World Chess Council

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The World Chess Council (WCC) was a short-lived international sports association in the field of chess , which competed with the official world chess federation FIDE .

The founding of the WCC was announced in April 1998 during the opening ceremony of the Linares international chess tournament by the then reigning classic chess world champion Garri Kasparov and the Spanish chess patron and tournament organizer Luis Rentero . As a successor to the Professional Chess Association (PCA), which was also founded by Garry Kasparov in 1993 and dissolved in 1996, the WCC was to take over the further organization of the world championships that had previously been held by the PCA in competition with FIDE in London in 1993 and in New York in 1995 . Garry Kasparov as the title holder of the PCA was there, unlike the winners of the FIDE World Championships held during this period , in personal continuity with the chess world champions before his disqualification by FIDE as a result of the split into two competing associations. Luis Rentero took over the chairmanship of the WCC.

The WCC published its own world rankings during its existence and organized a candidate competition between Vladimir Kramnik and Alexei Schirow , which took place from May 24th to June 5th, 1998 in the Spanish city of Cazorla and was won by Alexei Shirov. The world championship fight planned for October / November of the same year in Seville between defending champion Garri Kasparow and challenger Alexei Schirow was canceled at short notice because the financing of the competition agreed between Luis Rentero and the Ministry of Tourism and Sport of the Andalusian regional government did not materialize. The activities of the WCC came to a standstill a short time later after Luis Rentero withdrew from his chess activities for several years after a serious car accident at the end of November 1998 and a subsequent long hospital stay.

After the end of the WCC, Garry Kasparov joined a world championship fight against Vladimir Kramnik , financed by the Braingames company, two years later , in which he surprisingly lost his title to the challenger. Vladimir Kramnik defended the title in September / October 2004 against Péter Lékó and in 2006 also won the unification competition against the reigning FIDE world champion Wesselin Topalow , which ended the split in the world chess championship.

literature

  • André Schulz: The big book of the World Chess Championships. New in Chess, Alkmaar 2015, ISBN 978-90-5691-637-4 , pp. 264/265.