The St. James Club, in the center of Paris, is a small exclusive hotel built within a courtyard. Garry’s room was decorated in an art deco style and had a view of the rear of the courtyard, which is landscaped to duplicate a peaceful country scene. Garry wanted to raise the curtain, but didn’t know how, which surprised me, for he had been living there a week. I found a hidden button and showed him. He paced a little and then asked sharply if I was ready. He was a little angry and wired.
Then finally, for the first time, Kasparov and I were talking about chess, but it hardly seemed like chess at all. No variations. No chess moves. To hear him, chess was an abstract struggle, a psychological and philosophical confrontation more than a game. At its center was a grappling against dark forces. “When you understand the essence of chess, the hidden mechanisms, you can make something brilliant from what might appear really stupid. Some positions are so complex that you cannot calculate two moves ahead. You must use your intuition. Sometimes I play by my hand, by my smell.”
At one point, I said that he sounded like a captain trying to navigate his ship through a blinding storm. He took that in for a minute. “It is like comparing different dimensions. It takes imagination. At the highest level, chess is a talent to control unrelated things. It is like controlling chaos.” At this he sat up from his chair. He had never thought of chess this way before. “It is like controlling chaos,” he repeated.
About this time, the doorbell rang. It was a reporter from the newspaper Figaro, who had been waiting for an hour in the lobby. She was thin and beautiful. Garry invited her in and then gave me a high five in the manner of Magic Johnson complimenting James Worthy after a sensational slam dunk. “We did great,” he said. We nailed it, baby. He was very excited about controlling the chaos. I was tired. Usually after he talked, I felt tired. After a minute or two, Garry was speaking with great passion about Gorbachev and Azerbaijan to the woman, who nodded and smoked a cigarette. Kasparov builds upon his energy, gearing himself up from a good interview to a better one, constantly revising his best ideas. The lady journalist was nodding to the cadence of his sentences, getting high on this chess champion with a troubled soul. I overheard Garry talking about controlling the chaos in his country, as if the two of them had just come upon the idea.
Before the Immopar Trophée it was a foregone conclusion among grandmasters and fans that Kasparov would win. He always won. Yet, considering him the odds-on favorite was probably more a function of the man’s reputation and growing mythology than an accurate assessment of his current playing strength. First of all, games played with only twenty-five minutes on each player’s clock are full of peril. At this speed, anyone can blunder. Second, at the highest level, success in chess, as in basketball, swimming or track and field, depends to a significant degree on conditioning and practice, which for a chess player translates into high-level study and competition. The most talented miler in the world would have little chance to win a top-level race if he had not trained seriously for several months before. In May of 1990, Kasparov had neither studied nor played a serious game of chess in months. When I asked Garry if he were looking forward to Dan-Antoine’s tournament, he answered, “Fred, how could I?” as if I had accused him of insensitivity or questioned his values. It was as if Kasparov were fasting from chess, demonstrating to people back home: Look what I am willing to risk. This is the time for men to take a stand. History does not often give a second chance.
It occurred to me then, and I think it is still true, that it had become difficult for Kasparov to enjoy playing chess. As a youth, it was the burning passion of his life, and now, when he plays a world championship match or a serious tournament, the game absorbs him fully—each move is hugely important to him, as though history were sitting as his judge—but liking it is something else. He can be cheerful and a little silly playing geography, cards or video games, but for him, chess is too serious, too filled with portent, fear and consequences for light-hearted enjoyment. What if he were to lose a game or two? Would chess commentators begin to speculate that he is no longer the greatest of all time? Could he continue to find the motivation to play if he were no longer considered the greatest? If he were to lose a championship match, what would happen to his life, to the lives of his family? In the spring of 1990, he was surely worrying: If he were to lose against Karpov, would he still have political clout? In some small way, would a Karpov victory set back the cause of democracy in his country?
