GM Tunc Hamarat (right) receives his 16th World Championship plate from ICCF President Josef Mrkvicka (photo by Per Söderberg)

Dear friends!

Mumbai was interesting for me and I'll just give a some points which are important for me.

All of the people were very friendly to me and I had many discussions. I was active on some important topics and it was accepted to establish a new level in the WC cycle, which means that I will probably play in another FINAL. Probably I will take part in 3 commissions (tournament, rules and marketing), so people seem to give importance to my views.

I have also some ideas regarding usage of Fischer clock but I will not give details here.

I will play 2 games against the world and the money will go to ICCF (Web server ?). At the moment we are thinking about the playing conditions.

A very interesting possibility, to play against Kramnik or Leko, was mentioned, but I don't really believe that this would be possible, because these guys can lose great image if they lose against me, but everything is possible in life. It probably depends on whether or not some organisations would give enough money for such a match. It would be interesting to demonstrate the correct chess strength-relation between CC and OTB. (I have to mention here that the best Austrian player GM Stanec (near 2600 ELO) didn't accept to play a match against me, reasoning that he had no chance!).

Another interesting proposal was a match between Oosterom and me, but this doesn't seem to be possible in the near future due to our schedules. On the other hand, I am not sure that such a match would be interesting for a large number of people.

The friends from India were very friendly and tried to do everything for us (the only exception was a very unfriendly guide of the big tour we went on, who brought us to very expensive places to get provisions and in the last day Gerhard prevented a fight between him and me (no kidding !!))

The previous and new presidents were very friendly towards me and I can say we are friends, although I feel that some really important differences exist between them, but I don't want to go into this subject because this is nothing to do with me. I mentioned it because I am not political and probably such matters are normal.

I also spoke about many critical topics with many people (for example, integration of CFC and so on) but again I will not discuss these topics here.

I also liked the very objective approach of Pedro and hope that he will be active in the future in the same way.

In short, most of the things that happened there were positive, but to stay objective there were also some topics which I found unprofessional, but again I will not go into this stuff.

I wanted to post some messages to TCCMB in Mumbai but I didn't have the password and the Internet was very slow (they use tel. lines and not a modem) so I couldn't.

In any case, best wishes and till later !

TUNC