Confused about the world chess championship?

Me too. Here’s the short version.

In 1993, Kasparov broke from FIDE and participated in title matches outside the umbrella of that organization, defending his title against Short (1993) and Anand (1995) before losing it to Kramnik (2000).

Meanwhile, FIDE had Karpov and Timman (two of the runners-up from the candidates' cycle won by Short - Yusupov was left out) play a match, which Karpov won. Karpov then defended his title in matches against Kamsky (1996) and Anand (1998). FIDE then completely changed the format of its world championship cycle, and Karpov resigned his title in protest and unsuccessfully sued to stop the changes. Since then, the title has been held by Khalifman (1999), Anand (2000), Ponomariov (2002) and Kasimdzhanov (2004).

But a plan for unifying the two titles was crafted in 2002. It read in part, “The Dortmund [2002 Challenger’s Tournament] winner will play the Classical World Chess Champion Vladimir Kramnik and the present FIDE World Champion Ruslan Ponomariov will play Garry Kasparov, the current World's number one rated player. The two match winners will play a reunification Classical Chess World Championship match in October/November 2003.”

Obviously the dates are all fubar at this point, and Ponomariov is not even the FIDE champion anymore. But the ball is rolling on this. The first step is the Kramnik-Leko (Leko won Dortmund) 14-game match taking place right now in Switzerland.

There is no date scheduled for the Kasparov-Kasimdzhanov match yet.

This discussion of the world championship reminds me to bring up this site I found recently. It rocks; it has all world championship games in PGN format back to Labourdonnais-MacDonnell in 1834! I strongly encourage everyone to check it out and enjoy!