Knights & Knaves

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Quick, name this sport: rival world champions, a shady multimillionaire commissioner, drug testing, boycotts and shapely young women parading around in skimpy costumes.

If you said professional wrestling, you get partial credit. The correct answer, of course, is chess. The governing body of world chess, led by its eccentric president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, has launched an all-out campaign to remake this most elevated of intellectual exercises into a fast-paced, high-stakes spectacle suitable for prime-time television. In the process, Ilyumzhinov is either rescuing chess or dragging it down to the level of Tonya Harding vs. Paula Jones, depending on your point of view. In the highly political, deeply petty world of top-rung chess, nothing is black and white.

The story of Ilyumzhinov's rise to power reads like a James Bond movie scripted by Vladimir Nabokov. Like many other chess players, Ilyumzhinov was a prodigy. At 9 he was the chess champion of his native Kalmykia, a tiny, impoverished Russian republic populated by the descendants of Genghis Khan. But his talents went beyond pushing pawns. In his 20s he made millions running a string of banks in the early wildcat years of post-Soviet Russian capitalism. At the tender age of 31 the dapper Ilyumzhinov (he has a fondness for white capes and vintage Rolls-Royces) was elected President of Kalmykia. His regime has been dogged by allegations ranging from electoral irregularities and embezzlement of federal funds (an investigation has been launched but no charges filed) to the 1998 murder of the crusading editor of an opposition newspaper (one of his former aides was convicted of the crime).

In 1995 Ilyumzhinov took over the presidency of the venerable Federation Internationale des Echecs, FIDE for short, which curates the rules of chess and tabulates the world rankings. He immediately set out to reshape the sport in his own image. In an attempt to make chess more sponsor friendly, he compressed the traditional two-year championship schedule into a more dramatic three-week tournament. He sweetened the pot with liberal infusions of cash from his deep pockets and sped up the game clock, discarding the time-honored classical chess format, in which players spend hours elaborating intricate moves, in favor of rapid chess, an adrenalized variant in which each game lasts just 50 minutes. "Chess had to be commercialized. Investment had to be brought in," Ilyumzhinov insists. That must be what he had in mind when he staged the 1999 world championships at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Ilyumzhinov also launched a campaign to make chess an Olympic sport, a process that will involve, as per International Olympic Committee regulations, mandatory drug testing. In Kalmykia's capital city of Elista, he erected a $30 million chess coliseum called Chess City, a bizarre extravagance in a place where hot water is still a luxury. Last spring he staged a fashion show featuring flirty chess uniforms modeled by Alexandra Kosteniuk, a curvaceous grandmaster who may be the chess world's answer to Anna Kournikova. Kosteniuk then proceeded to play eight simultaneous matches. On Rollerblades.