I was kind of hoping that this would all get resolved without requiring a post, but the course of true Chess never did run smooth.

Famed Chess player Anatoly Karpov is challenging the current president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov for the FIDE presidency. Gary Kasparov took some time out from his Russian politicking to lend support, as did current number one ranked player Magnus Carlsen. So far so good.

Except that on Friday, the Russian Chess Federation voted to support Anatoly for the presidency, and that vote was immediately challenged as illegitimate and underhanded, for earlier, the RCF’s chairman Arkady Dvorkovich declared Kirsan to be the RCF’s candidate for the presidency. Arkady was not present at the vote, as he was at his own meeting about the same subject.

To make matters more interesting, Kirsan claims that he was once abducted by yellow-robed human-like extraterrestrials who took him aboard their interplanetary spacecraft, has been known to associate with dictators like Muammar el-Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein, and has been associated with human-rights violations in his job as president of Kalmykia, a small Russian republic. (source)