by Paul Hoffman
Kasparov and Karpov then curiously reversed roles in the chess world. The new champion
wasn’t just chess player, but also chess politician, granting and receiving favors, forming coalitions, making other players dependent on himself, sometimes meting out punishments. It was the same game Karpov had always played so brilliantly, infuriating Kasparov.
The struggle between the two men was also played out in their respective autobiographies. In Karpov on Karpov, the older Russian voiced his disapproval of his adversary’s behavior at the board. Kasparov was known to make dismissive faces, shrug his shoulders, wave his hands, stare at the ceiling, and pace wildly. Sometimes he leaned over the board and crowded his opponent’s physical space.
Each time before I sit down with him at the board, all I have to do is remember that he’ll begin to perform his theatrical pieces, he’ll affect a deep meditation, torments, and hesitation, even though he knows every move in advance and is only performing during a game. You can be sure this spectacle is not for me—Kasparov understands that I know his worth—but for the public, and yet I can’t deal with the annoying fact that I have to be part of it.
In Child of Change, Kasparov acknowledged his own behavior but denied it was deliberate:
Some people seeing my intense concentration at the board, with my head in my hands and a fixed look in my eyes, think this is all an act designed to frighten or intimidate my opponent, like Tal’s famous glare.8That is not so, though I admit that sometimes it could have that effect on a weak or impressionable opponent. It is all for my own benefit really, to exclude all outside distractions and force myself to dig deep inside my mind for the right combinations. You have to keep your thoughts together, not allow them to scatter under pressure.
Other world chess champions, Kasparov argued, also had “strange habits” at the board. But these, too, he said, were simply a means to release tension rather than a calculated effort to unnerve the opponent. “Steinitz, the first world champion, used to hum Wagner,” Kasparov wrote. “Alekhine would twist his hair, Botvinnik his tie, Lasker smoked cigars. Morphy never raised his eyes to his opponent until he had made the decisive move.”
But if Karpov was more convincing than Kasparov on the subject of his rival’s “strange habits,” he was not at all believable when he tried to paint him as an agent of stagnation because he was once a member of the Communist Party (which Karpov himself never was). Recent events have confirmed Kasparov’s commitment to Western-style democracy. To the dismay of his family and friends, who are worried about his physical safety, the man who was once invincible in chess has become one of the loudest voices in Russia objecting to Putin’s turn toward totalitarianism and the widespread business corruption and cronyism throughout Moscow. Journalists in Russia who said a lot less are now dead—in improbable car accidents, mysterious gas-stove explosions, or apparent contract slayings—and businessmen who crossed Putin are now in jail.
In his mission to checkmate the former KGB chief-turned-Russian president, Kasparov may be guilty of megalomania—believing that he won’t be defeated in life because of his overwhelming success in chess—but the genuineness of his effort is unimpeachable. Kasparov has always been politically active, and now he has given up chess and chosen the perilous course of guiding his country toward an open society and a free-market economy. Karpov, meanwhile, has showed his old Bolshevik stripes by publicly supporting Putin.
IN DECEMBER 2002, I HAD A FRONT-ROW SEAT WHEN KASPAROV AND KARPOV came together for old times’ sake for a two-day match in the ABC Studios in Times Square. The two veterans played two games of rapid chess a day, at the brisk time control of twenty-five minutes apiece with ten seconds added for each move. Each man received an appearance fee, said to be $200,000 for Kasparov and $50,000 for Karpov, but there was no cash prize for the winner. “It doesn’t take a prize to get the two of us to go at it,” Kasparov told me before the match. “I want to maintain my winning streak against him and demonstrate once again that he and I are much different when it comes to morality and politics.”
The organizer of the match had invited me because he liked the chess articles I wrote. He asked me if I knew a celebrity who understood enough about the game to be able to make the honorary first move. (The first move is, in fact, chosen by the player with White, but you still want someone who can perform it without, say, pushing the king pawn an extra square or making a knight hop in the shape of a V instead of an L.) I am friends with David Blaine, the magician and endurance artist—we’ve played chess together—and I thought he’d enjoy meeting Kasparov. “Chess is like magic,” David once told me. “You always have to stay one step ahead of your opponent—or your audience.”
