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.

"Paul Rubin" wrote in message
...

"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),

Billie Jean King remarked about something similar in Tennis - she said of
Wimbledon, eg, that the stands were just as full, and the organisers made as
much money from women as from men, and the TV stations were just as
attended - so how come barefoot and starving status?

She [laugh] also said that when she started playing there the committee
[100% men] insisted that women wear corsets.

If you go to Fide's website and look at the current picture of the
organization plus assorted national representatives for chess you will see
100% men.

Now, obviously, that has nothing to do with ... ggg

But Fide were angry with 'winning' their case, no? Which is why every other
women in the world got 50 free points - which conveniently changed the top
woman's rating, to 'legitimately' have a new top player.

Now, obviously, that ... ggg

What a farce chess management is!

Phil Innes

"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.

"Paul Rubin" wrote in message
...
"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

In fact, *no* statement at all. And Polgar herself accepting Xie Jun
as champion, which is in some ways even better than the clear FIDE
win scenario I outlined - which would have been having some
arbitrator say it.


, 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.

You obviously have zero grasp of tort litigation. Settling for expediency
happens all the time. Your "logic" would have a $1 win as a Polgar victory.


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.


They didn't have to pay it. They agreed to pay it in return for something.

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.

You forget that Polgar was suing for the title. Losing *that*
would have been a loss for FIDE. Instead their procedures
were upheld in return for a small sum. I will grant that the
$25000 settlement does suggest something less than 100%
perfect behavior on FIDE's point, something I've never
claimed. FIDE apparently didn't do a very good job of arranging
match conditions, though in fairness to FIDE this was made more
difficult because Polgar herself did not want to play the match, and
Polgar's federation was also not supportive of her. But even given
those factors, FIDE may not have done everything that they possibly
could have been expected to. Hence, they settled for something
slightly less than the clear FIDE win.

Be aware also that the title simply wasn't worth much.
skipped

In fact, it wasn't worth much *to Polgar*, which is why she avoided
playing. Polgar no doubt felt that she had little to gain by playing
Xie Jun. She'd already been champion, she was hoping to hit the
jackpot by playing Judit, and she'd been a well-known chess personality
her whole life. However, those factors *don't* apply to other woman
players. A ~$100,000 purse and a chance to prevail in a FIDE sanctioned
cycle was worth something.


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.

According to several reports, Polgar *sued* for it. Obviously FIDE could
have restored the title in a settlement. But Polgar's case wasn't strong
enough.


Susan Polgar continues to play the CAS result as a minimal win but as


That's what it was. Polgar had moved on with her life and was not
interested in competitive chess at the time. She tried to keep her
title with away-from-the-board maneuverings. She failed.

The real winner was Xie Jun and other women chessplayers who were
contending later cycles. Through no fault of her own, Xie Jun
was seeing her title devalued by Polgar. FIDE did the right thing
to settle with expediency - not because Polgar deserved anything,
but becaues Xie Jun and other woman players did.

"Paul Rubin" wrote in message
...


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.


Nice theory. Now for the facts. Here is what she says on her website:


"When Polgar refused to play under these conditions, FIDE illegally stripped her
of her title. Polgar sued in the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne,
Switzerland, for monetary damages and the restoration of her title. In March of
2001 the court ruled in favor of Polgar, ordering FIDE to pay Polgar $25,000 in
damages. However, since a new World Champion was crowned, FIDE could not restore
her title."

This is factually inaccurate in several respects.

1. There has been no finding of illegality on FIDE's part.

2. The court did not rule in favor of Polgar, or at all. There was a settlement.

3. Her last line suggests that the court wanted to restore her title, but
somehow couldn't. In fact,
Mrs. Polgar voluntarily withdrew her claim to the title, "without prejudice to
either party's contentions as
to the merits of the dispute between them."

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.

A more accurate description is that she's good at spin - good enough to
dupe naive folks like you - and takes a rather lax approach
to factual accuracy.

