2013 WCH Update: Norway sends complaint, Paris ready to bid

3.5.2013 - The President of the Norwegian Chess Federation, Jøran Aulin-Jansson, has sent a vigorous protest to World Chess Federation on the selection of Chennai as the host of the 2013 World Championship match between Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen. Just hours after we had received his open letter to FIDE we received word that Paris is apparently placing a €3.45 million bid.

The full story is here:

http://www.chessbase.com/Home/TabId/211/PostId/4009711/norway-sends-complaint-paris-ready-to-bid-030513.aspx

wow thx for the update...things are gonna get hot

Hoter than Chennai...

FIDE: follow your own rules, have a bidding process. 

It's also on the fide official site.

Very good.

It has been a tradition and custom in the past to have a neutral venue. Fischer Spassky in 1972 was an example.

Then again when you are Kirsan and you have intergalactic contacts maybe it should be on the moon.

Tell them they can play at my house.

good, i was getting tired of what seemed like half of india cheering chennai as a choice and ridiculing any opposition...and that didnt even cover the other sizable portion of anand fans who were happy that carlsen would have to have every inconvenience plausibly possible....

Good job on the update, NimzoRoy!

There had been complaints in these threads that the FIDE was not following their own rules in relation to the bidding process ( things could get interesting now ).

Anand is too nice for his own good . He should not have agreed to play in Bulgaria nor Russia imo , giving both his opponents home field advantage . 

That is exactly the point. Anand (who had to go by car from Frankfurt to Sofia because of that stupid volcano and was not granted an extra rest day by the Bulgarians) allowing Topalov a clear advantage does not mean that Carlsen has to make the same unfair concession.

These FIDE guys are nothing but corrupt.

I've read most things written on this subject the last days and the only conclusion I can make is that most people discussing it are too stupid to even understand what it is about.

2008: bidding won by Bonn, 2010: bidding won by Sofia, 2012: bidding won by Moscow. 2013: no bidding according to FIDE, who want to hold the match in Chennai, but if there had been it would have been won by Paris with a big margin as things stand now. The players usually accept the result of the bidding process, and for example in 2010 there was no one in India that was interested in holding the match anyway. In 2012 Gelfand said that he didn't want to play in India, so his sponsor upped the bid in the last minute (or maybe even afterwards, with FIDE you never know).

Wow. Top matches in chess are this screwed up? Venues for tennis, golf, etc. are set years in advance.

Last time around, this is how the result of the bidding process was summer up (and I pick an Indian source so no one can claim that it is biased in the wrong way):

"Higher bid and neutral ground went in favour of Moscow"

http://www.behindindia.com/behindindia-news/world-chess-championship--chennai-02.html

The article does also claim that India was given unconditional rights to hold the 2013 match, but the only thing the FIDE press release said was that they had three months after Anand-Gelfand to make a bid as first option, something that never happened. They did make a bid ten months after the match though. I'll try to find one of the many Gelfand interviews posted around then, the funny thing is that he was much more negative about the prospect of playing in India than Carlsen ever has been, but then it didn't even create a discussion.

This is maybe not one of the most negative ones, but still Gelfand makes it very clear that he doesn't want the event to be given to India:

http://whychess.com/en/node/1120

In the end Gelfand's sponsor upped his bid so India was "avoided".

So Gelfand complained about not having been personally contacted by the Indians, mistrusted that the Indians actually had the money, questioned their experience, wanted neutral ground, declared that he "of course" wanted the match to be held in Moscow instead, and thought it would be irresponsible to give the match to India. All this and similar things repeated in many interviews around then. And I don't recall if even a single person was upset. But when Carlsen's team says that Chennai well might be the best option but that they would like to see a bidding process decide it as usual and that others are ready to offer much more, what follows is endless complaints from pig ignorant people about what an idiot Carlsen is, that he should retire from chess, that he is worse than Fischer etc. :-)

... also not Carlsen's fault, nor should he be punished for it either...