Florencio "Campo" Campomanes is Mr Chess

Last Wednesday, Viswanathan Anand successfully defended his world chess title crown in a match with Vladimir Kramnik, a former world chess champion. For about two weeks, I had been following this match on the Internet, relying on relays from Chess Cafe, This Week In Chess, the Internet Chess Club and of course, reading Susan Polgar's blog and ChessBase.

I admit that it was a learning experience. When you follow a live game played at the highest levels, you learn in two ways (at least, for me, I learnt in two ways). One, doing your own (superficial) analysis of the position and seeing whether your assessment was correct. Two, reading the running commentary by the grandmasters and learning from them.

All I can say is, sometimes I was correct but most times, I was way off track. There's still a lot for me to learn.....

Florencio Campomanes, the World Chess Federation's honorary life president, was at hand to give away the prizes to both Anand and Kramnik. I'm pleasantly surprised by the endurance of this man. He's already 82 years old but his energy, dedication and love for chess remains unabated. Thank goodness that he looks fully recovered from a horrifying car accident in February 2007 which had put him into intensive care.


I first met Campo in 1974 when as a college student, I had played in the inaugural Asian team chess championship. Here's a photo of me enjoying a blitz game with him. I can't remember when this was snapped but it could be sometime in the early 1990s. You can take it from me: his appearance had hardly changed although he may be physically slower now. Every time we met, he would greet me with his incredibly thick accent: "Queh".