A few hours before the first round of the Immopar Trophée, Garry and I were sitting in his living room at the St. James Club. He was waiting for a phone call from his mother in Moscow. He wanted to ask her about his grandmother, who had not been in good spirits. He paced for a few minutes and then said to me. “I had to convince my grandmother to leave Baku. She left her life behind, the graves of her relatives. We lost everything we had. I lost twenty-six years. It doesn’t exist for me anymore.”
4
IMMOPAR TROPHÉE
Before the start of Dan-Antoine’s Immopar Trophée, the lovely Théâtre des Champs Elysées was drenched in libidinous music. On gigantic screens, grandmasters faced off with the determined expressions of outsized road warriors. While a huge display board blinked in a light show of purples, greens and reds, revved-up fans hung over the balcony, wired for chess. Then a master of ceremonies called the first two grandmasters to the stage with the epic cant of a Nevada ring announcer introducing heavyweights to fight for the title. By traditional chess standards, this production was blaring and gaudy, but the audience was swept into it.
Dan-Antoine had imported the strongest group of grandmasters ever assembled for an “action” tournament, and they were competing for a record purse. But the river of passion running beneath the Immopar Trophée was the opportunity to watch the best in the world gun for Kasparov. Kasparov’s fame and charisma packed the theater; his participation had convinced Immopar to put up the prize fund and was the reason this chess event was attended by scores of journalists and photographers, and was appearing on French television.
In this format, each player had only twenty-five minutes to make all of his moves, which was about six times faster than grandmaster chess was usually played. When a player ran out of time, regardless of the position on the board, he would lose the game. Many chess purists don’t like action chess, claiming that even top players have to make mistakes at this speed and don’t have time to develop deep and beautiful ideas, but Dan-Antoine pointed out that five- and six-hour games, however rich in art, are not audience-friendly. The fan goes to sleep long before the thrilling moments at the end.
All great chess games develop toward a crisis, a moment of truth, which may not come for many moves, many hours. At one point in the unraveling of scholarly openings or during the imaginative feints and counterfeints, attacks, sacrifices and complexities of the middlegame or in the austere and puzzling standoff of a few pieces at the end, it becomes apparent that the game will result in a breakthrough and victory for one side, or will fizzle out into a draw. After hours of trading cerebral blows, such moments are highly emotional.
In action chess, paced by the clock, players and fans feel crisis from the opening move. Playing at this speed, grandmasters have some time to calculate deep variations, but they also make more blunders than in slower games. It’s painful for them, to be sure, but thrilling to watch, like game-turning fumbles in football. These chess fumbles are concrete proof to patzers that, despite the encyclopedic knowledge and mental gifts of grandmasters, we all play more or less the same game. In addition, when chess is played at action pace, the pieces are on the move rather than sitting for an eternity on one square, and consequently, even a relatively unsophisticated chess fan can maintain a feel for the flow of the game by watching the display board and listening to the animated commentary on earphones.
It is daunting to observe how a man you know quietly disappears in the theater of hype and reputation. While the popular French prodigy Joel Lautier was beating the forme
r world champion Boris Spassky in the first two-game match, the standing room crowd was already awaiting the chess fury of Kasparov, and so was I. As the smiling Lautier made his exit, pulsing music summoned the powerhouse Russian on stage. The Garry whom I had come to know during the past two weeks had little to do with the fierce warrior face on the huge television screen overhead. “Kasparov never loses,” someone beside me said. “He’s a chess machine. He never smiles. He’s all chess.”
Kasparov walked to the table in the center of the stage, waved quickly to his fans and loosened his tie. Jonathan Speelman, a thin man with long disheveled black hair, was a head taller than the world champion. Kasparov was clearly impatient to begin, tapping his foot while the announcer said a few words.
