In the last two years, I have become best known because of my presence on the Internet. I have at the moment 508 pages on the World Wide Web and the number increases almost every day. My web pages average more than 5,000 hits per day.
However, I am not a recent arrival. I have always been around. I have known Bobby Fischer since we were kids. This is why I was able to publish the rules and the name of "Fischer Random Chess" one month before Fischer announced them. I have four published books in print, all of which were written before the Internet became available. The company of which I am now president, Ishi Press, has published a hundred books on a variety of subjects.
The thing the Internet has done for me is that it has made it possible for views such as mine to become known even though those views are not in accord with the establishment. I have long been one of the most popular writers on chess, and yet even now almost nothing I write is published in the mainstream chess media. Many if not most voting members had never even heard of me before I became a candidate.
The reason is that my views are too controversial. Not that people disagree with them. Indeed, most agree. However, the major publications are afraid to publish them.
I am best known as a muckraker: Someone who informs the public of things which the insiders don't want known. They know that I will continue to do this if elected. That is why Don Schultz and the others so greatly fear a Sam Sloan election. It is not that I cannot get along. It is just that I have this irrepressible urge to tell everybody everything I know. Once I know a secret, it is not a secret any more.
I have been doing this for a long time. Here are a few examples.
I published the fact that in the 1985 US Open Computer Chess Championship, a Fidelity Computer had openly thrown a game to another Fidelity computer so that a Fidelity computer, rather than a Novag computer, would win the tournament. Where did I publish this? In the December, 1985 issue of the International Computer Chess Association Journal (The "ICCA Journal"), of course.
Why didn't you hear about this before now? Because you don't read that journal. Instead, you read Chess Life, the publication which published all those ads about why you should buy a Fidelity Computer because it had won the 1985 US Open Computer Chess Championship.
I repeatedly raised this issue with the hierarchy of the USCF. I kept saying that when a human player throws a game, he is barred from the competition. Then, why was a Fidelity computer allowed to win the title?
They finally admitted the answer. Fidelity was a big advertiser in Chess Life. The USCF got a lot of money both from Fidelity itself and from selling Fidelity computers. The official policy of the USCF was to promote Fidelity computers. The minor detail that Fidelity had an inferior product and had cheated to get the title and that the USCF membership was being misinformed about the strength of these computers was just something which should be overlooked.
About two years later, in an unrelated incident, Larry Kaufman was fired as Chairman of the USCF Computer Chess Committee because he had said good things about a Mephisto Computer, when it was official USCF policy to say good things only about Fidelity computers. Many of you didn't know about that either, and Kaufman is an insider, not an outsider like me.
What really made me internationally famous as a chess journalist was the 1986 World Chess Olympiad in Dubai. There I got the chess column in the Gulf News and had the virtually unlimited opportunity to expound on the latest scandals in chess every day. This got me nearly arrested and deported several times, but the authorities finally decided that they couldn't touch me because my column was so popular.
The main thing for which I am remembered was exposing the deal to give every woman chess player in the world, except for Zsuzsa Polgar, 100 free rating points. This was a despicable deal which Don Schultz made with Campomanes and Krogius to keep Maya Chiburdanidze as the number one rated woman chess player in the world and to get Campomanes re-elected, even though Polgar was a far stronger chess player than Chiburdanidze. Eventually, my story was published in Chess Life in Larry Evans' column. (It would never have been published any where else in Chess Life.) It was also published in New in Chess magazine. Otherwise, to this day, only a handful of chess politicos would know about it. Don Schultz still says he did the right thing.
More recently, I was the person who exposed the fact that the November, 1995 bid to hold the World Chess Championship match between Kamsky and Karpov in Montreal was a hoax. I published this on the Internet, in December, 1995. See http://www.ishipress.com/shiloh.htm . I knew this because I knew the man who made the bid to be a professional con man and swindler. It was three months before the rest of the world who did not read my article found out that the "match" was not going to be a match. Even today, everyone is so afraid of libel suits that they do not want to say anything about this incident.
I have just cited four examples of things which I have publicly revealed which otherwise would probably never have become widely known. There are dozens of examples of this. I am known for this.
This is one reason why you should vote for me. The closets of the USCF are filled with secrets which I am hoping to find out about and plan to reveal, if elected. I really do not understand why the USCF Policy Board has always been obsessed with secrecy. This is not only true of the current Policy Board. Did you know that one outgoing USCF treasurer was once paid $10,000 for the "legal services" he performed while supposedly acting in a volunteer capacity on the USCF Policy Board? Do you think that the USCF would have hired him as a lawyer if he had not been the treasurer?
More recently, what about the $10,000 which Don Schultz billed as expense money to the USCF for his hotel bills and rental car, plus meals at $35 per day (the man is a hearty eater) because, according to him, he was "required to conform" to a policy board resolution by hanging out for a month in the USCF office. This was the resolution which he himself had rammed through over the protests of myself and numerous others. My web site on that subject is still up. See http://www.ishipress.com/control.htm .
What about the $235,000 which the USCF owes to Yugoslavia for Chess Informants purchased during the War in Bosnia in violation of UN Sanctions, a fact which was concealed in the 1996 USCF balance sheet and annual report?
What about the excessive amounts the USCF keeps paying its departing executives?
So, you see, the problem is not that I cannot get along. Indeed, I can get along. The problem is that they steal. With Sam Sloan around, it will be harder for them to do that.
Sam Sloan