This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Garry Kasparov became World Champion in 1985 by defeating Anatoly Karpov, and he held the title through the tense final years of the Cold War chess rivalry the two men's matches had come to symbolize. In 1993, preparing to defend his title against the English challenger Nigel Short, Kasparov and Short broke from FIDE entirely, objecting to the federation's financial terms and organization of the match. The two players formed a rival body, the Professional Chess Association, and played their championship match under its banner instead.
FIDE did not recognize the breakaway and organized its own championship cycle in parallel, crowning a separate line of champions, including Karpov himself, who defeated Jan Timman in a FIDE title match the same year, and later a series of champions produced through FIDE's new knockout tournament format. For thirteen years, two players could each describe themselves as the reigning World Chess Champion: Kasparov's classical lineage, carried after his own retirement in 2005 by Vladimir Kramnik, and FIDE's separately organized title.
Kasparov's own position, recorded on this atlas as a documented dissent against FIDE's claim to have preserved an unbroken championship, held that FIDE had forfeited its authority the moment it allowed the 1993 match to proceed outside its structure, and that his and Kramnik's lineage, not FIDE's, was the legitimate continuation of the title Steinitz had first won in 1886. The split ended only in 2006, when Kramnik played the FIDE champion Veselin Topalov in a unification match, restoring a single recognized World Chess Champion for the first time in over a decade.