The sports commissioner with the chess champion

The New York City Sports Commissioner Kenneth J. Podziba has announced that New York City will host a world-class chess championship between the world’s #1 ranked chess player, Garry Kasparov, and computer chess champion, X3D Fritz. This battle of “Man vs. Machine” will be the first sanctioned virtual reality chess championship and is scheduled to take place at the New York Athletic Club November 11-18, 2003.

Full text of the press release

During the previous Man vs Machine event Ken Podziba took time off to get acquainted with the Internet coverage of the event. The Sports Commissioner is getting quite involved in chess, as you can see by his support of the US Women's Olympic team.

Word about the New York match is certainly out. We discover that a Google search for "X3D Fritz" retrieves 6,650 stories worldwide (this may have increased by the time you click the above link). If you have a few days free, and knowledge of some of the world's major languages, you may want to browse through some of the articles. What they show is a gigantic world-wide awareness of the upcoming event. Together with the live TV programs (including 17 hours on ESPN) and live Internet coverage on major portals (like AOL) this could become the most widely followed chess event in history. The sponsor X3D Technologies certainly expects no less.

Here are some ChessBase reports on the match