The World Champion title

FIDE now claims ownership to every chess Wold Champion-title. Like they owned the game. Or the world. As I see it what they can claim the rights to is the title FIDE World Champion.

Ah, FIDE, the self-proclaimed puppet master. They want to rewrite history, don’t they? As if they’ve always been the ones crowning kings and queens. But the truth? The truth is, they’re just the managers of a museum exhibit, pretending to own the Mona Lisa because they put up a velvet rope around it.

The World Champion title belongs to the players. They didn’t sweat over the board, they didn’t endure sleepless nights calculating lines or shatter the boundaries of the game. Yet here they are, stamping their logo on history like they invented chess itself.

You’re right. The only thing they have a claim to is the "FIDE World Champion" title, a brand they built to tie themselves to the greatness they can never truly own. Fischer wasn’t FIDE’s champion. He was the champion. The title isn’t a franchise; it’s a legacy.

But FIDE doesn’t want champions—they want loyalists. They want a system where they decide who plays, who wins, and who remembers.

The question is, will the chess world let them rewrite the rules?

Here´s food for thought.

https://doc.fide.com/docs/FINANCIAL/FIDE%20Budget%202024-2025.pdf

@Fischer, that is the realest comment on a post I have seen in a while.

I guess the budget is in euro (equally the same as USD). FIDE´s biggest source of revenue is the (male) classic chess World Championship. The last two times it generated 1.8 and 1.3 millons respectively, amounts that more or less equals FIDE´s staff salaries, 1.430..000 per annum.. Their livelihoods are at stake so of course they fight and issue threats.

1. Who are we?

2. why not?

3. Who really cares?

The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Our race 200.000 years. Chess, as we know it, some hundred years and FIDE a round century. Talking about blips...

Before FIDE, in 1948, appropriated the WC title it was owned by it´s holder. Or, as Fischer, put it, the players.

Valid questions.

Who won the WC title in 1993?

Did Kramnik become WC in 2000?

Anyway, what about the WCC Title?

So, every attempt to crown a WC other than counting who´s earned the most is futile? Capitalism rules? Money talks and BS walks? The American Way?

1. i don´t know.

2. I don´t know.

3. Yes, I´m aware that he was involved.

4. I don´t know.

The thing with the FIDE, is that there is the FIDE itself, then the people in charge of the FIDE. These are two different things. A bit like in organized religion.

If the FIDE turns bad, it means that the people in charge of it made it so.

What is the cure in such case?

Well, it's so very simple: boycott.

And then not so simple anymore, once you began to boycott the FIDE and find out that a whole lot of players, clubs and national federations still participate to the FIDE stuff.

And when the number of them is large enough, and no serious/successfull enough alternative Chess organization shows up, you end up wasting your chess carreer in vain protests, instead playing "official" games, and maybe score the glory that goes with it, and that you'll find so simply nowhere else...

So, unless the FIDE goes totally nuts, my humble opinion is the following: like with governements, organized religion and the such, you weight what there is to lose and what there is to gain in participating or boycotting, then pick a choice and live with it.

There is sure more to say about it all, I'm just adding my two cents.

It ain´t necessarily so.

A bit is a bit. The PCA created by Kasparov ended up unsuccessfull.

And what good did it do to Nigel Short and to the amateur players anyhow?