Mortal Games

by Waitzkin, Fred;

  But then Karpov missed his chance. He played several inaccurate moves. After Kasparov sacrificed a pawn which he knew that he would eventually win back, he was out of danger. Perhaps Karpov had been thrown off by Kasparov’s demeanor and aggressive opening play, and hadn’t fully appreciated his advantage. When a player is a little back on his heels, it is sometimes difficult for him to seize the day. On Kasparov’s face, then, came an expression that was derisive and chiding. I had seen it before, when he was analyzing with a trainer who persisted in arguing a point that Kasparov considered incorrect. It was the expression of an impatient pedagogue: Why are we wasting our time here; the position is clearly drawn. Then Kasparov’s eyes glazed over with boredom, or perhaps feigned boredom. He hardly looked at the board as they played out the last few moves, until Karpov agreed that the position was drawn.

  All and all, a lively and suggestive game. In championship matches, games impact upon succeeding games. They are evocative, send messages, establish patterns. After game 1, Karpov would be annoyed with himself for missing a real chance. For his part, though he had played inaccurately, Kasparov would feel steadied. He had needed to remind himself that he was Kasparov. He had shown that, even against Karpov, he wouldn’t hesitate to take risks and that he could survive mistakes.

  In addition to the Hudson Theater on the street level of the swanky black-and-chrome Macklowe complex on West 44th Street, there were two other floors devoted to the match hosted by California billionaire movie producer Ted Field. On the eighth floor, some seven hundred journalists from around the world tapped on laptops, while studying closed-circuit monitors showing close-ups of the players or their current position. Others roamed what seemed like acres of chess tables foraging opinions from groups of grandmasters huddled over the latest move. On the fifth floor was the chess book store, as crammed as Dalton’s when Tom Clancy is signing his newest techno-thriller, except the buyers standing on line were hefting abstruse tomes on the King’s Indian and Ruy Lopez. Nearby were three commentary rooms, where a fan could ask naive questions of grandmaster lecturers. There were also two VIP suites.

  For decades, the American public couldn’t have cared less about the sagest opinions of grandmasters, but all of a sudden television crews were competing to get players to give their spur-of-the-moment hunches. Chess was featured in the press and on network news. Of course, some reporters assigned to cover the event wrote as if the match were a tea party, and used the old chess-nut, “These games are about as exciting as watching grass grow,” but there were others, like Manny Topol, New York Newsday crime and sports writer, who knew little about high-level chess but became captivated by the building drama of Karpov and Kasparov trying to take each other out. Topol camped out at the Macklowe for five weeks, catching the flavor and doggedly pursuing the leads of grandmasters, delivering the goods each day to his million-plus readers in the terse hard-hitting prose with which he had written stories on murder and sports corruption.

  For the first week, reporters were asking all the top players who would win. Most grandmasters at the Macklowe picked Kasparov in a tight contest, but seventeen-year-old grandmaster Joel Lautier, covering the match for a French newspaper, said that Kasparov’s lack of preparation and overconfidence made him a slight underdog. Lev Alburt, who considered Kasparov the most creative player of all time, expected the world champion to win, but suggested that the very qualities of mind that made Kasparov unique might lead to his undoing. “He has one flaw, in character as well as in chess,” said Alburt. “Garry has an internal urge to create wonders, to put himself in lost situations and then make a Houdini-like escape. He does this because he has learned that he can make a miracle at the last moment, and this is dangerous, because miracles don’t always happen.”

  One of the VIP rooms was hosted by Ted Field. Here, while keeping track of the game on the monitor or a demonstration board, one might overhear two pint-sized prodigies debate the technicalities of the current position, or observe a wealthy lady in a strapless gown raise a knowing eyebrow as a tipsy ex–world champion commented upon Karpov’s weak squares. When he was in town, the reclusive Field, a strong amateur player himself, sat in a corner analyzing with his close friend, writer Jerzy Kosinski, whose face during the last months of his life was gaunt and spooky.

