I am getting a bit tired of this talk of Topalov as a low life and what have you. We dont know the full story - I agree his manager seems a bit of a snake.

Anyway they have shook hands at the beginning of this game, hopefully there can be no more nastiness in the match and we can concentrate on the chess.

TopNotch - it is all very well these GM´s think the score is wrong but as I said they are living in a cloud cuckoo land if they think they can turn back time now - the game has already happened. I know John Cox has come on here and said different, but I am a simple man and it just makes no sense - the game has transpired already. I´m not sure Kramnik fully thought through the consequences of his sit-in but we have to all remember to put things into proportion. Topalov is not an evil low-life, Kramnik is not a saint, we are in a match and by some miracle it is going to continue now!

Willempie: It’s a problem of Topalov’s for this reason: game five is supposed to have taken place. Either it was organised according to the contract, or it wasn’t. It doesn’t matter whether Topalov thinks it was or not: if a court finds it wasn’t then the game doesn’t count contractually for the match. That would mean FIDE was in breach of its contract with Topalov to organise the game validly, but it wouldn’t mean he was entitled to say that actually it did happen validly.

[quote author=Uberdeker link=1148578544/315#328 date=1159798269][quote author=Markovich link=1148578544/315#322 date=1159797262]I am defending FIDE and the arbiters, not Topalov. [/quote]

I hope you are getting compensation as spokesman for the Kalmykian mafia. By the way, interestingly enough, the lower the low-life, the stricter the rules... 

Anyone care for discussing chess here?[/quote]

"Getting compensation as a spokesman?"  "The lower the low-life?"  Those remarks are rather pejorative, aren't they, dear chessfriend?  Besides being irrelevant?

Some blogger does say that on the link you posted, but I can’t follow him at all. The notion that the Appeals Committee can overrule a clear contractual provision which says that certain things cannot be altered just has no conceivable basis to me.

To be sure there is jurisdiction to entertain a complaint about Kramnik’s behaviour. But how one leaps from that to deciding that the AC could change the conditions of contest is quite beyond me, especially when the contract specifically says that they cannot. Are you not making the very mistake you decry – saying that you think, and you think most people would think, it was a fair, proportionate, etc, response. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t, but that’s not the point. The point is that it was something the AC were not entitled, indeed explicitly forbidden, by the rules to do, and the result was game five was never organised under the agreed conditions.

The expression ‘remedies which indeed alter some of the contract provisions’ speaks for itself to an English lawyer. Nothing (except fraud, illegality, etc) can alter the contractual provisions; all the AC can do is carry them into effect.

To be fair, if Kramnik does sue heaven knows what law it will be under, so what I or any other English lawyer would think probably doesn’t matter very much.

According to Kramnik's statement he seems to go for something like the compromise I suggested earlier today.

Quote:


i.e. Topalov will have to produce 3-0 in the following games to be able to claim the unified title without a long legal debate... Hopefully, that will never be an issue though.

Btw, on the offcial page it seems like they did shake hands before game 6 - unless it's an old photo.

I thought Topa should have tried to avoid the exchange of queens with 10. Bxd4 (instead of 10 Qxd4) if he wanted more. It looks like he needs a break today  too.

TopNotch wrote on 10/02/06 at 13:44:29:


I very much respect this view, and I uphold it myself when the law is both transparently unjust and gravely injurious; here in the U.S. we had a law that citizens of free states (states where slavery was illegal) had to do their best to help return escaped slaves to their "rightful" "owners" in slave states.  That is the kind of law, disobedience to which I can support. 

But even if I accepted that the arbiters ruling in Elista were transparently unjust, and I do not, I could not condone anyone's breaking the match over it because it is not gravely injurious.  It concerns indeed such a trivial matter that, I would say, it was irresponsible of Kramnik to threaten breaking the match over it.

Please understand that I do not say that Topalov is a good guy.  I am defending FIDE and the arbiters, not Topalov.

It does not concern me in the slightest, by the way, that my views are in a minority, since that is entirely irrelevant to their correctness.