Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  Masha was off to the kitchen. She covered for Garry. Whenever Garry broke off conversation in mid-sentence to study or to call someone on the phone, she rushed to fill the space, entertained, soothed a bruised ego. She was light where he was heavy, faultlessly polite where he could be rude. She was the one to call from Europe filled with warmth and good cheer to wish the family a happy new year. When Garry returned, with his combative smile and confrontational ideas, Masha retired to the edges.

  “In Paris, I said that in nineteen ninety-one there won’t be a Soviet Union. Maybe I made a mistake. It could happen earlier.” In his voice there was the familiar scorn for American liberals, for Bush and for the editors of The New York Times, who continued to write glowingly of Gorbachev as if he were a Messiah adored by his people and destined to rule his country long into the twenty-first century. “But let’s be conservative and leave it nineteen ninety-one.”

  Kadzhar, Garry’s old friend from Azerbaijan, cooked the dinner, a typical training meal: well-done steak, potatoes, cucumbers in a sour cream sauce. Garry ate with relish, and talked, his thick bottom lip glazed with sour cream. At one point he scanned the table for bread, and, seeing none, reached onto my plate, broke my roll in half, a quick smile, took a bite, kept talking. Conversation coursed from the morality of using nuclear arms to the chess potential of the young Soviet grandmasters Vassily Ivanchuk and Boris Gelfand. Kasparov felt that nuclear arms were an acceptable alternative against a tyrant such as Hussein, and that both Ivanchuk and Gelfand were “big” talents but lacked the psychological stability to become world champion. There were allusions to a disturbing problem concerning the match, but Garry shook his head, no, he didn’t want to talk about it tonight. Tonight he was in good spirits. Unlike in France, Kasparov was struggling to be the master of his moods. A few times during dinner, he thought of something, and spoke sharply in Russian to one of his trainers, an idea that nagged at him from the day’s study—they must look at this tomorrow. Kasparov was no longer fasting from chess. Chess was stage front. Karpov was coming in less than two weeks.

  After dinner, Garry walked back to the living room, sat on the sofa, and I joined him. The sounds of Klara and Masha working in the kitchen were warm and wholesome. We joked about the immensity of the living room. Giraffes could graze in this room. He loved it. After a few minutes, I said that I was considering writing a book about him and the forthcoming match. His jaw tightened a little, and he nodded, as if he had known that I had something on my mind. He suggested that we talk about it tomorrow. I thought glumly that if I never mentioned it again, he would never bring it up. He was staring at the chessboard and pieces in an irritated way. He hadn’t intended to study chess after dinner, but the pieces, still arranged in a variation, triggered a concern. He looked up at the ceiling, lips moving, calculating, envisioning what would happen six moves ahead. He began to make moves. After each one for black, he tapped the piece into place, a kind of exclamation mark. Kasparov’s hands were delicate and oddly small on his heavily muscled body, hands perfectly made for moving little wooden pieces. For all the things we talked about, I sometimes forgot that chess was what he did the best.

  Even without trying objectively to understand what he was doing, it was pleasing to watch Kasparov take apart a variation he had played many times, jiggle it around while searching for a tempo, for a slightly better square for a piece, some little improvement. It was not unlike watching a master mechanic take apart an engine that is less than perfect, spill all of its parts into a large tray of oil, and then put them back together.

  It occurred to me that whenever I came to visit Kasparov, I brought my own agenda. I worried that I would feel like an idiot surrounded by so much world-class chess, or that I would become bored. I worried that I wouldn’t like him or that he wouldn’t like me. I wondered if he would ask about my life. But minutes after my arrival, I was swept away by his pace, by the freshness or outrageousness of his ideas, by his appetite for new worlds to conquer, by the thrill of watching him play blitz chess with his trainers or the silence in the room when he moved the pieces by himself. All of Kasparov’s visitors are pulled into his orbit, walking at his furious pace, eating at his odd hours, attentive to his timing, gravely concerned about his concerns, as if they had been thinking about them for years. (“Fred, did you read Mayor Popov’s speech yesterday. Here it is, take a look . . . No, we’ll talk about that later. First, read Popov’s speech.”) This happens very naturally. I’ve seen him with wealthy businessmen, well-known political figures, top grandmasters, editors, actresses, hockey players, novelists: they quickly began to function in his world—he rarely crossed over.