  Vinnie and other guys from Washington Square, as well as hustlers who worked chess tables in midtown and on Wall Street, could not afford tickets to the games. They took an elevator to the fifth floor, where they could watch on a monitor in the hall or in the book store. Although there was supposed to be someone in charge of the guest list at the door of Field’s suite, party-crashers were tolerated, particularly if they were known players, and no one said anything when one of the park guys, looking self-conscious in makeshift finery, wandered into the line behind Jerzy Kosinski, Mikhail Tal or some CEO, for a glass of champagne and a plate of cheese, veggies, shrimp and fruit.

  Next door was another VIP room, this one hosted by Belgian entrepreneur Bessel Kok. At the time, Kok, forty-nine, was CEO of the SWIFT corporation and the executive director of the Grandmasters Association (GMA), a trade union of grandmasters which Kasparov had created in 1987 to improve the working conditions of professional chess players and, according to Kasparov, to redress the corrupt practices of FIDE. Headed since 1982 by Kasparov’s nemesis Florencio Campomanes, FIDE had controlled the chess world for more than forty years.

  The fall of 1990 was a critical time in the young life of the GMA. During recent months, the organization had become philosophically split between the points of view of Kasparov, its president, and Bessel Kok. In the early summer, despite Kasparov’s fervent lobbying, the grandmasters had voted to enter into an agreement with FIDE—in effect, a treaty of peace between the two organizations which conceded to FIDE a share of revenue from the world championship match, as well as a measure of the organizational control that the GMA had wrested away from FIDE during the past three years. The grandmasters were tired of war, and they also feared that if Bessel Kok did not get his way he would withdraw his considerable financial support, and that of his corporation, from the elite tournaments he had been sponsoring. Kasparov had been so incensed that he had resigned from the executive board.

  Not everyone minded that. As the games commenced, influential members of the organization, such as grandmasters Yasser Seirawan from the States, Jan Timman from the Netherlands, and ex–world champion Boris Spassky, were outwardly festive, and perhaps even a little heady about being able to conduct their chess business without the abrasive Kasparov, who they said made life miserable when he did not get his way. The more sparsely populated GMA/SWIFT suite clearly favored Karpov, while Field’s cram-packed place seemed to lean toward the world champion. Though they sat side by side, there was little seepage between the two rooms. From the door of the GMA room, one could hear the pop of champagne bottles and the mellifluous voices of Seirawan and Spassky, both cultured men with a flair for showmanship, as they stood in front of a display board ad-libbing erudite and entertaining analysis. Any chess lover would have found their act memorable, but this was a very tight club. To get in, your name had to be on a list, and to get on the list you needed to be famous, rich or a very strong chess player. Kok, a man eloquent in many languages, often stood beside the door with an icy drink in hand. As he turned away the poor and untitled, he had a slightly bemused expression, as though these decisions weren’t really his doing, but rather some ancient and incontrovertible law.

  Karpov and Kasparov played the first seventeen moves of game 2 very quickly. The position they arrived at, developing out of the venerable king pawn opening known as the Ruy Lopez, was something of a modern classic. Many recent games have evolved from this setup and it has been much studied.

  “I believe the position is very good for White and he always plays it for Black,” said Kasparov later. “We have the beginning of a genuine chess fight here, two opposite views competing.” In return for an active queenside knight and bishop,
Karpov had conceded Kasparov the middle of the board for his two center pawns. In the Ruy Lopez, such a concession is dangerous because those slightly advanced pawns frequently serve as a staging area for a kingside attack. Then again, Karpov had made a career out of turning such smart-looking attacks into mincemeat. On the earphones, Pandolfini explained that White had to be patient while trying to exploit his slight positional advantage. “It’s like milking a cow,” he said. For this game he was joined in the booth by Yasser Seirawan, arguably America’s strongest grandmaster, and by my son Josh, who had recently won his fourth scholastic national championship. As Karpov and Kasparov played through this well-known opening variation, the talk in the broadcast booth was relaxed and chatty.

  “Then I made an innovation, a strange-looking move. I pushed my pawn to f3,” said Kasparov. Grandmasters usually identify their moves in a jargon called algebraic notation.* Each of the sixty-four squares on the chess board has a name consisting of a letter and a number. To arrive at f3, Kasparov pushed the pawn sitting ahead of his kingside bishop forward one square, from the second rank to the third. A quiet move. A move that doesn’t bring fans out of their chairs. In fact, at first glance it seemed to shut down lines of attack. Before this move, Kasparov’s rook, sitting on the third rank—the third horizontal row—had been poised to shift over to the kingside to participate in an attack. Now the rook was blocked off by the pawn. Still, Josh loved this new move. In his next tournament game, the following weekend, Josh played f3, and my hunch is that, around the world, other young players intoxicated with Kasparov’s chess made the same move without beginning to understand its nuances.

