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United, Kasparov and Short mounted a far more powerful counterforce to FIDE than the solitary Fischer had ever managed. They became the founding -- and only -- members of the Professional Chess Association ( P.C.A.) and began entertaining bids for their runaway world championship match. The Times of London, owned by Rupert Murdoch, rose to the bait. A 24-game competition stretching over eight full weeks and featuring Britain's first-ever contender promised reams of publicity, much of which the Times could provide. Weeks before the match started, the paper began running extensive and incessant chess coverage. London's double-decker buses sprouted ads proclaiming, THERE'S ONLY ROOM FOR ONE AT THE TOP and THE BATTLE COMMENCES SEPTEMBER 7TH. The Times's name and logo figured prominently in the 56 hours of television coverage that the commercial network Channel 4 committed to the event.
For its part, FIDE responded predictably: it expunged Kasparov and Short from its list of ranking grandmasters and decreed the Karpov-Timman match in Zwolle as the only true chess championship. No one, not even FIDE loyalists, took this claim seriously. Surreptitiously or not, chess attention centered on London.
; There, last week, the most dramatic moment occurred in the initial match, when Short ran out of time, could not make his 40th move within the required two hours and lost to Kasparov. This outcome provided some grim satisfaction to purists; one of the reforms initiated by Kasparov's and Short's P.C.A. was to condense playing time in order to make championship chess more palatable to casual spectators.
Can chess, a notoriously cerebral exercise, ever achieve the critical mass- market niche necessary to pay top players what they now think they are worth? To those who do not know the game, televised chess can seem slightly less enthralling than a test pattern. Despite all the hype, Kasparov and Short have not yet filled the Savoy to its 1,030-seat capacity. As both championship matches stretch on, and the war between FIDE and the top two players escalates, chess fans may come to wonder whether they are experiencing an embarrassment of riches or merely an embarrassment.