Author: Ed Schröder
Date: 18:11:45 10/11/02
The Dubious Qualifier How Fritz "earned" the right to play the Million Dollar Challenge As Vladimir Kramnik does battle with Fritz in the battle of Bahrain, scheduled for an October 2002 start, many will no doubt be interested in how this match came about, and how the participants were chosen. The Human representative, Kramnik, was automatically invited by virtue of his holding the traditional World Champion title, which he earned by defeating Kasparov in their 2000 match, where I participated as arbiter. As soon as the BGN World Championship match between Kasparov and Kramnik had concluded, Ray Keene asked me to begin working on the Man vs. Machine Million Dollar Challenge (as it was then called, at my suggestion). It wasn’t until the end of March, however, that the organization of the qualification and final match got down to details. The qualifying event turned out to be quite a controversial affair. I felt to withdraw as arbiter for reasons which will be presented in Part One of this document. That did not affect my status as arbiter of the final, and I developed a full set of rules for the match, in cooperation with both Team Fritz and Team Kramnik. That will be covered in Part Two. However, events of September 11, 2001 forced a postponement of the match. During the interval, BGN sold the rights for the match to the Einstein TV group, who hired Malcolm Pein to take on the role previously occupied by Ray Keene. I was again invited as arbiter, but my participation was vetoed by Team Fritz, as will be discussed in Part Three. Part One deals with the controversial qualifying tournament held in Cadaques, Spain,. to choose a challenger for Kramnik. Because many questions have been raised about this event, I am going to refrain from presenting any prejudicial commentary, though I may do so at some time in the future. Instead, I place in the public record a large set of internal emails. I should point out that I never received any compensation for my work, and am under no obligation to keep this material from the public. It is certainly in the public interest to make this material available, and however one might judge the actions of each individual, I think that all the correspondents behaved very well. Indeed, even after I withdrew from the qualifier I remained an integral part of the team working on the big final match, so obviously we felt confident that we could all work together. It is not my intention to disparage any individuals involved. Each has made very significant contributions to chess and our disagreements over matters of policy and philosophy should not be taken as personal animosity. More at: http://www.chesscity.com/HISTORY/dubious_qualifier.htm A couple of hours reading, no joke. Ed
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