Humankind battles to reclaim the chess-playing championship of the world.

It is a balmy weekend in April, and three chess professionals are in the picture-postcard Spanish fishing village of Cadaqués, a couple of hours' drive northeast of Barcelona. Out on the sunny terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, Ray Keene, Fred Friedel, and Enrique Irazoqui launch into learned reminiscences of tournaments they have known. Ray invariably edits their recollections in the infuriating manner of chess masters everywhere by dredging up from his elephantine memory individual games and every damn one of their moves. Fred recalls dragging a stone-drunk Mikhail Tal to the table at a blitz tournament in Saint John, New Brunswick.

"Ah, that was against Vaganian," says Ray between mouthfuls of paella. "The key move was Ne4-g5. And Tal won the tournament."

"Imagine filling your mind with stuff like that," says Enrique.

"Please pass the gambas," says Ray.

__"IBM bent the rules," says Ray. "They didn't actually cheat, but they exploited every resource of the rule book to disadvantage Garry." __

The three men, each attached to chess in his own manner but nicely complementary in trio, have gathered for the penultimate step of an ongoing campaign to promote, update, and vivify the world of chess, the most frustratingly simple yet fiendishly complex cerebral activity since Homo sapiens got a little time free from hunting and gathering to become Homo ludens.

The Englishman, Ray Keene, chess chronicler for The Times of London and former British champion, is founder of Brain Games, the feisty young company that staged last October's world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik. The German, Fred Friedel, is cofounder, boss, and moving spirit of the Hamburg chess software company ChessBase. The scion of a noble Barcelona family, Enrique Irazoqui is one of the world's top experts in the explosively growing field of computer chess. This multinational cast of characters is part of a small brotherhood of devoted aficionados who for generations have labored to promote chess, with the aim of proving that the game's commonly accepted effete-elitist image is false, and to tap into the estimated half-billion chess players out there in the wide world, most of whom have never set foot inside a chess club.

But misperceptions of the game aren't all that need correcting. Worse damage was done during a single week in May 1997, when IBM's Deep Blue computer beat the human world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six-game match in New York. It was a sensational story that rippled worldwide, cast as the frightening symbolic denouement that humankind had been dreading ever since our bucolic rural existence began ceding ground to the dark, infernal mills of the Industrial Revolution: the machine dominating man in the one area where he was unique and unchallenged - his intelligence. The chess world found it devastating. "It was too much to bear," says grandmaster Yasser Seirawan. The cover of Inside Chess magazine read "ARMAGEDDON!" To make matters worse, Garry compounded his defeat by behaving petulantly during the postgame press conference. Puffing and pouting, the arrogant "Beast of Baku" looked to have been properly chastised.

But is that all there was to it?

Today, insiders know that Garry had good reason to be petulant in 1997, that a lot more went on behind the scenes at that epochal encounter than the brilliant programming of a team of corporate geeks. "IBM bent the rules," says Ray flatly. "They didn't actually cheat, but they exploited every resource of the rule book to disadvantage Garry. He would have won if they'd played fair with him." Most grandmasters, even those who regularly get kicked all over the chessboard by Kasparov, agree.

The background to the affair was Kasparov's convincing win over the machine in a six-game series the previous year in Philadelphia, which thus sustained the rash, youthful boast he had made in 1987: "No computer can ever beat me." When he went into the second match against IBM's updated program, he was as overconfident as Big Blue was thirsty for revenge. Fred recalls an optimistic Garry going into the match harboring cheery impressions of talks he'd entered into with IBM about co-developing a gigantic chess portal, only to hit a glass wall as the match began and discover that the game was lethal. For a year, the Deep Blue team had been ferociously preparing and revving up its public relations engine for a high-profile battle. Says Seirawan, "It had suddenly become Ali-Frazier."

