Just Write

You might’ve never heard of Veselin Topalov, but he dom­i­nated the field of eight of the best chess play­ers in the world at the FIDE World Chess Cham­pi­onship.

The term “World Chess Cham­pion” is …, well, it’s complicated. As if the Chess world has been “split-root” for years, sev­eral dif­fer­ent peo­ple have claims to the title, includ­ing Topalov from Bul­garia and also Vladimir Kram­nik of Rus­sia (for defeat­ing Garry Kas­parov way back in 200). Neither is the high­est rated player, with the top two spots being held by Kas­parov from Rus­sia and Viswanathan (every­one calls him “Vishy”) Anand from India.

Speak­ing of Kas­parov, he retired from pro­fes­sional chess in March of 2005 to pur­sue a career in Russ­ian politics. Since then, the media seemed to lose any inter­est in chess, and he’s still the only chess player whose name most peo­ple would recognize.

How­ever, the realm of world-class chess com­pe­ti­tion has become more inter­est­ing, not less. For cov­er­age, the Chess­base site is the best. New arti­cles appear at least once each week­day, and the jour­nal­ism is well-written and com­plete (though they do post an occa­sional “arti­cle” when they release a new product).

Back to the World Cham­pi­onship, which took place in San Luis, Argentina at the Hotel Potrero de los Funes, from Sep­tem­ber 27 to Octo­ber 16, 2005.

Early favorites were Anand, Topalov, and Peter Leko of Hun­gary, and the spec­u­la­tion as to who would win were ripe.

Dur­ing the actual tour­na­ment, com­men­tary was pro­vided by Nigel Short of Eng­land, from Round 1 to Round 14. Let’s just say his com­ments are saucy, or per­haps just tart, at least for your aver­age grandmaster.