Former World Champions in Action
Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 1:18AM
Dennis Monokroussos in Kasparov, Short, Topalov

Garry Kasparov recently played (and defeated) Maxime Vachier-Lagrave in a two-game blitz match; now he's getting ready to face off against Nigel Short on this coming Sunday, October 9. According to Mark Crowther of TWIC, it will be an 8-game blitz match with a time control of five minutes per game (per player) with a two second increment after each move.

In his heyday, one of Kasparov's best and most impressive publicity stunts involved taking on national teams simultaneously. His most impressive such achievement was a two-day match against the Israeli national team back in 1998. Gelfand wasn't playing, but the remaining players were all very strong, clustered around 2600 when that was still an elite rating. The first day Kasparov won two games and drew two, and the second day he whitewashed the Israelis for an incredible 7-1 match victory.

Now Veselin Topalov has apparently given it a whirl, but against a significantly weaker Irish squad. Alexander Baburin (the El Jefe of Chess Today) is a strong if semi-retired GM, but the other three players were IMs with day jobs. Topalov drew the match 2-2, losing to Baburin, defeating Mark Quinn and drawing Sam Collins and Alex Lopez. (There was a problem with the match relay, but the games will apparently be posted here later.) Not exactly a Kasparovian performance, but these things do take practice. It would be interesting to see if Topalov (or some other elite GM) tried to make a habit of this as Kasparov once did. (And even if they do, it's unlikely that any of them will take such events anywhere near as seriously as Kasparov did!)

Article originally appeared on The Chess Mind (http://www.thechessmind.net/).
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