More important than attitudes, though, was that Kasparov and his team had negotiated the match contract abominably. Whereas, in any chess match of significance, players study their opponent-to-be's previous games - often every game of every tournament in their history - Deep Blue had played no matches, save the one against Kasparov in 1996. So, although the contract stipulated that Kasparov would have access to all Deep Blue's previous games played in public, when he actually requested the printouts, IBM blandly said sorry, there were no public games. The entire oeuvre of the machine had been executed in private sessions with the company's team. Oh. So Garry did something he had never done before: He went into the match blind, playing an unknown opponent, while every game he had ever played was in the computer's memory. Moreover, he had agreed to the insane conditions of a match without adjournments.

In game two, an even more bitter disadvantage became apparent. At that point, a single move on the part of Deep Blue shocked not just Garry but the whole grandmaster community hungrily following along. Rather than capture an exposed pawn, the machine chose another route - a strange sacrifice that in '97 seemed far beyond the strategic foresight of a computer. "It was an incredibly refined move," says Seirawan, "of defending while ahead to cut out any hint of countermoves, and it sent Garry into a tizzy."

Nothing the machine had done in the 1996 match, nor anything it had done in game one, suggested it could or would make such calculations. The move represented a style of play out of keeping with anything that had gone before. "There were only three explanations," says Malcolm Pein, chess correspondent for The Daily Telegraph of London, who worked for IBM on the Web site for the match. "Either we were seeing some kind of vast quantum leap in chess programming that none of us knew about, or we were seeing the machine calculate far more deeply than anyone heard it could, or a human had intervened during the game."

For Garry, it smacked of evildoing. "He instantly hit on the concept of conspiracy," says Gregory Kaidanov, a grandmaster and one of the United States' top players. "It's a quality of many people in Soviet society: He became completely paranoid."

For most, it revealed something less dark but no less exasperating - that in feebly negotiating the terms of the match, Kasparov's team had allowed for adjustments to the program between games.

"We would say we 'tweaked' the program during the match," says Joel Benjamin, IBM's consulting grandmaster, who worked with the Deep Blue team full-time for nearly a year before the match. Seeing the machine's failings in game one, he says, IBM went back to the drawing board, reassigning relative values for different features of the game. Whereas the pre-tweaked machine might have thought the queen's mobility was more important than a captured pawn, the adjusted Deep Blue might calculate that a good fat pawn, in a particular context, looked juicier than a free-ranging queen. Benjamin would test-play the computer repeatedly before it headed back to face Kasparov again.

Murray Campbell, one of the three key IBM programmers who developed the machine, hesitates when asked whether his team would have agreed to the match had they not been permitted to make adjustments. Haltingly, he speculates, "I think we would have," and in that instant history seems to flicker, rewrite itself, and flicker back again.

__Rulewise, Kramnik will have a level playing field. Fritz, however, will have eight processors calculating some 6 million positions a second. __

Unhinged by the machine's surprise play in game two, Garry plunged deeper and deeper into nervous exhaustion, as IBM's hired grandmaster and programmers adjusted Deep Blue between games. The sixth and deciding game saw a drained and psyched-out Garry capitulating on the 19th move. "It was like Mike Tyson walking to the middle of the ring and fainting," sighs Fred, who was at Garry's side as computer consultant through the entire psychodrama. Later, when Garry asked for the logs of the program's calculations, IBM was dodgy, making the chess world ever more indignant, and all sides marched off in a rage.

"Someday I'll write a book about the Deep Blue experience," Fred says morosely. "Then IBM will sue me, and Garry won't speak to me ever again."

Why Ray Keene can be found at the Hotel Rocamar in Cadaqués has everything to do with that fiasco in New York, because in a sense he is preparing an antidote to it. He is preparing for a new Man vs. Machine match, to be produced by Brain Games and scheduled for an eight-game showdown this month in the Persian Gulf statelet of Bahrain. The match will be financed to the tune of $2 million by its chess-loving emir and arbitrated by Spaniard Enrique Irazoqui and American Eric Schiller. Once again, the idea is to pit the best machine against the best human.

