"Quadibloc" wrote in message
...
On Apr 28, 6:08 am, David Richerby
wrote:

Er... To avoid our getting lost in a twisty maze of nested negations,
my position is this. The international chess community should have
just as much of a say in the conduct of, say, a world championship
match between two Russians played in Russia as it would in a world
championship match between a Frenchman and a Brazilian played in
Japan. This fact of being organized and regulated by an international
body is what distinguishes a world championship from a national
championship.

I wouldn't extend that to the fine details of the playing conditions
but it should, for example, be the international body that decides the
overall form of the match, who competes in it and so on.

This is a perfectly reasonable position, since what the two men are
competing for, although it is in Russia that they are competing for
it, is the FIDE World Championship. As you note, the important things
are questions that directly affect the validity of the contest in
choosing the world's best chessplayer, so this would involve matters
like the number of games, the disposition of ties, and rematches.

Since the Soviet Union was

a) a totalitarian dictatorship, and

b) the home of the vast majority of the world's best chess players,

however, had push come to shove, FIDE's power would have been rather
limited. The Chess champion of the rest of the world except the Soviet
Union might not have been much of a world Chess champion.

Otherwise, one would have thought that holding one players' family
hostage during a World Championship match might have been considered
unsporting, allowing Korchnoi to win automatically through the
disqualification of Karpov.

Don't get your history from Larry Parr. Refusing emigration
requests for families of defectors has little do with chess and less to
do with Karpov. It was routine Soviet practice. Karpov and
Korchnoi have been cordial in later years - hardly what one
would expect if Karpov had been behind some evil plot.

To condemn Karpov, a chessplayer, for all of the USSR's
evil practices is ridiculous. After all, Korchnoi himself was
not willing to forego the title match to achieve a non-chess
objective - it would have been extraordinary for Karpov
to have done so.

Raymond Keene, an anti-Karpov writer, characterized the
1978 match as "that rare phenomenon - a World Championship
with both players in peak form"