  In the variation that Kasparov practiced now with the black pieces, he sacrificed a pawn for the beginnings of an attack. His opponent had more material, but Kasparov’s pieces controlled more space on the board. The world champion favors variations that lead to dynamic imbalances, double-edged positions where the possibilities are vast, the chess terrain best suited for flights of imagination. Throughout his career he has been inspired by the abstract and paradoxical nature of chess; that, for example, depending upon the position, a pawn may be worth more than a rook, a knight more than a queen, that more does not necessarily mean better. Again and again he replayed the variation, his smaller but more aggressive army swooping down on his opponent’s queenside knight, trying to force it from the middle of the board back onto a square where it would be more passive and perhaps vulnerable in a few more moves. Against Kasparov, who is relentless when he has the initiative, little weaknesses quickly become fatal weaknesses. He is a killer with his foot in the door. While he works at a position, Kasparov is not studying moves so much as power, the dynamics of power.

  “In chess you have general rules,” he said to me, “to find the best position for a piece, to fight for the open line, to have a strong center, to attack the opponent’s king. The real art in chess is to evaluate the factors because they are so different. What is more important, one pawn or the open line? What’s more important, the weak position of your king or some initiative on the queenside?

  “Material,” he continued, meaning the number and kinds of pieces still on the board, “must be compared against time—how long it will take for one’s attack to crystallize, relative to an opponent’s. Material and time must be evaluated against quality—whether the pieces are located on squares that are tactically and strategically strong. It takes imagination to control unrelated things,” Kasparov said with a big smile, no doubt recalling our conversation in Paris. “It is like controlling chaos.

  “People think of chess as a logical game, and, yes, there is logic, but at the highest level the logic is often hidden. In some positions where calculation is almost impossible, you are navigating by your imagination and feelings, playing with your fingers. For weaker players, great moves often appear to be stupid. But if you feel the unity, you can do what nobody understands.

  “Have you seen my game against Lajos Portisch in 1983?” Kasparov set up the pieces and quickly moved them to a position in the middle of the game. “You can see that Portisch had a strong and logical defense. But I had something. I felt it,” Kasparov sniffed the air like a hunter divining clues in the fresh early morning breeze. “I was playing by smell, by feel. All of my pieces were closing in. It was very sensual. I didn’t spend very much time thinking. I just looked at one line and said to myself, this is great. Portisch spent a great deal of time on his moves. He was not upset, because his position was solid enough. He found good moves. He found a way to exchange some of my more dangerous pieces. He remained under attack, but his position appeared to be defensible. But I looked at the position, and the factors that we have been talking about, they seemed positive for me. His king position was weak, his knight was to the side and couldn’t get back to the center of the game. The coordination of his pieces was bad. You recall, a few minutes ago we were talking about the quality of the pieces. A knight away from the action is worth less than a knight po
ised to attack. When pieces are working in harmony, they are worth more than the same pieces in disunity. The quality of his pieces was bad, but still we kept making normal moves. I didn’t appear to have any concrete threats. More and more, it looked like a draw.

  “Then we came to the critical position. Look at it, Fred. In the center my bishop blocks my knight from the central square, where it would be most effective in the attack. Many players in this position would retreat the bishop. But if you withdraw the bishop, it slows down the attack by a move, it wastes a tempo, which gives Portisch an extra move to defend. Only one decision. I sacrificed it for one pawn. Portisch couldn’t believe his eyes. I had no concrete threat. I didn’t even have any checks afterwards, just quiet moves. I needed my knight in the center where it would have great value, and the bishop meant little in this game. Portisch was forced to spend a move taking the bishop back. I sacrificed my bishop for a tempo, for time, as well as for the increased quality of the knight.”