Curiously she doesn't bring up the following from FIDE's statement at
the time she was defaulted:

"FIDE have concluded that Zsuzsa Polgar wants to play her sister Judit Polgar
(as
she has stated a number of times) and that the dispute has been essentially
engineered.

There was a specific proposal in Elista from their parents asking FIDE to
replace the official challenger in the final with Judit and this, was rejected
by the General Assembly."

This hardly paints the picture of one wronged by FIDE's process, but rather
as one who wanted to cash in on the FIDE title while undermining the
FIDE process. I don't hold it against her (she certainly has no duty to
support FIDE's system) but she should be honest about it.

Honhest Sam gets it going, and The Delegate obligingly reduces it:

These were official FIDE World Championships. You may argue that these
titles may not be as prestigious as the Classical World Championship.
That is your right. But they are still FIDE World Championship titles.


They were minor events. Susan's claim is misleading and false.

That is a minor opinion. I would say winning any age-delimited /world event/
is not minor. Delegate Johnson and Honest Sam Sloan are reduced to not
disagreeing with the statement 'they are still FIDE World Championship
titles", but reducing the merit of the achievement, (in their own opinion).

GENDER CALLING

Some time ago I talked with Sir George Trevelyan and Sir Laurens van der
Post on the subject of the treatment of PM Thatcher. They both agreed that
as a politician she was certainly not above criticism, but rather more
effective than anyone else had been for 10 years, but the level of insult
offered her would never be proferred to a man.

Here we have the views of just a few people, 2 or 3 of them, who want their
/opinion/ to be 'fact' and together have posted some 30 times on this
subject in the past 4 days.

COMPARED WITH WHOM?

They would never do this to a man! If they wanted to argue what was really
worthy of world champion status then they could take Perfidious Fide's world
championship where Khalifman played how many games to gain the title?

Was it 9?

Now, you could call that a W Ch, and offically it was - but not the /same/ W
Ch as Fischer won - I seem to remember him going through world class players
and with scores of 6-0, just as the pre-amble to the big sit down in
Iceland. Is that a fair comparison?

FREE TO WHAT?

Its one thing to talk about free speech - quite another to talk about
responsible or honest speech. In fact, what is decent legal honest and
truthful speech.

While the folks above who assert their opinions as the only viable facts we
should consider, have a rather fixated subject - in this case, a particular
woman who for both of them was a political opponent in the recent election,
and who was always a threat to the status quo of US chess complacency - the
gender issue must also be considered too...

How topical it is these days in US chess to example women in opinion of what
is good or bad - and ironically to cite Fide's standard as the measure!

LADY MACBETH MADE HIM DO IT

I suspect for both the writers above there is a greater animus present in
them; one has no use for women at all, and the other rather regrets that
/he/ is not wearing those [horrible!!] ties ; )))

Phil Innes



ECJ

On Sep 16, 8:03 am, "Chess One" wrote:
Honhest Sam gets it going, and The Delegate obligingly reduces it:

These were official FIDE World Championships. You may argue that these
titles may not be as prestigious as the Classical World Championship.
That is your right. But they are still FIDE World Championship titles.

They were minor events. Susan's claim is misleading and false.

That is a minor opinion. I would say winning any age-delimited /world event/
is not minor. Delegate Johnson and Honest Sam Sloan are reduced to not
disagreeing with the statement 'they are still FIDE World Championship
titles", but reducing the merit of the achievement, (in their own opinion).

GENDER CALLING


Phil ("Nearly an IM") Innes misses or ignores the point. The point is
that there is no record of these events. Inside Chess covered the
Melody Amber tournaments. There is no mention in Inside Chess of these
events. Mark Crowther in "The Week in Chess" also covered all the
Melody Amber tournaments. He too fails to mention these events.

All official FIDE championships are listed in the FIDE Handbook and
these events are not listed. FIDE does not recognize these as world
championships. None of the games were rated by FIDE. None of the games
appear in the databases.

The events did take place because I remember reading something about
them somewhere but nobody regarded them as World Championships other
than Susan Polgar of course.