  “F3 doesn’t look great,” said Kasparov, implying that you have to study the position a long time to get an inkling of its strength. With f3, Kasparov had protected his central pawn, but there was more to it than that. The move transformed Karpov’s Zaitsev defense into an old friend who had come upon bad times. Karpov stared at it for fifteen minutes. His knuckles grew white while he stared.

  Early piece placement in chess is based upon long-term strategy. Three of Karpov’s pieces, his queenside bishop and his kingside rook and knight, were fighting for the center, pressuring Kasparov’s king pawn. The novelty, f3, had not only increased White’s control of the center, but in doing so it had dynamically readjusted the position, so that Karpov’s three pieces were now strategically misplaced. Imagine a defending football team that has lined up tight in its best short-yardage defense, linebackers socked in close to fill all the gaps, only to discover one or two beats from hike that the opposition’s tight ends are flaring wide and the quarterback is probably about to throw long. Similarly, Karpov’s key defenders were in in the wrong places.

  For months, Karpov had concocted intricate countermeasures against each known attacking line in the Zaitsev. It was his meat-and-potato defense against Kasparov’s king pawn opening. Who knew the Zaitsev better than Karpov, other than perhaps Zaitsev himself, who was working for Karpov as a trainer? F3 was a stunner. This seemingly innocuous move would give Karpov sleepless nights, he would see it in his dreams. “The move changed the shape of the position,” said the world champion. “I spent days on Martha’s Vineyard analyzing this, preparing this move.”

  But at the time, Karpov didn’t appear to understand fully the depths of his predicament, or perhaps the move had numbed him. He answered by moving his queen up a square, in what is known as a developing move, a move that has little specific purpose other than to take the piece off the back rank and bring it to a square where, in a general sense, it might be useful later on. It was Kasparov’s habit to pace behind the stage while Karpov thought, and when he returned to the board there was an expression of incredulity on his face, and he held out the palm of his hand, as though he were about to say to Karpov, you must be kidding. “This move was very bad,” said the world champion. “It’s from another planet. He needed to attack the center, but this move did nothing. Then with each of his next four moves, he worsened his position.”

  While Karpov played several aimless moves, Kasparov brought both knights ahead and moved his bishop toward the center of the board. On the display screen, it looked as though all the big guns for White had been wheeled forward in preparation for a crunching assault. Black’s position was riddled with weaknesses. Pieces were out of position. Pawns looked vulnerable.

  Watching chess, like playing, is passionate and very personal. The fan, even under the best of circumstances and even if he is a very strong grandmaster, can drift so far into his own fantasy of the game that it comes to have very little to do with the choices that are being made by the players. In the heart of a complicated middlegame, a player will consider a number of possibilities leading ahead in time and space from the position in front of him. Each choice suggests a different landscape and a different degree of risk; some routes may wind their way to victory while others may lead into an ambush. When a grandmaster on the sidelines gives his instantaneous analysis to the press with the sure-handed confidence of a TV sports color man, funny things sometimes happen. Often his cocksure prediction of victory overlooks the very trap that one player has set for the other. Off-the-cuff analysis is often little more than a test of a man s aesthetic preferences or his rooting interest.

  On the twenty-fifth move of the game, Kasparov surprised virtually every chess player in the house by initiating a thrilling combination in which he sacrificed his queen bishop for Karpov’s kingside rook pawn. A powerful bishop in exchange for a lowly pawn? What on earth was he thinking of? “I felt it,” Garry said, about his bishop sacrifice. “I didn’t calculate, I played it by intuition.” If Kasparov’s hunch was wrong, he would probably lose the game. “This is vintage Kasparov, a leap into the darkness,” said Pandolfini. This was the kind of chess that had won Garry millions of fans, and chess lovers at the Macklowe were on the edges of their seats. All over the hotel, masters offered vastly differing interpretations of this unexpected move. In the booth, Seirawan said that the sacrifice was one of the worst oversights of Kasparov’s career. Josh strongly disagreed, arguing that Karpov’s kingside was now busted, and that if there were not some precise defense, Karpov would get mated. It occurred to me, while listening to Pandolfini, Seirawan and young Waitzkin bat out opinions with each move, that an entirely different—and just as interesting—game was taking place in the analysis booth.

