CARL PORTMAN: Check mate?

Hello Jon,

Here’s one for the blog...

As a serious chess player since I was a kid I am never surprised at the machinations at FIDE. To you and me that’s the Fédération Internationale des Échecs the governing body of the game. There’s currently a huge battle for supremacy and the FIDE Precidency. The current and possibly outgoing incumbent is a man called Kirsan Ilyumzhinov from a faraway place called Kalmyk in the USSR. A strange man indeed, and a multi-millionaire to boot. No one really knows how he got his money or even much about the man himself. Trust me, this is a major political position in the chess world – THE position in fact.

So why are you interested? Well, he has gone on record as saying that he takes his advice from meetings with yellow-suited aliens who predict future developments for him on planet earth. You knew that chess was weird, didn’t you?

Mr Ilyumzhinov, 48, the head of the south-western Russian region of Kalmykia, appeared on a Russian talk show on April 26, and went over his evening with aliens.

He said he saw a "semi-transparent half tube" spaceship on his balcony. He then entered it and met "human-like creatures in yellow spacesuits", The Moscow Times reported.

"I am often asked which language I used to talk to them. Perhaps it was on a level of the exchange of the ideas," he told the television programme host.

He had told The Guardian the aliens took him to "some kind of star".

"They put a spacesuit on me, told me many things and showed me around. They wanted to demonstrate that UFOs do exist."

His autobiography including chapter titles such as ‘without me the people are incomplete’ and ‘It only takes two weeks to have a man killed’.

Chess is the oldest war game but nasty things happen away from the board too. Watch this space....