Deep in the perfume mines of Ulhumbria, sweating miners labour in tropical heat to extract precious olfactory essences, nasally pleasing to man and woman alike, from the recalcitrant earth. Even the perspiration shed by these miners, perfumed by contact with mysterious molecules, is prized by the natives. The mine owner, Don Edificio Della Septum, is firm but fair, with the finest nose in the Southern Cone. When a Yanqui Corporation attempted to buy him out, he demurred graciously, ignoring their initial entreaties. When they grew more brash in their unseemly lust for profit, Don Edificio wrote:

<Yes I wonder if <Eyal> is going to watch the match? I wonder if he will ever come back here>

Yes well I already repeated a joke I made 1,000 times in here so I figured this time I'd go with the "Implied vintage Kraba."

As a literary scholar, of course, you'll recognize this trope.

<BANANA v ELEPHANT 2012> You know how easily ELEPHANT could stomp off with the crown here eh? BANANA seems a little nervous, he'd better start playing like "The Tiger of Madras" or it all might slip away.

Nobody wants to see every page of this website clogged for the next two years about how the World Champion shouldn't be champion.

On the other hand, an ELEPHANT victory here would be less of a shock than a <Schlechter> victory over <Lasker>, which almost happened by a heart beat.

Well, at least if Gelfand wins the match and then keeps playing unimpressively in tournaments, it will be obvious that it's because he's hiding preparation for the next match...

Anyway, I'm rooting for him even though he has the charisma of a radish and I'm not rating his chances very highly. But if the match goes into tiebreaks, I don't think his chances are as bad as a lot of people around here seem to assume. When you look at the world cup and the candidates tournament together, you see that in order to get to this match he won ten matches overall and five of them on tiebreaks; in the last of these, against Kamsky, he even managed to win in a must-win situation with Black after loosing with White. So he has proved that he's extremely strong in these situations.

Btw, I knew that he is extremely driven and focused, but I didn't realize just how much until I read an article that was published in the Israeli press a couple of months ago, containing quite a lot of information about his childhood and youth. Seems like from about the age of four he knows exactly what he's going to do in order to get to where he is today - during the next two hours, two weeks, two months... Nine o'clock eat an egg for breakfast; ten o'clock take a walk for physical fitness; twelve o'clock have a session with seconds; May 11 play 3...d5.

http://www.calcalist.co.il/local/ar...

(I suppose your Hebrew isn't fluent enough to read this, but there are some nice pictures of him as a child, and also of a stack of albums which are part of the 60 albums compiled over the years by his father to document every aspect of his life and career - rather touching)

As for the secret "2 game clause", according to <Schlechter> biographer <Warren Goldman>, there's no evidence to support this claim:

"Unfortunately, conditions governing the truncated contest were never published so far as the author has been able to determine. The researcher looks in vain for either a one-or two-point clause..."

<Carl Schlechter>
Warren Goldman
Caissa, 1994
p. 400

However, <Lasker> certainly had a 2 game win clause in previously published conditions for a match in 1908, a match that didn't happen of course.

The day before the final game, Lasker told reporters that if, as it appeared, Schlechter wins the match, then a good man will have become champion. Everyone including Lasker assumed that all Schlechter had to do was draw the final game. So I'm pretty sure from this that he only needed to win by one point.

But Schlechter was an incurable romantic. He felt bad for Lasker that he would lose the championship for one blunder in 10 games. So he played for a win.

Not so! In fact I purchased, and read, <Schlechter's> very fine biography due to your spirited defence of <Carl> after I referred to him as a positional draw meister.

<Warren Goldman's> 1994 biography on Carl is on the chess historian's "A list" due to his comprehensive research and academic rigor. Every single factual claim and anecdote about Carl is footnoted to a primary source. There are only a handful of actual history books on chess masters like this.

I will indeed make a film about Carl, but it might take five years to do it, given that I can't do everyone at once.