GM Shirov in 1998

The previous post on this blog, Small Projects 'On the Cover' (October 2023), identified a number of World Championship posts on my main blog that need a follow-up. The first post I'll tackle is the most recent on the list: October 1973 & 1998 'On the Cover' (October 2023). There are three topics worth developing, all involving Alexei Shirov. From the October 1998 cover introduction:-

• 'The Kasparov - Shirov World Chess Council (WCC) championship match will not take place in 1998, if indeed it takes place at all.'
• 'Beginning with next month's issue, Alexei Shirov will author a series of articles for USCF members.'
• 'Shirov will also be in the country in time to participate in the FIDE World Championship tournament, which begins November 29 and ends December 27 [1998].'

Re the Kasparov - Shirov match, I have a page, 1998-99 World Chess Council (and more) that places the match in context. See the section titled, 'The WCC loses its sponsors'.

Re the Shirov articles, I found five in a column titled 'Shirov's Inferno' which appeared irregularly. The first article was in the November 1998 issue of Chess Life (CL), the last in August 1999. In February and March 1999, Shirov wrote a two part article, 'Consolation Match', that discussed the collapse of the Kasparov match and a replacement match with GM Zybnek Hracek. [NB: The page 9899GKIX should explain the connection between the two matches.] See also World Championship Columnists (December 2022, main blog): 'Back in the mid-1990s, both Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov -- bitter rivals at the time -- wrote separate columns for the USCF's Chess Life (CL)'

Re the 1998 FIDE World Championship tournament, the October 1998 issue of CL carried the following advertisement. It echoes that issue's 'On the Cover' introduction.

The postponement of the tournament until 1999 (to be discussed in next month's November 1973 & 1998 'On the Cover') had a negative impact on a possible reset of relations between FIDE and Kasparov. From my page on the '1998-99 World Chess Council':-

In December [1998], FIDE Secretary Emmanuel Omuku verbally rejected Kok's offer to finance the match between Kasparov and a FIDE champion. The FIDE championship in Las Vegas had been cancelled, reportedly due to contract difficulties with Karpov, so the FIDE decision may have been due more to the lack of a player than to any fundamental opposition to the idea. Some observers suspected that the collapse of the Russian economy in August may have been a factor in FIDE's cancellation of the event. The cancellation meant that there was little world class chess in December, as most other events had been pushed off the calendar.

Unfortunately, the USchess.org URL mentioned in the CL ad is not available via Archive.org. To explore what is available from the USchess site around the same time, see Archive.org on 1998 USchess.org. For more about GM Shirov's U.S. activities in 1998, see Shirov's SmartChess Videos (December 2022).