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Home > Archive > Chess politics > March 2006 > USCF needs to do more to help Bessel Kok
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USCF needs to do more to help Bessel Kok
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| Sam Sloan 2006-03-18, 7:32 pm |
| USCF needs to do more to help Bessel Kok
The Election for FIDE President will be held in Torino, Italy in just
ten weeks. There are two candidates: Bessel Kok and Kirsan
Ilyumzhinov. For more than 20 years since the mid-1980s, Bessel Kok
has been the leading chess organizer in Europe. He is a wealthy and
successful businessman who backs his mega chess events with his own
millions which he earned through honest enterprise, rather than by
bleeding the impoverished masses or by under-the-table evasions of the
Oil for Food program.
Almost every major chess event held in Central Europe for the past 20
years has involved Bessel Kok. He was also the moneyman behind the
Grandmaster Association and the Professional Chess Players
Association.
In the coming election, almost every major chess playing country in
Europe has committed to vote for Bessel Kok. However, Bessel Kok still
faces a hard uphill battle, because tiny corrupt dictatorships around
the world are expected to vote for the incumbent, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.
Kirsan is expected to get the vote of many of the African, Arab and
Asian delegates. The vote of South and Central America is unknown.
The USCF has made a positive move by clearly instructing the US
Delegate to vote for Bessel Kok. There cannot be a repeat of previous
incidents such as when the delegate was told to vote for Jaime Sunye
Neto but voted for Kirsan instead in exchange for a Rolex watch.
The USCF needs to do more than just vote for Kok. We need to campaign
for him too. The USCF is just one of 158 member nations of FIDE. Many
much smaller nations or even non-nations have more votes than we do.
For example, the Islands of Jersey and Guernsey have two votes. The
British and US Virgin Islands have two votes.
26 FIDE member nations have pledged to vote for Kok. Our delegate has
informed me that Bessel Kok in reality has 50 rock solid votes.
However, he still needs another 30 votes. These will be hard to get
because Kirsan has in his pocket votes from small even insignificant
countries who have given him their proxies and will not even be
attending the meetings in Torino.
A powerful weapon Kirsan has is the power to decide which votes are
valid and which are not. It sometimes happens that two different
groups show up, each claiming to represent a particular country. In
addition, countries that are behind in their dues are not supposed to
vote. Kirsan will be the one to decide which countries are up to date
in dues and which are not.
Another four years of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov will be a disaster for chess.
He has already made a joke of the most valuable asset that FIDE has,
which is the right to determine the world championship. In addition,
Kirsan is broke now. His great patron, who provided him with all the
money, is in jail at the moment. It will probably be a while before
Saddam Hussein is back in action.
The USCF needs to get on the horn and start making calls for Bessel
Kok. Even though we have only one vote, we have a lot more influence.
It may seem surprising, but many of the smaller FIDE nations will vote
for whomever the US tells them to vote for. This is because, unlike in
the US where the USCF is completely independent from the US
Government, in many other countries, the sporting associations are an
arm of the government. The delegates they send to FIDE meetings are
sometimes not chess players at all, but are government functionaries.
These political people will often want to be seen voting for or
against whomever the US votes for.
The USCF needs to send mailings to every member nation of FIDE,
explaining why they should vote for Bessel Kok. Then, our FIDE team
should get on the phone and start calling all the FIDE delegates. I
would be willing to make the calls and send the mailings myself, at my
own expense, but I need to be able to say that I am speaking on behalf
of the USCF, and not just myself.
Sam Sloan
http://www.rightmove06.com
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| Intelli Gent Design 2006-03-18, 7:32 pm |
| The United States Cycling Federation doesn't care about chess wierdos.
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| Paul Rubin 2006-03-18, 11:31 pm |
| sloan@ishipress.com (Sam Sloan) writes:
quote:
> I would be willing to make the calls and send the mailings myself,
> at my own expense, but I need to be able to say that I am speaking
> on behalf of the USCF, and not just myself.
As corrupt and incompetent an organization as the USCF is, it will
be a cold day in hell before it's stupid enough to let Sam Sloan speak
on its behalf.
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| Ray Gordon 2006-03-18, 11:31 pm |
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quote:
> The Election for FIDE President will be held in Torino, Italy
You mean TURIN?
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