  According to past world champion Mikhail Botvinnik, a “combination” is a forced sequence of moves involving a sacrifice. At the conclusion of Kasparov’s six-move combination, the position was still being debated as hotly as on the very first move. He had exchanged two minor pieces—two knights—for a rook and a pawn. In purely materialistic terms, Karpov had come out the better. Seirawan said that Kasparov’s position was lost. Josh said that he was winning.

  By now, other grandmasters in the Macklowe were beginning to favor Kasparov’s position. Grandmaster Patrick Wolff came into the booth and reported to the audience that analysts on the fifth floor were now giving a big advantage to Garry. Seirawan insisted this was ridiculous, and struck an eighty-dollar bet that Karpov would win. Bruce pointed out that the exchange of pieces had cleared the queen file—one of the center vertical rows—for Kasparov’s rook, and that Black’s forces were scattered. Kasparov saw it Pandolfini’s way: “At the conclusion of the combination, there was no harmony to Black’s pieces,” he said. “Of course, a grandmaster would usually prefer to play with two knights rather than with a rook and a pawn, but Karpov’s two knights weren’t working together. The quality of my pieces gave me an edge. White had a huge initiative. My attack was coming much faster than his.”

  Now, Karpov had less time on his clock than he would have liked. He calculated variations with sharp little nods of his head, while he held his arms with his hands, as if to contain his jumpiness and restrain the impulse to move prematurely. Garry sat motionless, but under his chair his feet were dug in as though he were about to push off. Josh and Seirawan continued to squabble, li
ke fans of opposing teams. Josh, a lover of Kasparov’s attacking style, could hardly bear to consider Karpov’s defensive resources, and as for Yasser, Garry could do nothing right in this game. A few moves later, Garry continued his assault by pushing his bishop pawn. Almost instantly, Seirawan called the move a blunder. Later, Garry would say that this, in fact, had been the winning move, because it had led to the rending of Black’s kingside, and set up the quiet attacking moves which soon broke Karpov’s back. Kasparov speculated that Seirawan’s commentary had been an attempt to humiliate him, but I think Yasser simply could not let go of his vision of the game, and like most others at the Macklowe, his judgment was impaired by his fan’s heart. Even after Karpov had resigned and the two men had left the stage, Seirawan continued to insist that Garry had played poorly. “Garry is a perfectionist,” said Yasser. “And despite winning, I think he will feel badly about this game.”

  A few months before, Seirawan and Kasparov had been friends and had often spent time together when they were playing in the same tournament. They were about the same age and both had diverse interests to go along with their love for chess. In June, when Kasparov had begun his lobbying effort against the proposed GMA agreement with FIDE, he had assumed that he would have Seirawan’s support, and that Yasser would try to convince other grandmasters from North America to vote for the proposal. Kasparov was convinced that backroom deals had been struck between Kok and FIDE officials that would eventually give Kok dictatorial powers over both organizations. Yasser believed that Kok’s motivation was simply to help professional chess, and according to him, when he told Garry that he intended to support the FIDE agreement, Kasparov became enraged, and threatened to use his clout with the organizer to prevent Seirawan from having any part in the 1990 championship. Yasser was furious. During the ensuing months, he repeatedly lambasted Kasparov, calling him corrupt, and proposed that in response to the world champion’s resignation from the executive board of the GMA, grandmasters in the West should consider refusing to play against him. “If he doesn’t play against Western grandmasters,” said Seirawan in an interview with chess journalist Cathy Forbes, “we can say to Kasparov, ‘You’re not the world champion, you’re the Soviet champion,’ or the Azerbaijan champion, depending what crowd of fans he wants. . . . The GMA can then elect one of our own members to be world champion. I’ll recognize him, and Garry can go eat chicken Kiev.”