& YOU HAVE TO GO SOME TO MAKE CHESS NUTTIER:

The Dictator and His Hobby: Kalmykian Leader Makes Farce of Chess Championships (Maik Grossekathöfer, 10/12/06, Der Spiegel)

He claims that he can communicate with aliens. Once, he says, he was even taken on a tour of one of their UFOs. "The extraterrestrials put me in a yellow astronaut suit and showed me their spaceship. I was on the bridge. I felt quite comfortable in their company." And who is the lucky space tourist? None other than the president of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.

The 44-year-old multimillionaire has other interests than just space aliens. In the past, he regularly consulted a Bulgarian fortune teller named Babushka Vanga. About 13 years ago, the blind psychic told him that he would be appointed leader of Kalmykia and elected president of the World Chess Federation (FIDE), would open a factory to clean the wool of Kalmykian sheep and, last but not least, would have an oil pipeline built through the Caucasian steppes.

The pipeline doesn't exist yet, but the psychic's other predictions have all come true.

Ilyumzhinov has ruled one Russia's poorest republics, a dusty strip of land bordering the Caspian Sea, home to 290,000 people, since 1993. He assumed the presidency of FIDE two years later. In 1998, he organized the Chess Olympiad in the Kalmykian capital of Elista, fulfilling yet another of Babushka's predictions -- that people would come to Elista from all over the world in that year.

This year, the focus is once again on Elista, with its population of just over 100,000. The chess world championships are underway, with Russian Vladimir Kramnik and Bulgarian Veselin Topalov battling it out for the title. Entering Thursday's 12th and final match, the two chess geniuses are tied at 5.5 points a piece -- with a pot of $1 million waiting to be split between them.

But regardless of who wins the 2006 title, President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov has dragged competitive chess into its deepest crisis ever.