Within a minute or two, the chessmen were spread all over the board and it was apparent to everyone in the theater that the world champion was attacking. With a sneer on his face, Kasparov pushed his pieces forward. He placed them on squares where, progressively, they had more range and attacking potential. Meanwhile, Speelman’s pieces were maneuvering defensively in their own terrain. “Speelman knew Kasparov has incredible knowledge in the opening, so he tried something original. It didn’t work,” said the Siberian grandmaster Anatoly Viser, who was visiting Paris and hoping to immigrate from the Soviet Union. Speelman had tried to trick Kasparov by varying the move order of a standard opening, but the world champion had understood immediately that Speelman’s variation held little threat. Sitting next to me, grandmaster Viser was enraptured with Kasparov’s aggressive play. “His pieces are always moving ahead and they have a crazy attacking harmony,” he said. While Kasparov stared bullets at the chessboard, Speelman appeared to be disconcerted, his pieces cramped together, hunkered down for a siege.
In high-level chess, players attempt to improve their positions incrementally. It is extremely rare for a great player to overlook a simple threat to a rook or knight or to get checkmated from a position that is roughly equal, although this happens to amateurs all the time. Grandmasters spar for tiny advantages, to create a weakness in an opponent’s pawn structure which will be exploited thirty moves later in the endgame, for example, or to maneuver for the chance to play the middlegame with two bishops against an opponent’s two knights, or to gain an open file or diagonal which will increase the play of a rook or bishop. Crushing combinations, resulting in the winning of material, usually evolve from an accretion of subtle positional advantages. Afterwards, in chess journals and books, master analysts demonstrate the inexorable development of these powerful moves, like meteorologists charting the growth of small storms over warm oceans.
The world champion is a fantastic positional player, but what thrills chess fans is his penchant to do the unexpected. When he sacrifices material for attacking initiative, the move frequently comes like a bolt out of the blue. It seems to have little basis in standard chess logic. Even when not entirely unexpected, his sacrifices often appear to be premature, as though the world champion had not fully and carefully laid the groundwork for his attack. Invariably in each of his tournaments, there are games in which Kasparov sacrifices a rook or queen, and the analyst, often a grandmaster, cannot find justification for the move, other than in the fact that it was Kasparov’s creation and therefore brilliant and possibly even decisive. But afterwards, in analysis, Kasparov demonstrates that the stunning move or series of moves was well within the logic of the game. The catch is that to find it, one must be able to calculate as deeply as the world champion and at the same time possess his uncanny feel for the intangible elements of chess. For even the world’s greatest players, it can be terrifying to play against him, worrying from the opening move where and when the gauntlet will fall.
Speelman acknowledged that he had to overcome a psychological disadvantage to play effectively against Kasparov. “He is intimidating,” said the three-time English champion. “He has remarkable energy, and he sometimes finds moves that somebody else wouldn’t find. He does this rather consistently. His style is very forcing. He likes to do things and doesn’t like his opponent to do things to him. When you are playing against him, you feel that you’re playing somebody very good at chess and almost everybody else is pretty bad at chess.”
The incremental buildup of pressure upon an opposing position has a teasing and arousing effect upon fans; they sit on the edge of their seats waiting for the final blow. Such was the expectation of the audience in the Théâtre des Champs Elysées as Kasparov tightened the noose on Speelman’s kingside. But then, much to their surprise, Kasparov traded queens and, with a bored expression, took the first game by quietly exploiting a small endgame advantage. Normally, when a player suffers under a powerful attack he attempts to defuse it by trying to lure his opponent into an exchange of pieces. Likewise, the attacker attempts to avoid exchanges, unless they lead to concrete advantages that are likely to assure a victory later on. But great players do not need to hold material in their hands to feel confident of victory. Against Speelman, an endgame specialist, the world champion was so confident in his assessment of the endgame position that would evolve six or eight moves down the road, and in his technique to exploit it, that he was willing to trade a larger but more diffuse advantage for a smaller one that eliminated all chances of his opponent’s counterplay.
Perhaps Kasparov’s easy handling of the ending took something out of Speelman, who offered little resistance in the second game. Playing the black pieces with the same aggression that he had shown with the white, Kasparov attacked Speelman’s kingside, and the Englishman’s own queenside attack was feeble and slow-developing. After gaining a pawn advantage, the world champion was content to settle for a draw, which gave him the first match and knocked Speelman out of the competition.