The television cameras were rolling when Kasparov and Karpov swaggered up to the board and watched David pick up a White pawn. With an agonizing expression on his face, David grunted and squeezed the pawn, like the strongman at a carnival, until he’d crushed it into a cloud of dust. The match arbiter started berating David on camera because the pawn he destroyed was irreplaceable. Like each of the other chessmen, it was uniquely equipped with a microchip so that the electronic circuitry in the chessboard could sense what square the pawn was on and broadcast the full game position over the Internet to hundreds of thousands of chess fans around the world. The arbiter was angry, but the champions were laughing—a rare display of levity for them at the start of one of their matches. Needless to say, David made the crushed pawn rematerialize and the match, and Internet transmission, began without a hitch.
Kasparov easily won the first game and seemed on his way to victory in the second after winning a pawn. But both players were short of time, and in the ensuing struggle, Karpov started to hunt down the younger man’s king. In desperation, Kasparov sacrificed his queen to stop the mating attack. When he subsequently lost another piece, he resigned and left the playing hall. And so the score was 1–1 after the first day.
On the second day of the match, Karpov overslept during an afternoon nap and arrived for the third game a few minutes late and out of breath. He asked the tournament organizer for a ten-minute delay to compose himself, but Kasparov insisted that the game start immediately. It was Kasparov, though, who soon fell several minutes behind on the clock, and his old rival outfoxed him in the endgame, after most of the pieces and pawns had been exchanged. Karpov was now ahead 2–1; with only one game remaining, he could not possibly lose the match. Kasparov had to win to secure a tie.
In the fourth game, Kasparov had the advantage of moving first, but after twenty-eight moves he could do no better than reach a sterile, even position. He shook his head in disgust, looked up at the ceiling, mumbled something inaudible—as if he was asking God why he had been put through such agony—and offered Karpov a draw. And so Kasparov lost the match 2?2–1?2. He had told me that whenever he loses he’s in deep physical pain.
The organizer invited David and me to dinner with the two players and their teams. Going to a fancy hotel restaurant with Karpov was probably the last thing Kasparov wanted to do in order to put the defeat behind him, but he forced himself to attend because he knew the organizer was planning other lucrative chess events. He sat at a table with only his entourage and lowered his head to his plate for most of the meal. His team of seconds spoke quietly among themselves while their boss picked at his fish. At Karpov’s table, the victor and his team were getting smashed. David went over to Kasparov and pulled him, literally pulled him, to his feet. The Russian tried to push him off, but David led him forcefully by the hand to where Karpov was sitting and performed a mentalist card trick for the two champions. Karpov was fooled—he laughed loudly and appreciatively at the outcome. Kasparov was tricked, too, but he was so withdrawn that he couldn’t even force himself to smile. David’s girlfriend, a tall model with perfect teeth and an incandescent smile, winked at the world number one, who was normally a ladies’ man, but even she couldn’t elicit a response. Kasparov slunk back to his table, sagged into his seat, and left the restau
rant soon afterward.
I stayed behind and had too many vodka shots with Karpov. He was not a large man, although the small body of his Fetus days had swollen a bit. Karpov started making fun of how dejected Kasparov had looked at the meal. He imitated his rival by putting on his best hangdog expression and resting his head on a dinner plate. Then he stopped the impersonation, started slapping the table, and told me how happy he was to see Kasparov so miserable. “I’ve waited for this,” he said. “I’ve waited long for this. He deserves to suffer.” Karpov had never won a match against Kasparov before. In fact, the last time he’d defeated him in an individual game had been twelve years before, in 1990.
After he downed another vodka, Karpov looked a bit wistful. “I know Kasparov as well as I know anyone,” he told me. “I know his smell. I can read him by that.” Indeed, the two men had sat face-to-face for more than six hundred hours, their foreheads sometimes only millimeters apart as they leaned in over the chessboard. “I recognize the smell when he is excited and I know it when he is scared. We may be enemies, but we are intimate enemies.” And then Karpov reverted to imitating his rival by laying his head on the table.