This time around, however, the man who will meet the winning machine is not Kasparov but another Russian, the modest, bespectacled 26-year-old Vladimir Kramnik, the man-against-man Brain Games world champion. And this time around, he will have a level playing field: The rules give him adjournments, prematch practice with the engine, and printouts of its games - in other words, the same knowledge of the machine as the machine has of him. His opponent this time will be today's top chess program, Fritz, whose handlers will be allowed to adjust only the program's "opening book" - the choice of scenarios for the first eight or ten moves - all of which Kramnik will be familiar with. For three months prior to and during the match, the Fritz team will be forbidden to modify the code itself or further train the machine; once the match is in progress, they will write the program's logs to an HTML page in real time, so that doubters and geeks can survey the machine's thinking. Ray, who will be directing the match in Bahrain, has vowed that humanity will have a fair shake and that millions will be able to log in and confirm it.

Ray has spent his life studying and celebrating the game of kings and the king of games. A full-time competitor for 15 years himself, he eventually decided to earn a living, and it's hard to begrudge him that. (Chess' lesser pros tend to tread the knife's edge of genteel poverty, and several great names of the past have died destitute. A shiver runs down the spines of chess masters everywhere at the memory of Prague's Wilhelm Steinitz, a titan of the noble game, who ended his days in New York wandering barefoot through vacant lots to charge his feet with the electricity by which he telephoned God without benefit of a phone. Of course Steinitz challenged God to a game, offering Him a pawn, but He refused, so we'll never know the outcome.) A large, learned, Falstaffian character of prodigious appetites and deliberately outrageous opinions, Ray combines the businessman's drive with the bon vivant's passion for gastronomy. He is also a filmmaker, an author who has written or cowritten more than 100 books, and a lively entrepreneur whose Brain Games is seriously challenging the sclerotic Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE) for leadership in organizing the major events.

His energy and ambition - and predisposition for controversy - make Ray a worthy descendent of past impresarios who have tried to coax the game into the spotlight. Unlike the Deep Blue match, which was essentially a business promotion stunt with the objective of showing off IBM products, Ray's Bahrain gig is the latest in a long and honorable line of efforts to popularize chess and encourage its growth in the face of a generally negative public image.

It has to be said that the old stereotypes were not completely unjustified. For centuries, chess had been an upper-class activity, forever symbolized by bourgeois gents standing around with their cigars, silk ties, and polished boots in venues like the Café de la Régence in Paris and Simpson's Divan in London. The first step toward bringing showmanship to the game came in 1769, when a Hungarian engineer, Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen, built a mechanical "chess-playing machine" for the Austrian empress Maria Theresa. Featuring a mustachioed, life-size figure in Anatolian regalia that moved the pieces while clinking, clanking, and whirring impressively, "The Turk" whipped everybody in the royal court. Of course it was a fraud, activated by a chess master cleverly hidden inside the box. The original Turk and its various derivatives enjoyed wide fame in Europe well into the 19th century, counting Napoléon Bonaparte among its victims.

The 20th century saw the young Soviet regime elevate chess to the status of an important national priority. Lenin was a player, and the ineffable Nikolai Krylenko, public prosecutor and erstwhile commander of Soviet forces, decided that "shock brigades" of chess players would be a fine instrument for demonstrating the superiority of scientific socialism over decadent bourgeois societies. By the Brezhnev-Kosygin period of deepest political orthodoxy, the Soviet Chess Federation counted 4 million regular competitors, and a chess faculty reigned proudly in the Moscow Institute of Physical Culture.

Its style was small-scale and rudimentary, but Soviet chess really was a spectator sport. Organizers could count on all 1,200 seats of Moscow's Estrada Theater being sold out for the championship matches, which the Soviets virtually monopolized in those days. Fans paid passionate attention to the games via big wooden demonstration boards with the pieces hung on hooks. For the 1969 Spassky-Petrosian bout, a much-trumpeted innovation was a clunky "electronic" display. This was about as moderny as you could get in those days, and a break with the Precambrian pageantry of the past, but its lightbulb graphics were so blindingly hard to decipher that everyone naturally followed the moves on the old demo board they were accustomed to, then read them again the next morning in Pravda.

