Blood on the Board

By Paul Gray

Amid the noise of jostling photographers and clacking shutters, the two combatants finally squared off last Tuesday on the stage of the Savoy Theater in London. In one corner, the challenger and clear crowd favorite, a pink- cheeked, brush-cut 28-year-old and the first native-born Briton ever to contend for the world title. In the other, the defending champ, an Armenian- born egoist, 30, with killer instincts and a reputation as the best warrior of all time. At stake: competitive pride and a purse of $2.6 million.

And then, as the din gradually subsided, Nigel Short and Gary Kasparov began to push chess pieces across a board.

Meanwhile, the official World Chess Championship had opened a day earlier, with considerably less hubbub, in the small town of Zwolle, the Netherlands. There, former world champion Anatoly Karpov faced Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman for prize money of roughly $1.4 million.

What in the world of chess was going on around here? Since matches determining the best player on earth normally crop up only once every three years, the phenomenon of two such face-offs commencing during the same week left rank-and-file devotees with divided loyalties and confusion aplenty. On the one hand, the Karpov-Timman contest bore the imprimatur of FIDE (pronounced FEE-day), the Federation Internationale des Echecs, the powerful governing body that has been running world championship competitions since 1948. In the past, FIDE's authority would have been enough to convince chess fans that Karpov-Timman was the match to follow. Unfortunately, Karpov and Timman had both been eliminated by Short during the FIDE-sponsored competitions to determine who would challenge Kasparov for the championship.

So why were Kasparov and Short not playing for the FIDE world title in Zwolle? Because these two, who seem genuinely to dislike each other, had nonetheless banded together to mount an unprecedented challenge to the reigning chess establishment. When FIDE decreed last February that the Kasparov-Short match would take place in Manchester, England, for a purse of about $1.8 million, Short claimed angrily that he had not been consulted. He was unhappy with the choice of Manchester, hardly a high-profile or glamorous setting, and he didn't like the prize money either. He phoned Kasparov and said, as he recalls, "Look, why don't we play this match outside of FIDE?"

Kasparov had his own reasons for warming to the idea. His resentments against FIDE date back to the mid-1980s, when he was challenging his compatriot Karpov for the world title. After an epochal, 48-game struggle, with Kasparov surging from behind and Karpov near collapse, FIDE president Florencio Campomanes suddenly declared the contest finished "without result" and ordered it to be replayed from the start. Outraged, Kasparov decided that the monolithic Soviet chess federation, which grudgingly tolerated him while championing Karpov, had leaned on FIDE and Campomanes to salvage Karpov's title, at least for a while.

And Kasparov was not the only one who thought that the U.S.S.R., long the dominant force in world chess, dictated FIDE policies. Bobby Fischer had accused the Soviets of match rigging and clashed repeatedly with FIDE officials before and after he won the world title from Boris Spassky in 1972.

United, Kasparov and Short mounted a far more powerful counterforce to FIDE than the solitary Fischer had ever managed. They became the founding -- and only -- members of the Professional Chess Association ( P.C.A.) and began entertaining bids for their runaway world championship match. The Times of London, owned by Rupert Murdoch, rose to the bait. A 24-game competition stretching over eight full weeks and featuring Britain's first-ever contender promised reams of publicity, much of which the Times could provide. Weeks before the match started, the paper began running extensive and incessant chess coverage. London's double-decker buses sprouted ads proclaiming, THERE'S ONLY ROOM FOR ONE AT THE TOP and THE BATTLE COMMENCES SEPTEMBER 7TH. The Times's name and logo figured prominently in the 56 hours of television coverage that the commercial network Channel 4 committed to the event.

For its part, FIDE responded predictably: it expunged Kasparov and Short from its list of ranking grandmasters and decreed the Karpov-Timman match in Zwolle as the only true chess championship. No one, not even FIDE loyalists, took this claim seriously. Surreptitiously or not, chess attention centered on London.

; There, last week, the most dramatic moment occurred in the initial match, when Short ran out of time, could not make his 40th move within the required two hours and lost to Kasparov. This outcome provided some grim satisfaction to purists; one of the reforms initiated by Kasparov's and Short's P.C.A. was to condense playing time in order to make championship chess more palatable to casual spectators.

Can chess, a notoriously cerebral exercise, ever achieve the critical mass- market niche necessary to pay top players what they now think they are worth? To those who do not know the game, televised chess can seem slightly less enthralling than a test pattern. Despite all the hype, Kasparov and Short have not yet filled the Savoy to its 1,030-seat capacity. As both championship matches stretch on, and the war between FIDE and the top two players escalates, chess fans may come to wonder whether they are experiencing an embarrassment of riches or merely an embarrassment.

With reporting by James Geary/Amsterdam and Barry Hillenbrand/London