The Melody Amber tournaments are fun-type completely unofficial
events. In order for these events to be regarded as world
championships there would have to be a qualification system to insure
that the best players had a chance to compete. Did Chiburdanidze,
Gaprindashvili, Ioseliani, Galliamova, Xie Jun, Cramling and the other
top women players in the world compete in these events? I doubt that
any of them played because if they had played the results would have
been recorded and the games would be in the databases.

The only other strong players in the two events that Susan won were
her sisters Judit and Sofia who finished second in each. Nobody can
seriously consider them to be world championships.

Also, there is the issue of one of the four "Women's World
Championships" that Susan Polgar claims she won turns out to be the
unofficial World Championship for Girls Under-16. How can anybody
claim that winning that event is winning the Woman's World
Championship?

If anybody can find any record of the cross table of the two Melody
Amber tournaments that Susan won, please let me know. I have just
spent over an hour searching for them and I cannot find them anywhere,
but I know that they exist.

Sam Sloan

On Sep 16, 7:03 am, "Chess One" wrote:
Honhest Sam gets it going, and The Delegate obligingly reduces it:

These were official FIDE World Championships. You may argue that these
titles may not be as prestigious as the Classical World Championship.
That is your right. But they are still FIDE World Championship titles.

They were minor events. Susan's claim is misleading and false.

That is a minor opinion. I would say winning any age-delimited /world event/
is not minor. Delegate Johnson and Honest Sam Sloan are reduced to not
disagreeing with the statement 'they are still FIDE World Championship
titles", but reducing the merit of the achievement, (in their own opinion).

"I work with Susan Polgar." - Phil Innes, April 3, 2005

GENDER CALLING

Some time ago I talked with Sir George Trevelyan and Sir Laurens van der
Post ...

Both gentleman have been dead for nearly 11 years.

Snip remaining Innes puffery and shilling for Trollgar.

This appeared in the Fide Yahoo group under the title; free speech, etc. Its
a good illustration of what's wrong with free speech alone, since I try to
illustrate that what is free is of no necessary merit if it ain't coupled
with what is responsible speech. In short; is the motive clear what the
issue is being raised? Consistently with Sam Sloan over the past 18 months I
can't think he is raising any issue in order to fix it, but has other
motive. I was disappointed with his board tenure, thereby. Phil Innes

Just in case anyone here is still interested, would the phrase 'won
4 world
titles' offend anyone?

Phil Innes

If she said that, I do not think that anybody would object.

**perhaps you could make this a suggestion, therefore, rather than a plaint?

However, what actually happens is she allows others to say in her
presence that she "Won the Woman's World Championship four times".

**well, if you are disposed to only complain, and repeat what you don't
like, then aren't you promoting the very thing you disagree with? Again,
simple re-phrasing does the trick, i.e.: "won four woman's world titles,
[including world championship]."

That statement is clearly not true. It appears on the TV video about
her "Make Me a Genius", in the speech by the President of Texas Tech
University just prior to her commencement speech, on the USCF website,
on several recent television shows about her and many other places.

I wonder what these broadcasters will think when they find out that
this statement is a lie.

**When the media people got after my resume of this and that, i declared i
used to be an alpine climber, but the way it was represented was as if i had
soloed Everest without oxygen in midwinter. media hype everything up, often
over-dramatising material - another example is the nonsense appearing on the
back of book jackets over which the poor author has no control.

**it's one thing to observe what may be likely to cause misunderstanding,
but alone that does nothing to /resolve/ the issue - after a year on the
board, isn't that clear to you, Sam Sloan - a person who raised hundreds of
issues, but didn't resolve any of them? your own motives, you see, are
rather suspect here, preferring to champion truth by exposing perceived
faults of others, rather than remedy them by working /with/ others.

**If it seems like a real wish to resolve something, rather than utilise it
to grandstand personal heroics, then your questions would have greater
chance of being taken seriously, rather than as would-be interrogator to no
clear result.

Phil Innes
-----

Sam Sloan