As many of you probably know by now, Gata Kamsky of the U.S. won the World Cup this weekend by beating Alexei Shirov in a four-game match. He will thus get a chance to play Veselin Topalov in a world championship qualifier match next year. I’m excited for Kamsky, and I think it’s also good for world chess to have him apparently back at the strength he reached in the early 1990s or even better.
 I have to admit to being a little bit less excited than I would be if, say, Hikaru Nakamura or (looking way into the future) Roy Robson were to win at a similar level. The best analogy I can think of is when the Toronto Blue Jays won the baseball World Series in 1992. Baseball is not a very big sport in Canada; at the time there were only two major-league baseball teams in the country, and now they’re down to one. One comment, from someone who lived in Toronto, stuck in my mind: “So our Americans beat their Americans.” The Kamsky-Shirov match leaves me feeling a little bit the same way: “our Russian beat their Russian.”
Maybe when it comes to the chess world championship we should just put nationalities aside, and root for individuals. What do you think? Are you rooting for anyone in particular in the Anand-Kramnik match, or in the Topalov-Kamsky match? How much do you care about the chess world championship?
To get things started, I’ll submit my opinion. I care very much that chess should have a world championship, that it should be professionally organized and dependable and not subject to political whims. This is because I want chess to be on a par (or maybe even better) than other sports. I love the tradition of the world championship. But I’m not sure I care so much, on a personal level, who the winner is. I’d actually like to get away from some of the worship of world champions, which leads chess players to believe that the champions played the only games worth studying and had the only history worth recording.
Okay, your turn!