  “But if you are wrong about the attacking potential of your knight or the timing of your attack, you’re down a bishop against a great player. You’re probably lost.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you ever think that you need to feel danger to play your best, that you like to live on the edge?”

  “I cannot describe the feeling when I play this way, hanging by a thread. I can feel it all through me.”

  “I’ll never forget the twenty-fourth game in Seville,” I said, referring to the last game of the 1987 title match against Karpov. “Josh, he was eleven then, was playing in a tournament in Connecticut. One of the wire services was sending the moves of your game to the tournament hall.”

  Kasparov had been playing poorly in the fourth match, as if he had become bored with playing marathons against Karpov every year. He kept missing wins. When Karpov won the twenty-third game, Kasparov’s situation was suddenly grave. Karpov needed only a draw in the final game to win back the championship. When a grandmaster with Karpov’s defensive genius is playing only to draw, it is extraordinarily difficult to defeat him. The twenty-fourth game had the makings of a great storybook finish: the champ down on points needed a knockout punch in the final round. Virtually everyone in the Connecticut tournament was rooting for Kasparov. There was a feeling in the air that the chess world would suffer a setback if Karpov won.

  “Some Russian emigrés playing in Connecticut were saying that your life would become very difficult if he won,” I continued. “Everyone was following the moves of the game. Josh was beside himself. He couldn’t concentrate on his own game for checking your position.”

  “It was terrible for me as well,” recalled Kasparov. “When I lost the twenty-third game I didn’t believe that I would recover. In the night, I went to the hotel where my coaches lived and spent three hours playing cards, just to relax. My future was on the line in this game. I began thinking about what the plan should be. I remembered that Karpov was down twelve to eleven in ’85 and had to win the last game to draw the match and retain the title. In that game, he started to play very risky aggressive chess and he lost. As I recalled, his strategy had made my task simpler. By attacking with all his force, he had given me concrete problems to solve and removed elements of doubt. Before that game, I had been really afraid that he would play quietly and slowly, trying to postpone my celebration. I had envisioned him having a slight edge and playing on and on. Okay, maybe my position wasn’t dangerous, but it was very unpleasant, and Karpov would be waiting patiently for my mistakes.

  “I decided that maybe that was the chance. I knew that Karpov expected me to play risky chess. Instead, I played quietly. But when you play this quiet way with white, nursing a slight edge, you present black a choice and a dilemma: to make the best move or the safest move. Karpov is a great player, and normally he would play the best move, but the best move sometimes involves some risk. This quiet style can have a narcotic effect. The position does not seem dangerous to him. And so he chooses the safest move. But the safest move is not always the best move.

  “Now the position is slightly worse, a little worse, and he must play with the psychological discomfort of knowing that he did not make the best moves. Karpov understood this very well, but he could not change his psychology. I remember the moment when he could play a move fighting for initiative. But this would break the symmetry of the game, make the position unclear, unpredictable. He felt it was the best move, but he couldn’t, you know. It was against the logic of the game. And now the position was getting worse for him, worse. I had a big advantage and if he made the final mistake, I could win. Then, when we were in time trouble, he made it—but I answered with another mistake. Now he could draw, but he didn’t play accurately. After exchanging several mistakes, the position was adjourned.

  “Even today, I don’t believe that the adjourned position was won for me. It was fifty-fifty. During the night, we couldn’t find a way to win. But, also, we couldn’t find a certain way to draw. A couple of hours before the resumption of play, we found an interesting idea. Still, there was no obvious win: Chances, but who knows? When I went to the tournament hall, however, I looked at his eyes and I knew that he would lose. I could see that he didn’t believe that he could save the game. In three moves he made the decisive mistake, a horrible positional mistake. Incredible. He couldn’t sustain the tension. In this game he was defeated by psychology more than chess moves.

  “Of course, the loss of this game would have been a disaster for me. The Sports Committee, Karpov, they would have tried to smash me as a person. Maybe they couldn’t keep me rotting somewhere, as they did Gulko five years earlier—things had changed in the country and I was not as vulnerable as I would have been in ’84 if I had lost—but they would have made my life a misery. I might have been forced to leave the country, and I didn’t want to do that.”

