"David Kane" writes:
You have not substantiated your claim that she was prepared
to play the match vs. Xie Jun.

Huh? She suggested dates and venues, no reason to think she was
unwilling to play at them. You're saying that all the documented
statements and offers are wrong because something different was going
on in her deepest heart of hearts and that she would have found some
other way to duck if FIDE agreed to her dates and venues. Of course
that can never be disproven, but it's completely speculative on your part.

There are three factors. Money, titles, and reputation.
On the money scale, Polgar sued for "at least Sfr 500,000"
On titles, she wanted to be recognized as champion.
With respect to reputation, she wanted FIDE to be found guilty of
wrongdoing.

So a clear win for Polgar would have been something like SFr 1 million,
the title, and a ruling that FIDE had acted inappropriately.

That was public relations posturing, not much to do with actual cash.
As Sydney Greenstreet said in The Maltese Falcon, "This is genuine
coin of the realm. With a dollar of this, you can buy ten dollars of
talk."

A clear win for FIDE would have been SFr 0 to Polgar, Polgar without
the title, and a ruling that FIDE acted appropriately.

A clear FIDE win would have also required Polgar to pay the
arbitration costs and FIDE's legal fees. Instead the money went in
the other direction. That sounds like a Polgar win to me. No clear
statement of FIDE acting inappropriately, because that would have
devalued the title even more than it already was, which would have
been against both Polgar's interests and and FIDE's. Instead we're
left to infer who was right based on the direction of money flow.

The actual settlement was somewhere "in between": $25000 to Polgar,
Polgar without the title, and no decision concerning the
appropriateness of FIDE's behavior. That may technically be "in between"
but objectively a lot closer to FIDE's clear win.

You are completely wrong and grasping desperately. The settlement
clearly indicates FIDE acted inappropriately. That is why they had to
pay Polgar 25 thousand sweet, sweet smackeroos. Genuine coin of the
realm, worth 250 thousand of talk, not that advanced a concept. (Heh,
250K USD = around 500K SFR at that time, one could even say she was
paid in full). "Somewhere in between" would have been a carefully
worded press release with no clear winner, neither party pays the
other, Polgar and FIDE split the arbitration costs, both sides pay
their own legal fees. Instead, the result at the bottom of the
scoresheet: Polgar 25000, FIDE 0.

Look, suppose you're on your way to a meeting and Sloan plows his taxi
into your car and does $3K in damages and he says it's your fault.
You're trying to portray yourself as an important movie tycoon, so you
ask the judge to award you $1 million in compensation for the big
studio deal you were hoping to sign at your meeting, plus you want him
to order a TV miniseries to be made of the incident and to give you
Uma Thurman's hand in marriage. You either are making those extra
requests for pure publicity reasons or you might delusionally think
they really make sense, but it doesn't matter either way. The judge
makes Sloan pay the $3K and ignores the speculative and off-the-wall
stuff. That is a clear loss for Sloan, and any sensible outsider
would call it a win for you, though for PR reasons you might choose to
not treat it as one.

Be aware also that the title simply wasn't worth much. Even the
overall (a/k/a men's) FIDE WC title at the time wasn't worth much.
Quick, who held the overall title back then? Forgot? Don't worry,
most of us have. The answer is Alexander Khalifman, but nobody except
FIDE sycophants like Eric Johnson gave a damn because the world's
actual top player was very obviously Kasparov, who had broken away
from FIDE. Khalifman's title was near worthless. The women's title
was even more worthless, since it was a restricted title that had
never gotten much respect, and since the actual top woman player was
obviously Judit Polgar who disdained to have anything to do with it.

Anyway, you haven't even shown that CAS had the jurisdiction to make
FIDE give Polgar the title, and in Polgar's version this turned out to
be impossible.

Susan Polgar continues to play the CAS result as a minimal win but as
I see it, that's part of her continuing promotional and public
relations effort to convince the public that these titles and the
players who hold them are more important than they are. That's ok,
she's a promoter so that's what she's supposed to do. That would also
explain why she didn't want to completely torpedo FIDE's remaining
apparent legitimacy with the public.