And then came Bobby Fischer. His ascension to the top of the game in 1972 made him a worldwide sensation, and much of the credit for making Fischer a star is due to a New York TV executive named Mike Chase, the first person to bring chess live to a mass audience. An ardent amateur player himself, Chase was the young director of operations for the New York Network of the State University of New York (SUNY). He knew that America hadn't had such an explosive talent as Fischer since New Orleans' Paul Morphy swept through the game more than a century earlier, and that even if - or because - Fischer was brazen, uncouth, and ill-spoken, his match against Boris Spassky in neutral Iceland was bound to be a terrific spectacle.

"No one believed chess could be a spectator sport," Chase recalls. "The way to present a match was by postgame analysis. But I realized at tournaments, that a lot of the excitement came from guessing what the next move would be. The only way to capture that excitement was to televise the games live."

__For the 1969 Spassky-Petrosian bout, moderny meant a clunky "electronic" display, and a break with the Precambrian pageantry of the past. __

Chase borrowed a couple of big demo boards, set up an open phone line to Reykjavìk, and hustled a little-known chess master as his emcee up to a SUNY studio that happened to be available in Albany. Channel 13, New York's public station, picked up Chase's show because they got it for free. Chase presided over an informal, monthlong chess kaffeeklatsch, improvising as he went along. He spiced the menu with visits from passing grandmasters, his actress wife, Chris, and friends who simply happened by. They all happily jabbered about the developing positions, explained strategy, and predicted moves. When one of the antagonists in Reykjavìk pushed a pawn or slid a bishop, a bell rang in the studio and everyone shut up. New Yorkers loved it, and it quickly became apparent that Chase was on to something special.

More than 10 years would pass before anything like Chase's show was replicated, but both before it and after, certain subterranean things were happening that presaged a new life for chess - the computer was moving into the game. By the mid-'40s, the English mathematician Alan Turing had already written visionary instructions that would enable a machine to play chess - before any machine existed. The only recorded game ever played by Turing's "paper machine" was set against an amateur human opponent in Manchester in 1952. Clumsily playing a Vienna opening, it got its queen trapped by gobbling a pawn and was declared loser without going further. Not exactly glorious, but it was a start. Since then, mathematicians and physicists have been regularly toying with chess programs.

All of them encountered the same simple problem: The number of continuations possible in a chess game is far beyond the capacity of human brain or machine to search - an average game of 40 moves implies a number of potential positions in the order of 10128, a number vastly larger than the number of atoms in the known universe (a mere 1080). The so-called alpha-beta algorithm devised in 1958 by three scientists at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) solved this by radically pruning back the search tree, enabling computers to look five and six ply ahead - up to three full moves. Twenty years later, Ken Thompson, then at Bell Labs, built a special-purpose machine that vastly outperformed existing supercomputers, searching up to eight or nine ply at 180,000 positions per second. A professor at Carnegie Mellon one-upped Thompson with the hardware-driven HiTech, powered by 64 chips in parallel.

By the late '80s, Carnegie Mellon grad students Feng-hsiung Hsu and Murray Campbell had developed a ridiculously cheap ($5,000) machine they called ChipTest. That evolved into Deep Thought, capable of searching 2 million positions per second. After joining IBM, and provided with a stratospheric budget, they turned their Deep Thought experience to producing Deep Blue, the monster machine with 400 chess-specific chips that searches 200 million positions per second.

Enter Dan-Antoine Blanc-Shapira. Binominal and bicultural, this quick, fidgety 42-year-old Parisian, issued of a French mother and an American father, was raised in Paris, Nairobi, and LA, is consequently fluent in French, Swahili, and Californian, and seems to have been born to organize events. He started at 10 with a bike race in Nairobi (20 kids paying an inscription fee of one Mars Bar), then, at 15, a Paris gala for Amnesty International. In 1986, he went to work for the Cannes tourist board and invented the International Games Festival - "the Olympics of parlor games." To a previously dead winter season he brought some 80,000 new visitors for competitions in everything from checkers to bridge and Scrabble.

