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Readers Respond to Makro’s Letter

Following up on yesterday’s letter from Georgios Makropoulos, I received quite a bit of mail, most of it rational and articulate. I give two such letters below.

It is understood that the 2018 FIDE elections will be hotly disputed and will have more than its normal share of controversy and intrigue. I also hope in the coming months to have interviews with the other candidates, or atleast with several of their running mates. 

I present a letter from Riccardo from Italy.

With reference to the letter of Georgios Makropoulos within the article “2018 FIDE Election Campaign – A Letter from Makropoulos”, published yesterday on your blog, I would like to express two or three simple personal thoughts.

Even though in general terms the Makropoulos’s consideration about the fact that it is preferable (when possible) to contact the interested parties when writing a hypothesis about their resignation is correct, there’s also to say that in general terms a blogger can express his own opinion and his own prediction.

The letter of Makropoulos unfortunately convinced me, all in all, very little.

In any case, I would like to focus this my paper on a specific fact: admitted and not allowed that your blog, Mr. Spraggett, is implementing a kind of pro-Ilyumzhinov campaign in the run for the upcoming FIDE presidential election (as claimed by Makropoulos).

The point is that you are free to do so (especially when there are several valid and interesting considerations in support of this in your various articles).

What instead appears very ugly and very questionable is the type of management of the FIDE website updates by Makropoulos (or FIDE), as rightly written by Evgeny Surov (I think it was Surov) in his article (LINK) on Chess-News.ru some time ago.

And not to mention the fact of having taken away in a childish way the name and the photo of President Ilyumzhinov, after a suggestion of Malcolm Pein (as written by Chessdom, if I’m not mistaken)…

A short letter from Willy Iclicki

As you probably know me as an old FIDE member, I wish to thank you for your support to Kirsan.  There are, unfortunately, not too many journalists who are supporing the man who has donated his life and money to our game.

You may already know that I’m on his team so if you wish, you can always contact me to get the truth on the situation which is certainly not Makro’s version and vision about his chance of victory in FIDE elections.

It will be a pleasure to chat with you.