KARPOV’S IMPERSONATION OF KASPAROV WAS FUNNY, BUT HE HIMSELF IS not a model of good sportsmanship when he is defeated. In fact, he is known on the grandmaster circuit as a very sore loser. He runs a chess school in Lindsborg, Kansas, where Pascal Charbonneau used to be an instructor. One summer evening Pascal arrived at the school, weary from a full day of car rides and plane flights from Baltimore. When he entered the building, he saw Yuri Shulman, a grandmaster and fellow instructor, playing blitz with Karpov. Karpov won the game, and Shulman looked exasperated. He got up from the table and said, “Pascal, you play.”
Pascal put down his luggage and took Shulman’s place. The Canadian was excited because he had never faced a world champion before. He had White in the first game. Soon he had a slight advantage in a Taimanov Sicilian, and he was ahead on the clock, too. Toward the end, he was two pawns up with a clear win on the board and an overwhelming time advantage of twenty-five seconds to Karpov’s six seconds. “Karpov just let his clock run out,” Pascal told me, “and announced to the assembled spectators, many of whom were weak players, ‘I lost on time.’ He said it in a voice that made it sound like he had a great position, but he was completely lost.” Shulman, who had stepped away, returned and asked in Russian who won. “I was quiet,” Pascal said, “and Karpov didn’t respond. Shulman repeated his question, and Karpov said, ‘It was not bad for Pascal.’ Only when Shulman asked a third time did Karpov clearly admit that I had won.
“I played the second game very badly,” Pascal recalled. “I lost without putting up a fight. Maybe subconsciously I thought that if I lost there was more chance Karpov would play a lot of games with me”—which is indeed what happened. Pascal played better in the third game and was up a pawn but still managed to lose. “At that point,” he said, “I told myself to stop playing like an idiot. Next I tried the Paulsen Sicilian as Black. He didn’t respond very accurately, and I didn’t give him any chances.” Pascal evened the score with another win. “In a subsequent game I was better the whole time, but he defended well,” Pascal recalled. “And with each of us having twenty seconds left, I offered a draw. To my surprise, he turned me down and played on. He tried to blitz me and wanted to beat me on the clock, but he played terribly. When he had only eight seconds left and there was no hope for him because I was about to queen a pawn, he said, ‘OK, it’s a draw,’ and swept all the pieces aside and then set them back up. Of course it wasn’t a draw.”
All in all, the two of them played fifteen games, and in the end Karpov was ahead by only a single one. “I was extremely happy,” Pascal recalled. “I quit after a game that he won because I didn’t want him to hate me.”9
I NEVER GOT TO PLAY KARPOV, BUT I DID FULFILL EVERY CHESS PLAYER’S dream—nightmare, really—of facing Kasparov, in a simultaneous exhibition over the Internet. The six-board event was sponsored by the high-tech firm ZMD, and Kasparov’s opponents were stationed in the company’s various offices and factories around the world. Because of the different time zones involved, it was difficult to schedule the event at an hour when all of the participants were fully awake. I played at 6:00 A.M. from an office in Long Island. ZMD had kindly put me up in a hotel a few blocks away, so that I could get a proper night’s sleep before the match. Kasparov was playing from somewhere in Europe.
A few days before our game, I had watched Kasparov give a simul against twenty-four traders on the New York Stock Exchange. He had limited the event to people who were rated below 2000. The same rating ceiling applied to the Internet simul, and his agent had questioned me to make sure I wasn’t too strong for the event. The emphasis on rating seemed strange, because Kasparov had achieved godlike status in 1998 by demolishing the entire Israeli national chess team of grandmasters and international masters—players rated in the 2500s and 2600s—in simultaneous play. At the stock exchange, the opponents were complete amateurs and he disposed of them all, 24–0, in only an hour and forty-five minutes.