And chess. Blanc-Shapira persuaded Kasparov to come to Cannes for his brainchild: a worldwide simul. Playing on a 50-foot stage and projected onto giant screens, Kasparov took on chess masters from 10 different countries - Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, Italy, Japan, Senegal, Switzerland, the US, and the USSR - via modem links. He was exhausted after three and a half hours, but harvested eight wins, one tie, and a single loss. Like Turing playing a computer game before he had a computer to play on, Kasparov had just played the first-ever Internet tournament before he'd logged onto the Net. "This is a new era in chess," he cried, crushing the skinny little Frenchy in one of his famous bear hugs. "We've got to work together."

They took the Cannes concept and ran with it, improving as they went along. That year and the next, Blanc-Shapira matched Kasparov in a flashy, hyped-up spectacular against the French national team, and then in 1990 rented the prestigious Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris for another showdown: Kasparov and seven other grandmasters scrapping over two days for a prize of $90,000. The show was a tremendous success, with the 2,000-seat theater selling out on both days. For the 1991 and 1992 events, the pool of players went up to 16 GMs, the purse to $200,000, and the length of play from two to four days.

Today, Blanc-Shapira is happy to give Garry all the credit for what came next: Dan-Antoine's flying circus, an itinerant chess extravaganza featuring the world's finest pawn-pushers and starring Garry Kasparov, as himself. Whatever detractors may think about his arrogant swagger and feral need to destroy opponents on the chessboard, Garry is a generous lover of the game who is always willing to help anyone who wants to promote it. He has done demonstrations in discos, in an open-air theater directing human "pieces," in hospitals for kids, and in the mountains of Peru. He once suggested commercially sponsored chess teams. A Bud Light team against a Stolichnaya Vodka team? Well, why not?

The flying circus was a dynamite stunt. Blanc-Shapira talked Intel into a sponsorship of $700,000 a year in prize money, and applying all the tricks and theatrical gimmickry that had wowed Paris, he opened the first Intel Speed Chess Grand Prix event in Moscow, with others scheduled in Paris, London, and New York.

__"This is a new era in chess," cried Kasparov in '88, crushing the little Frenchy in one of his famous bear hugs. "We've got to work together!" __

Playing at a hurry-up pace of 25 minutes apiece, the combatants succeeded one another two-by-two on a dramatically lit stage decorated with giant chess pieces.

The lights dropped at the start of every performance, pin spots following players as they entered from the wings, and a booming offstage announcer introducing each one exactly in the manner of a prizefighter: "And from Moscow, the challenger, Vladimir Kraaaaamnik !" During play, a series of cameras intruded upon every possible angle of the game: The electronically sensitive demo board gave a graphic display of the moving pieces on one giant screen, while an overhead camera homed in on the actual board of play on another; other cameras zoomed in for close-ups of every tic, wince, and chewed cheek. Over the headsets provided at each seat, spectators heard nonstop chitchat by two or three commentators, among whom there was always one gee-whiz Candide playing Everyman ("Hey, it looks like the champ's in trouble!") and one ponderous expert providing deep analysis.

Like Mike Chase, Blanc-Shapira exploited the fun of not knowing. At each seat he had installed individual keypads and linked them to a central computer. The audience was encouraged to predict the next moves, and at the end of each match, the seat with the greatest number of correct predictions was awarded a prize.

"I dusted off chess," Blanc-Shapira says with undisguised pride. "With those keypads I made it into the only interactive sport in the world! And I changed the mentality of the players: After Evgeny Bareev won his first match in Paris, he got up and walked offstage, the way they used to do in the old days. I pushed him right back out. For a while he stood there like the perfect chess introvert, head down, nervously playing with his hands, but then the applause finally began to get to him and something clicked - he raised his arms in triumph. For the first time ever, he was interacting with the public."

If Kasparov's loss to Deep Blue four years ago brought mankind down a peg, it raised the expectations for popularizing chess. Hundreds of news outlets covered that match, and only moments into game one, unexpected hordes of Net surfers strained IBM's extensive servers.

For the miniature upstart Brain Games, that kind of PR triumph will be a stretch. But what it doesn't achieve in popularity, the October match could make up for in sportsmanship. Ray's aim when he set out to arrange the event was to stage a top-level man-machine bout, fair and square. He wanted it big, but he wanted it better, too - better than the tainted experience of '97. He already had his best man. Now it was a matter of finding the best computer to play him.

