kramnik, whose
personal surly brand of entitled anticharisma has rendered even his
nominal "World Champion" title nearly worthless. The only one of this
group who seems to excite some enthusiasm is Topalov; and he couldn't do
it by himself, even if he were to realize what needed to be done.

So if, and this is a really big "if", Kasparov's retirement is genuine,
then I believe we'll see things get an awful lot leaner financially for
top-level chess before they begin to get a little better.