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Dr. Lim announced that he was going to retire at the 1988 FIDE Executive Board meeting in 1988 in Abu Dhabi which I attended. With the departure of Dr. Lim, FIDE rapidly descended towards chaos. The many scandals which enveloped FIDE after the departure of Dr. Lim almost certainly would never have occurred had Dr. Lim still been around.
Dr. Lim was a chess master and many times chess champion of Singapore. He once barely missed qualifying once to the Interzonals by being eliminated in a play-off tournament.
I did not know until it was published in TWIC that Dr. Lim also had an exceptionally distinguished career as a medical doctor. Born 27 January 1920, Dr. Lim Kok Ann was a medical doctor who gained worldwide fame in 1957 when he isolated the Asian flu virus at the height of the Asian influenza epidemic. He was dean of the medical faculty at the University of Singapore and headed what became the Microbiology Department there until he retired in 1980. He was Singapore's first chess champion when the national championships were inaugurated in 1949. He established the Singapore Chess Federation, which he headed for 18 years.
I first met Dr. Lim Kok An at the 1986 World Chess Olympiad in Dubai. I last met him at the 1995 World Chess Championship of Chinese Chess in Singapore. Dr. Lim was walking through the shopping mall on the way to see the Chinese Chess tournament. He expressed surprise to see me and asked me what I was doing there. He was surprised to learn that I was playing in the tournament and that I was one of the contestants for the World Championship of Chinese Chess.
To make sure Dr. Lim knew that I really was playing for the Championship of Chinese chess, a different game than chess, I asked him to come over to the board and look at my game.
Sam Sloan
Here are links:
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