Because Deep Blue had beaten Kasparov in 1997, Ray first challenged IBM to defend its title. However, since its victory, IBM has declined to pit its champion against any other chess program or any other human. The system has never played in public again. "We had nothing to prove anymore," says Murray Campbell, who still works at IBM Research. Despite the aggravated sputterings and frequent charges of bad faith by chess lovers everywhere, IBM shunted its world champion into sudden retirement. When Brain Games approached Feng-hsiung Hsu, one of the Deep Blue programmers, about a match against the new human champion, his response was pragmatic: To field Deep Blue again would require months of preparation and a diversion of resources that IBM wouldn't agree to. As Campbell points out, "All the principals involved in the work had moved on to other things."

Ray, then, arranged a computer semifinal for the Bahrain man-machine punch-up in Cadaqués. He considered the other top-rated multiprocessor programs as contenders for a tournament that would determine which should represent machine-kind against Vladimir Kramnik. The preselection came down to three programs: two German and one Israeli. The German Shredder team demanded direct entry to the finals, was refused, and walked off in a huff. The Israelis agreed to participate, fielding their program, Deep Junior, designed by Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky.

So Shredder's defection left only one program to face Deep Junior: the German product Fritz, fielded by the impressive Fred Friedel. Bearing a family name that seems invented for a lederhosened music-hall Kraut, Fred is in fact closer to Mowgli, having been born and raised in a hill station at the edge of the Indian jungle above Bombay by a half-Indian, half-Portuguese mother and a Bavarian expat scientist father. His brown eyes and swarthy countenance bear witness to his mixed-breed genes, his perfect English to the British schools he attended as a kid, and his sly sense of humor to a long association with Ken Thompson, his chess-playing, computer-programming friend, guru, and idol.

Unique in look and background, Fred is also unique in his field, having caused nothing less than a revolution in the chess world. Say "ChessBase," the name of his company and signature product, to chess professionals anywhere, and they will face in the direction of Hamburg and genuflect. King Kasparov himself has certified it as "the most important development in chess since the invention of printing." The Telegraph's Malcolm Pein says simply, "All professional players use it." And adds, "There may be a Linux, if you like, but ChessBase is Windows." Stretching from the 17th to the 21st centuries, ChessBase stores more than 1.8 million games, presented graphically, playable at the click of a mouse, and manically, Germanically cross-indexed into every imaginable configuration. Do you want to know how often Bogolyubov played the Grünfeld against Lasker, what percentage Capablanca had against the Sicilian, and what lines he generally used? Want to know everything about your opponent in the next tournament? It's all there in ChessBase.

But if ChessBase were Fred's one gem, he would have only a backstage role in the man-machine rematch this fall. What makes him more crucial to the event is that, in effect, he's also one of the players. Aside from his ubiquitous database, Fred's ChessBase engineers and interface designers have also helped create a chess-playing program that, by many accounts, is today's finest: Fritz has won speed chess games against Kasparov and Anand, and, processing speed aside, says Kramnik assuredly, "The program itself is stronger than Deep Blue." (Of course, Fred caused his American salespeople to shriek in horror when he named his star chess engine Fritz - it's about the same as a Warsaw car manufacturer baptizing his new model the Polack. US marketers insisted the name was the capital sin of US commerce, an ethnic slur, and came up with "Knightstalker." It bombed, and Fred got "Fritz" back.)

Reduced to a contest of one pairing, the semifinal between the Israelis' Deep Junior and Fritz in Cadaqués was a critical, telling, and somewhat disconcerting event. Deep Junior won the first 5 out of 24 games outright, and Fred had just about resigned himself to throwing in the towel. Then, in a stunning reversal, Fritz began clawing its way back into contention. It appeared that, having trained rigorously against Fritz in preparation for the match, Deep Junior was privy to a weakness involving king safety in the German program. Repeatedly, in the first five rounds, Junior chose openings that allowed him to exploit it. Without knowing, as a human might, what weak spot Junior was targeting, Fritz could only try varying defenses. Fritz finally hit upon some moves that foiled Junior's clever attacks, discovered they worked better, and kept using them. The Israelis' advantage vanished.