  In 1984, when Kasparov finally had his chance to challenge for the championship, the five-month, forty-eight-game marathon against Karpov was dominated more by politics, elements of the bizarre, and dirty tricks than by brilliant chess. At the start of Karpov-Kasparov I, a story circulated that Karpov had used his considerable political clout to have one of Kasparov’s top aides, grandmaster Gennady Timoshchenko, drafted into the army, and that this unexpected and disconcerting event accounted in part for Kasparov’s bad start. Whatever the reason (perhaps at the time Karpov was simply a much stronger player), the nervous challenger could not have begun much worse, and was losing the encounter 5–0, with Karpov needing only one more victory to retain the title.

  After Karpov’s pummeling of young Kasparov in the early rounds, however, the match fell into a rut of endless draws: at one point, seventeen in a row. There are various theories about them. Some said that Kasparov had come upon a clever strategy similar to Muhammed Ali’s rope-a-dope against George Foreman in Zaire, to frustrate and exhaust Karpov. Others in the chess world, such as the prominent chess coach Mark Dvoretsky, claimed that Kasparov, humiliated at the prospect of losing the match 6–0, was playing like a coward, again and again running away from promising positions in order to force draws, because bold play carried a measure of risk. In his autobiography, Kasparov makes it clear that his poise and self-esteem were very shaky. In those dark days, he was seeking counsel and confidence from Tofik Dadashev, a psychologist and mystic who had predicted that, despite the score, Garry would not lose. Kasparov was not proud of the draws, and explained simply, “I was not yet ready, psychologically, to take the initiative.”

  Be that as it may, after months of mostly draws, a kind of stressful and exhausting running-in-place, Karpov, a physically frail man, began to falter, and despite unexplained official time-outs that infuriated Kasparov and gave the champion time to rest, Kasparov won three games. Suddenly, he seemed to have Karpov on the ropes.

  The world press was heralding the match as one of the great sporting comebacks of all time—when, incredibly, Florencio Campomanes, president of the Fédération Internationale des Echecs (FIDE)
and a close friend of Karpov’s, suddenly declared the match canceled, due to the “exhaustion of both players.” Canceled! The enraged challenger told journalists, who were already interpreting the decision as a fix, that his health was fine, thank you, and that the decision had been made at the behest of the Soviet chess federation in order to save Karpov’s title, but there was nothing to be done.

  Months later, Kasparov won a rematch, and this time nothing could save Karpov. Kasparov became world champion, and subsequently won two more closely-contested encounters with his nemesis. All the while, though, swirling around their chess wars were bizarre rumors: Karpov’s seconds were sending him messages during the games in color-coded snacks and drinks; the former world champion was getting through demanding games with the aid of amphetamines. During the third match, Kasparov lost several games after his opening novelties were easily outplayed by Karpov—Kasparov claimed that one of his most trusted trainers, Evgeny Vladimirov, who had been acting suspiciously in camp, had been discovered copying the world champion’s newest opening ideas into a notebook. Kasparov was convinced that Vladimirov had been bribed by Karpov. Another Kasparov trainer, grandmaster Mikhail Gurevich, has said that before the Seville match in 1987 he was offered a $30,000 bribe to reveal Kasparov’s opening secrets.

  Despite the new liberalism in the Soviet Union and the apparent security of the New York–Lyon venue, there were some in the chess world who cautioned that the cloak-and-dagger side of the world championship was still an ongoing reality in the summer of 1990. “Many forces in the Soviet Union want Karpov to win,” said Lev Alburt, a grandmaster who had defected from the Soviet Union in 1979 and had just won the United States national championship for the third time. “Kasparov is an enemy to Gorbachev. If I were Kasparov, I would hire some expert to check my rooms. I would never discuss an opening novelty with my trainers in my room and never on the phone.” He added, somewhat paradoxically, “Of course, he must not become too paranoid.”