Here we go again. I suppose it was inevitable after the Toiletgate incident in his World Championship loss to Vladimir Kramnik, but Veselin Topalov -- who will be participating in the 2011 Candidates Matches -- is not happy about the recent venue change from Azerbaijan to Kazan, Russia. Now it turns out that Topalov is willing to play in Russia...provided he doesn't actually have to play any Russians.
Now, for most of the history of chess, this would have been a rather problematic issue. However, only one of the candidates in the 2012 World Championship cycle is Russian. Guess who? That's right -- it's Vladimir Kramnik, who one might imagine wouldn't exactly love to play Topalov again, either. It also raises the question of whether if, say, Alexander Morozevich or another Russian were in the tournament, and Kramnik were not, Topalov would have made the same statement. To be fair, in an interview with Silvio Danialov (Topalov's infamous manager), it appeared that FIDE was the source of their frustration, not Kramnik.
There's good news and bad news even if Topalov sticks to his guns and won't play Kramnik in Russia. The good news is that -- at least according to the pairings everyone seems to expect to occur -- the only way the two would meet up would be if both reached the final of the tournament (which is a knockout format using four game matches until the final, which is a six game match), and undoubtedly, Magnus Carlsen and Levon Aronian are going to have a say in that (not to mention the rest of the field -- there are no weak players in this tournament). The bad news? Well, if that were the final, and Topalov refused to play, we can only imagine the chaos it might cause. Hopefully, we'll simply avoid that altogether rather than find out.
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