__In a stunning reversal, Fritz clawed its way back into contention. It hit upon moves that foiled Deep Junior's attacks, and kept using them. __

Thoroughly knowledgeable about each other but without any human "tweaking" between games, the two programs fought an equitable - and rollicking - battle. After game 24 they were deadlocked at 12-12, and Fritz won the two-game tiebreaker.

So, the opponent Kramnik faces this month is Fritz. But instead of the two-processor brainpower Fritz was given in Cadaqués, it will have eight in Bahrain, allowing it to calculate 3 million to 6 million positions a second. And there's more. Thanks to Ken Thompson's fertile brain, Fritz will enjoy complete knowledge of all - all - five-piece endgames, and play them flawlessly - "like God," as Fred says. Mate in 150? Sure. Thompson's now working on the pawnless six-piece endings, containing 8 billion to 20 billion positions each, all nicely compressible into a single DVD.

Bad Vlad Kramnik will certainly know better than to get himself into unfavorable five-piece endgames, and with the match conditions Ray has set, he has the fighting chance that was denied Kasparov against Deep Blue. This time, no one will touch the computer between games. "What I want is to play the same opponent every day," says Kramnik. "That's the major difference with the Bahrain match."

Plus, Kramnik has had four years since Kasparov's defeat to improve his anti-computer strategy. ("You want to avoid getting into specific positions that require deep calculation" is how Seirawan explains the approach. "What you want are messy strategic conditions.") A dispassionate player with a highly rational style, Kramnik may from the beginning be a better contender for Man vs. Machine play. "Everyone says Kasparov is the greatest player of all time, but he may not be greatest against a computer," says Joel Benjamin, the grandmaster who put Deep Blue through its paces in '97. "For that, Kramnik might be the best pick."

But what if - given this second chance - the mortal still gets done in? The conditions of the great match will now be evenhanded, but does this mean chess itself loses again?

Not really. Chess today is on the cusp of creative chaos, because it is breaking free of its old constraints. Just as befell telecommunications, airlines, and so many other industries long ago, the game is in the process of being deregulated. FIDE, the governing and regulating body that was founded in 1924 and rapidly put in a half nelson by the Soviet chess machine, has withered into a caricature of itself, currently residing in the palace of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of the autonomous Russian republic of Kalmykia. Toothless and thoroughly dissed by most of the world's professionals - by Kasparov most of all - FIDE is simply becoming irrelevant. The door is open to innovators.

Ray hasn't hesitated a second to jump into this chessic void with Brain Games. His championship last October had the de facto legitimacy of matching Kasparov and Kramnik, incontrovertibly the world's two strongest players. After Bahrain, Brain Games' next major event will be another world championship tournament, the first in history to be a true open. Anyone can join the ranks of combatants. A first selection will be established by a series of Web site tournaments (now under way), which will narrow down the closet Kasparovs to a top 32. From this select group, a final tournament will determine two winners to join the world's elite of grandmasters in an eight-player scrap. The winner faces Kramnik, the present champion. "This means that anyone in the world can enter the chess championship - not just players selected by their federations," says Ray. "Unrecognized geniuses can fight their way straight through with no hurdles of ratings, bureaucracy, favoritism, or sexism!" It's impossible to say whether his outfit will really supplant FIDE or be just another flash in the pan like the PCA and GMA founded by Kasparov in years past. But it represents a willful impulse to shake up the game.

So what if computers can, from now on, outcalculate any flesh-and-blood genius? Who cares, really? Keene isn't planning to let "progress" outstrip him: Just keep giving everyone a fair shot at glory and there'll be lots more excitement to pump from the game. Fred agrees. In fact, he says, the villainous machines are our comrades. "The computer was invented for chess," he says, "and the Net is going to carry the popularization of the game a megastep further." Or as US grandmaster Gregory Kaidanov likes to put it: "I believe those who say, 'Car is faster than human being, but we still watch running races.'"