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Players unhappy with latest pairings for World Chess Championship

FIDE has released the final pairings for round one of FIDE Chess Championships to be played in Las Vegas from July 31st 1999.

The reparing was necessary to fill-in the four spots created due to the withdrawl of Karpov, Zsuzsa Polgar, Velimirovic and Morozevich who didn't sign the undertaking for participation in the 1999 World Chess Championship. They where replaced by Andersson, Milov, Lautier and Dreev out of which Dreev and Milov have been directly substituted in the second round, while Andersson and Lautier will play in the round one.

But the repairing has not gone well among the players and Michal Krasenkow has already protested about the repairings, which has directly substituted the missing players for new ones including those in the second round.

In a letter to FIDE he said, "Those reserve players (Dreev, Andersson etc.) were lower rated than Fedorov and myself, the highest rated players due to start from Round 1, in the rating list of January, 1999, applied for the 1999 World Championship, according to the Regulations approved by the 1998 General Assembly and 1999 Presidential Board (articles 14.1 and 14.3). As the decision taken seriously violates my rights, I strongly protest against it. I demand that FIDE should obey its own regulations and allow me to the second round of the Championship, according to article 14.3 of the Regulations. In the other case we reserve the right to take legal measures against FIDE."

Even Sergey Tiviakov has come out in Krasenkow's support and agrees with him that both Dreev and Milov, who were reserve players, should not start the World Championship from the second round, when there are a lot of players whose January 1999 rating is higher than rating of both Dreev and Milov.

According to Tiviakov, not only Fedorov and Krasenkow should replace Dreev and Milov to begin from the second round, but even the whole pairing for all the participants of the World Championship should be changed.

Both Krasenkow and Tiviakov agrees that the decision of FIDE affects not only those two players, but also the others taking part in the Championship. They say FIDE shouldn't have included Karpov and Morozevich into the preliminary pairing without receiving their undertaking signed and in turn avoided such a controversy.

But one would understand FIDE's point who obviously wanted to make the minimum changes so that most players would not have to change their preparation for individual players they have already been drawn against.

Agencies