There rarely was any money in it. Fischer succeeded because he was psychologically unbalanced about the role chess should play in life, preferring chess to women, sports, or anything else.

You need to bring Jesse "the Body" Ventura out of retirement to do the color commentary.

"Checkmate! I predicted it, McMahon! I predicted it! I told you Kasparov's Sicilian Defense would fail! I told you Kasparov was washed up! He won't be going home with the Beautiful Elizabeth tonight, that's for sure. . . ."

Americans will watch any darn thing if some American might win it. Heck, we even watched World Cup Soccer when the American team made it out of the preliminaries. So finding a Grand Master will have to come first. Grand Masters are so flukey that the only way to find one is to expose lots of kids to chess. As that's not going to happen, chess is dead.

(There is an argument that chess in America was killed by assimilation and meritocracy. In America, world championship chess might well require a culture of over-educated postal employees (i.e., intellectuals will nothing better to do than sit around in the parks and play chess). As we've more or less killed off underemployment for the intelligent (present company excluded), we've removed an essential support for American chess.)

What I don't get is the apocalyptic prose. Suppose there are no competitive chess players who live the USA. This would be a problem because…? We live in a world with a far greater variety of potential intellectual stimulations, it's not clear that chess even remains one of the better choices for that, much less the premier one.

Big payoffs to the winners will bring chess players out of retirement and recruit some new ones.

AOG -

'Remembrance of Things Past' is the answer to your question. You are correct though, about a greater variety of choices. Go can be a lucrative game, but fewer Americans play that than chess. Tournament-level checkers or drafts is also mentally taxing, but suufers from an even greater image problem.

Why not get our chess masters the same way we've historically gotten our Nobel Prize winning scientists, import them. Does anyone really care?

Bruce - That's how blogs have succeeded, too. Maybe Vince McMahon should supply some scantily clad women to us bloggers.

I stopped watching wrestling when they brought in the Haitian midgets. I mean, come on, that's just wrong on so many levels.

Sex and Chess. Is She a Queen or a Pawn?

VANESS REID, a 16-year-old student from Sydney, Australia, runs cross-country, plays touch football, enjoys in-line skating, swims and goes bodyboarding. She also has a cerebral side: she plays competitive chess. While Ms. Reid is clearly no novice at the game, she isn't exactly taking it by storm. ... She is not on the World Chess Federation's list of the world's 50 top female players. In fact she is ranked 47,694th among both men and women. But Ms. Reid, who has auburn hair, light-blue eyes and a winning smile, is arguably the top player in the world based on a more subjective criterion: her looks. A Web site called World Chess Beauty Contest ranks her as the world's most beautiful woman in the game.

The site was started earlier this year by Vladislav Tkachiev, 32, a Kazakh grandmaster who is ranked 83rd in the world, and his brother, Eugeny, 39. The younger Mr. Tkachiev, who appears in photos to be well-built and boyish looking, said they had started the site to raise the profile of the game. "Chess desperately needs some glamour," Mr. Tkachiev said. The brothers are not the only ones trying to inject some glamour, or at least sex appeal, into the game. Alexandra Kosteniuk, 21, a dark-haired, porcelain-skinned Russian grandmaster who is ranked fifth in the world among women and 525th over all, models and uses her Web site to sell photos of herself posing in bikinis next to giant chess pieces.

I don't know if this is o/t, but I remember a female cellist who played in the nude. That was before the internet, so I don't know how successful she was in promoting cello playing.

topless:

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/reviews/moore/moore6-12-00.asp

What, Gary Kasparov isn't an American citizen yet?

Xtreme Chess for Xbox 360.

"What, Gary Kasparov isn't an American citizen yet?"

I think he wants to go back to Russia and run against Putin.

the thing is, midgets make excellent pawns. now if i can just get elton to sign the damn contracts for him to be the black queen we can get this shebang on the road.