Although the competition was weak, I was impressed by how earnestly he had taken the event. To make it interesting for himself, he had been determined not to concede a single draw, let alone a loss. One of the games stayed with him. “If he had played better,” Kasparov told me afterward, “I’m not sure I could have won. I’d have to play like Karpov.” He chuckled at the thought. “Yeah, like Karpov, grinding him slowly, slowly down in an agonizingly long game.” We were wolfing down a buffet dinner at the stock exchange because he was about to fly to Germany, but the conversation kept returning to this particular game. “Maybe if I played f5, I could have broken through,” he said, interrupting some non-chess story that I was relating. Kasparov could not stop thinking about the game until he had determined the truth of the position. It was remarkable how the greatest mind in chess managed to turn an informal encounter with an amateur into a rich intellectual challenge.
As Kasparov left for the airport, he asked me whether he’d be playing me in the ZMD simul.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you know if I have White or Black?”
“I’m afraid you have White.”
“Oh, goody,” he said, gleefully rubbing his hands together, and we both laughed. He was a good sport to pretend that he needed White.
If Kasparov could act as if the color mattered, I could fantasize that I had a chance of victory and prepare for him by examining his games in detail. I ended up putting in almost as much work as I had for Larsen. I concentrated on the few hundred recorded games that Kasparov had played against amateurs in simuls, and I studied move for move each of the ones in which he’d had White. I saw that he shunned all sharp, mainstream openings, preferring quieter systems in which confrontation was postponed until the middle game.
This was the opposite of his approach against grandmasters, and it made perfect sense. In a simul he wasn’t going to repeat a high-level game in one of his favorite openings and risk a well-prepared amateur coming up with an improvement (as I had against Larsen). He would then have to show the world how he’d counter the novelty. It wasn’t worth it—he wanted to save all theoretical battles and secrets for important games against strong opponents. Against unskilled adversaries like me, he could afford to develop his pieces in a more leisurely fashion. He knew he could simply outplay us from a level position later on—not through showy tactics but through a complete understanding of the subtleties of the game.
In preparation for our encounter, I hired Alexander Baburin, a convivial Russian grandmaster living in Dublin. Working on a shared board over the Internet while we spoke on the phone, Baburin helped me devise responses to the calm systems Kasparov had previously adopted in simultaneous play. Even though these systems were designed to tamp down early Black counterplay, in a few cases we came up with ways to unbalance the situation, giving me at least the remote hope of avoiding the slow death to which Kasparov would
otherwise subject me. And in cases where we couldn’t drum up counterplay, Baburin helped me comprehend some of the nuances of the resulting middle-game structures so that—if I played exceptionally well and Caissa smiled at me that morning and Kasparov happened to be having a rough day—I might, just might, earn a draw.
I was so absorbed in my fantasy of preparing for Kasparov that I actually contacted the few players in the world who had recently beaten him and asked for their advice. Teimour Radjabov, a young player from Kasparov’s hometown of Baku, Azerbaijan, gave me a pep talk about not getting discouraged if the game did not seem to be going in my favor. It was the same kind of advice Pandolfini had given me about not capitulating prematurely. Radjabov could speak from experience. At the 2003 Super Tournament in Linares, Spain, the so-called Wimbledon of chess, the fifteen-year-old Radjabov found himself in a much worse position—on the Black side of a French Defense—against the world number one. Rather than just submit to inevitable defeat, the tenacious teenager muddied the situation by offering up a knight on the twenty-first move. Kasparov declined the gift horse and went astray in the ensuing complications. With his twenty-sixth move, he blundered a piece—and with it, all hope of saving the game. After Radjabov’s thirty-ninth move, Kasparov purposely let his time expire and left the playing hall without doing a postmortem with his opponent, or even shaking his hand.
At the closing ceremony at Linares, Radjabov was awarded the most-beautiful-game prize by a vote of the international journalists in attendance, many of whom were strong players themselves. While Radjabov’s mother videotaped her son receiving the prize, Kasparov took over the microphone on the podium and shouted, “How could you give the beauty prize to a game in which I lost a piece because of a stupid mistake? It has been selected only because it was the only game that I lost and I consider this to be a public insult and humiliation.”