Excerpt from THE CRAZY WORLD OF CHESS by GM Larry Evans ($9.95 due in
October from cardozapub.com)

SUSAN POLGAR VS. FIDE

January 24, 2005

Nowadays lawyers seem to be replacing good moves over the board.
FIDE, at war with several top players who refuse to submit to vacuous
drug testing, is being sued by a Jewish grandmaster who was prevented
from competing at the "judenfrei" knockout championship held in Libya
last year.

History repeats itself. In 1999 FIDE stripped Anatoly Karpov and
Susan Polgar of their men's and women's crowns respectively. They both
sued FIDE at the International Court of Sports in Switzerland. Karpov
was
awarded $50,000 and Polgar $25,000, but their crowns were not
restored.

In March 2001 the court found that FIDE erred by precluding Susan
from defending her title because there was no compelling reason not to
accommodate a new date after she had a baby.

Her Website reported:

"Polgar agreed to accept a lesser amount in a spirit of
goodwill. In order to lessen the damages, FIDE claimed it's
a non-profit organization without any money at all! Another
unfortunate revelation to the court was FIDE's claim that it
had to spend 'several hundreds of thousands of dollars for its
legal defense.' It is strange that FIDE can plead poverty and
ask for mercy in one breath and then justify these pleadings by
explaining the immense costs of its legal defense with its next.
One of the main reasons Polgar did not play was because
FIDE failed to find a sponsor for her match with Xie Jun. In
hindsight, it would have been cheaper for FIDE to sponsor that
match to begin with."

An editorial in Inside Chess noted why FIDE has lost so much
credibility:

"All players should be able to make the leap of logic that if
women's world champ Susan Polgar can be treated so callously,
anyone's rights as a player are similarly worthless. The USCF
should call for the collective resignation of FIDE's executive
body and work toward the creation of a new governing body
for chess. It has become abundantly clear that men and women
of good conscience can no longer support FIDE in the face of
its hapless bungling and callous destruction of professional
careers."

The Polgar sisters, who are Jewish, have long been a thorn in the side
of
FIDE, which is clearly an anti-Semitic organization. For an account of
how
every woman in the world except Susan Polgar got 100 free rating
points,
see "Rigging Ratings." This scandal took place at the Chess Olympiad
in
the United Arab Emirates in 1986 where a team from Israel was banned.

In 2004 Susan led the USA women's team to a silver medal. She was
the individual high-scorer on board one, and then was singled out for
a
humiliating "random" dope test, which she dared not refuse on pain of
having her team's result erased. Thus FIDE made the USCF eat crow for
publicly taking a stand against dope testing.

Susan and her sister Judit, who just had a baby (August 2004), are
currently the two highest-ranked women in the world.

Winning is the best revenge.


Paul Rubin wrote:
"David Kane" writes:
I think she said she would play "a challenger" for $2 million
dollars, at a time when there was nobody offering a prize
fund of anything close to $2 million dollars.

You should know better than to rely on Sam Sloan for this type of
info. All I can find in the pages Sloan linked was Susan basically
expressing an idealistic desire for a prize fund of that magnitude
(given that the men's WC fund was that high), plus a press release
saying some biotech company had joined into the notion. I don't see
any documentation so far of a situation anything like Sloan's spin.

She chose a different route (perhaps her associations with the likes
of scumbags like Sloan and Fischer were a factor) involving
litigation, where she also lost, but got a small face-saving sum.

Look at the actual numbers, the 1999 Xie-Galliamova match prize fund
was apparently $200K. I don't know how that was divvied up but if
it's like some other matches, the winner got 5/8 of it and the loser
got 3/8. That could be interpreted as: each player got $75K as
consideration for preparing for and playing in a grueling top level
match, including hiring coaches, seconds, babysitters, passing up
other opportunities during that period, etc. The remaining $50K was
the amount actually contested for in the match.

I can un
derstand the arbitrators not wanting to award the $75K playing
fee to someone who didn't actually undergo all that tribulation
mentioned above. That leaves the $50K. As the higher rated player by
a few dozen points, Susan was a slight favorite to win the match, but
her expectation from the $50k was maybe $30k, or $35K at best. And
she ended up getting $25K in the settlement. That sounds to me like
Susan kicked FIDE's ass, and any face-saving was on FIDE's part, not
Susan's.

Even compared to the $125K maximum that Susan could have potentially
gotten, $25K (when you consider that it includes freedom from all that
preparation and playing) is much more than a "small face-saving sum".
A small face-saving sum would be what Milov got: zero actual cash, but
FIDE was made to pay part of the arbitration fee instead of making
Milov pay the whole thing.