Chess v

If this is the middle game, George Bush must be president. Or, to put it another way, congratulations to the USSR and East Germany on your final sporting successes.

Confused? Of course you are, until you realise that we are dealing with the world of international postal chess. The 10th Correspondence Chess Olympiad, of which the last game was completed at the weekend, began in 1987, while Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were discussing arms cuts and Margaret Thatcher was successfully campaigning for her third term of office. With the players allowed three days' thinking time for each move, however, and delays in the international postal service further extending the schedule, the games could easily slow down to a rate of one move a month.

Despite the availability of fax and e-mail, international correspondence chess still relies on the old technology of postcard and stamp. Thinking time is measured as the difference between the date a move is received and the postmark on its reply. As several experienced contestants have observed, the worse a player's position is, the longer postcards seem to take to reach him.

Only at moments of extreme tension, as a man runs short of time towards the end of the sixth or seventh year of a game, for example, do players resort to recorded delivery, or even telegram, to ensure prompt and verifiable move transmission.

The last game of the 10th Olympiad to finish, fittingly enough, was won by an East German against a West German. The same two players are already competing in a unified German team in the 11th Correspondence Chess Olympiad, which began in 1992. That was when officials of the International Correspondence Chess Federation decided not to wait for the 10th Olympiad to finish before starting the next. If postal services improve, most of the games may even be finished in time to celebrate the millennium.

The 10th Olympiad, however, will be remembered above all for the final sporting triumphs of the Soviet Union, which took the gold medals, and East Germany, who took bronze. It was just like the good old days - except they didn't play the Soviet national anthem.

Meanwhile, back in the 1990s, the Kamsky-Anand match in Las Palmas is still level after well-contested draws in the fourth and fifth games. In Linares, Anatoly Karpov has taken the lead, half a point ahead of Ivanchuk, with a 10th-round win over Vesselin Topalov.