The 1993 Schism That Split World Chess
When Nigel Short won the 1993 Candidates Tournament to earn the right to challenge Garry Kasparov, both players accused FIDE President Florencio Campomanes of unilaterally announcing Manchester as the match venue without proper consultation. In response, Kasparov and Short broke away entirely, forming the Professional Chess Association (PCA) and playing their match under its banner instead. FIDE stripped Kasparov of his title and crowned a rival champion of its own. The result: two competing "World Champion" lineages that were not reunified for thirteen years.
The trigger
Both Kasparov and Short maintained that Campomanes had broken FIDE's own procedures by announcing the winning venue bid without the players' agreement, a governance dispute rather than a disagreement about chess itself. That distinction matters: this schism was born from a fight over who controls the World Championship's administration, the exact same category of dispute that would resurface in FIDE governance stories for decades after.
The breakaway
Rather than accept FIDE's handling of the match, Kasparov and Short formed the Professional Chess Association, appointed businessman Bob Rice as Commissioner, and played their match at London's Savoy Theatre under Times sponsorship in September and October 1993. Kasparov won clearly, 12.5-7.5, and was crowned PCA World Champion.
FIDE's response
FIDE did not simply accept the loss of its champion, it stripped Kasparov of the FIDE World Championship title entirely and organised its own rival championship, which crowned Anatoly Karpov as FIDE World Champion instead. For the first time in the sport's history, there were two simultaneously recognised World Champions, answering to two entirely separate organisations.
Thirteen years of a fractured title
The PCA itself folded by 1996, but the divided championship lineages it created persisted well beyond the organisation's own lifespan, continuing under various formats until Vladimir Kramnik and Veselin Topalov finally reunified the title in 2006, a reunification that came with its own considerable scandal (see our account of Toiletgate and the deciding tiebreak that finally settled it).
Why one venue dispute did this much damage
It is worth being honest about the scale of the consequence relative to the trigger: a disagreement over how a match venue was announced ended up fracturing the World Championship for over a decade. That gap, between the size of the original governance dispute and the size of its consequences, is the real lesson of 1993, institutional trust in chess governance was thin enough in 1993 that a single procedural grievance was enough to break it entirely.