Kasparov’s next opponent was the grandmaster Victor Korchnoi. As the announcer said a few words, Kasparov, sitting at the board, smiled and raised a hand to his cheering audience. Kasparov was living up to his billing: dazzling, untouchable, unpredictable. French girls who didn’t know a rook from a pawn were adoring him. The fifty-nine-year-old Korchnoi was hardly a proper test. Korchnoi was haggard and tense. His long weird face rippled through different emotions—charm, suspicion, modesty, anger, arrogance—as the announcer recounted a brief history.
Although their relationship had from time to time been strained, Korchnoi was Kasparov’s older brother politically. In the seventies, while developing into one of the several strongest grandmasters in the world, Korchnoi had gained a reputation in the USSR for being a troublemaker. At a time when public criticism of the Soviet state was dangerous, Korchnoi complained that it was absurd for teams of KGB agents to shepherd Soviet grandmasters when they traveled abroad.
In 1974, he narrowly lost a final candidates match to Karpov to determine the next challenger for the world championship. In effect, this contest turned out to be the world championship match itself, when Bobby Fischer refused to defend his title. In his autobiography, Chess Is My Life, Korchnoi claimed that Soviet authorities wanted Karpov to win and offered him all possible advantages, such as the best trainers and his choice of venue and hours of play. “Karpov had been chosen as the favorite, and it was clear why,” he wrote. “One hundred percent Russian, he compared favorably with me, Russian by passport, but Jewish in appearance. He was a typical representative of the working class, the rulers of the country according to the Soviet Constitution, whereas I had spent my life in the cultural center of Leningrad, and was contrasted to him as a representative of the intelligentsia. Besides, Karpov was younger and more promising, the future was his, whereas I would not be playing much longer. Karpov was showered with endearments and he had become a member of the Central Committee of the USSR Communist Youth Organization, the chairman of which was his friend. Karpov well understood what he represented.” He had become the symbol of Soviet Communism. The frail, fair-skinned man had quickly washed away the bitter taste of Bobby Fischer, the first non-Soviet world champion in twenty-four years. Karpov was proof,
once again, that communism produced the best minds.
During the 1974 candidates match against Korchnoi, Karpov had the full support of the Soviet state. Top grandmasters were ordered to give him their best ideas and advice. Korchnoi worried incessantly that his own trainers, much weaker than Karpov’s, would be ordered by Party members to betray him. He received hate mail, and intuited that if he evened the score against Karpov, then something might happen to him in the street.
Following the match, Korchnoi was outspoken in his criticism of Karpov, and particularly of the brazen manner in which Karpov had been favored in the match. Consequently, Korchnoi was stripped of his income and privileges, including the right to play for a year in international tournaments abroad. In 1976, he defected from the Soviet Union. Subsequently, playing his best chess as a forty- and fifty-year-old man, when grandmasters are usually past their prime, he earned the right to meet Karpov twice for the world championship. He lost both matches under scandalous and bizarre circumstances.
In Baguio in the Philippines, Korchnoi was thrown off-balance by Karpov’s psychologist, Dr. Zukhar, who sat in the fourth row staring at the challenger, apparently trying to hypnotize him. Also, Korchnoi’s delegation claimed that Karpov’s team of crack grandmasters was sending him coded messages by varying the color of the yogurt being handed to the world champion while the game was in progress. Whatever the reason, Korchnoi lost. After the victory, Karpov sent a telegram to Leonid Brezhnev: “I am happy to report that the world chess championship match has ended in victory. Please accept, dear Leonid Ilyich, my heartfelt gratitude for the fatherly concern and consideration you have shown me and my delegation during the preparation period.” Brezhnev responded that Karpov’s victory demonstrated the embodiment of “our Soviet character.”
Mortal Games Page 8