But Manny wasn’t happy. There was a problem. Manny knew next to nothing about high-level chess. He did not have a clue about opening theory, critical squares, weak bishops, or rook and pawn endings. When he imagined himself sitting alone, trying to analyze tonight’s game for his twenty-five million readers, he broke out in a cold sweat. In New York, with a veritable army of masters on hand, he could casually eavesdrop for technical information, and his articles had been inspired by the waves of passion that had swept across the pressroom. He had sometimes traded anecdotes about brutal murders and sports corruption, or the latest inside word about whether the Jets rookie had enough smarts to start at quarterback next year, for insights about the King’s Indian and the Ruy Lopez. But Manny contemplated the large empty Palais des Congrès pressroom and wondered who was going to explain to him the meaning of Kasparov’s latest opening novelty, or why it would excite chess players for generations to come that Karpov had moved his king to g2 rather than h1.
After a two-and-a-half-week break to rethink his strategy, Kasparov, with the black pieces in game 13, opted for a sound line in the Grunfeld defense rather than one of the sharp variations he favored in the King’s Indian. This signaled a departure from the attack-at-all-cost style with which he had opened the match in New York. “In some of those games, I committed suicide,” he reflected. In Lyon, living in a spacious house with a view across the Parc de la Tête d’Or, Garry was more lighthearted, and seemed resolved to play in a more flexible and self-protective style. The onus to win the match was still on Karpov. The players were tied 6–6—each win counting for a point, each draw a half-point—and if they continued to draw, Kasparov would retain the championship.
In game 13, Karpov deftly forced the world champion to trade queens and play out an ending in which Kasparov was considerably worse. Karpov’s two bishops were poised to nurse home a passed pawn in the center of the board. He had made a career of squeezing wins from such positional advantages. The players traded off their light-square bishops, and then Garry violated time-honored principles of endgame play by placing his pawns on the dark squares, where they might be vulnerable to Karpov’s dark-square bishop. In Five Crowns, Yasser Seirawan suggests that the ugliness of this plan belies its courage and resourcefulness. But with this highly unorthodox pawn placement, Garry had liberated his own king to slip ahead to a key square. The king and pawns together formed a shield against Karpov’s dark-square bishop and, utilizing an active rook as well, Garry was able to equalize and draw. He had managed to keep Karpov from taking the lead in the match by using deep and unexpected ideas in the endgame. Pal Benko might have wanted to put this one in his book.
Game 14 was exciting from start to finish, with sacrifices launching attacks and counterattacks. Karpov and Kasparov wrestled the initiative back and forth, and as both players grew short on time, they were still attacking. When it seemed for a moment that Karpov, up the exchange, was getting the better of it, Garry quickly found the key defensive idea and drew the game. It was a tense fighting draw, the seventh draw in a row.
When newspapers report successive draws in long championship matches, the public assumes that the games are lifeless and monotonous. More often, the opposite is true. When the players fight hard for wins, consecutive draws might be thought of as violent skirmishes within one huge battle or mega-game, which builds in tension through hundreds of moves, and which may indeed prove to be decisive in the match. The big one, encompassing many games, becomes increasingly more tense for the players and fans, as it continues to expand with more skirmishes. Everyone knows that the end of this standoff must come. The suspense increases with each drawn game. The players know only too well that, for all the days of buildup and irresolution, once the blood begins to flow it is likely to be a torrent. Fans and players look for clues to when the break may take place by scrutinizing telltale signs in prior games. After someone finally wins a game, the player who is down a point can no longer afford to safeguard his position. He must take greater risks to win, which in turn will alter his opponent’s style. The contestants will play the next stage of the match on a tilted board where draws may be the exception.
“In New York and Lyon, when we began drawing many games, it wasn’t because of our lack of will to win,” said Kasparov. “It was the result of a terrible fight . . . We didn’t score because of the tension. The tension kept building. We made mistakes. Who will make the decisive mistake? It is like Russian roulette—you feel this tension in your fingers. You are very nervous. Every move is a big responsibility. The importance of every home preparation is huge. In each game the importance of a mistake grows larger. I hadn’t played a world championship for three years, and I had completely forgotten what this kind of tension feels like . . . Draw, draw, draw, draw. It is like a kettle boiling. The tension is getting too strong for the players. One day the mistake will be crucial. You make a mistake and you are dead. One mistake could cost me the title. It feels like you are playing for your life.”
Before the start of game 15, chess enthusiasts in Lyon were betting that the first one to break the cycle of draws would take the match. Sitting at the board, Kasparov continued to look drained, but despite being on the receiving end of heavy blows, he appeared to be more in control of his game than in New York. In this one, Karpov played a fantastic opening novelty and came within a breath of winning. Again, Kasparov bailed himself out by trading into an inferior endgame. Then he created a stiff defense around his king to hold off Karpov’s menacing pieces, and save the draw. Playing in the fashion of his opponent, Kasparov had neutralized the former world champion’s aggressive early play by employing uncanny endgame technique.
* * *
When Manny Topol stared at a double-edged endgame position on the television monitor, his forehead furrowed and he took his chin in his hand. He knew that he was in trouble. During the many weeks of the match, Manny had become rather good at identifying the strength of direct attacks in the middlegame. He had learned that if Kasparov sacrificed his rook for a bishop, but in turn opened diagonals and files for his remaining rook, queen and bishop, the sacrifice was probably worth it. He had learned, in the language of Kasparov, that the quality of pieces can be decisive: fewer pieces dynamically placed on the board can overwhelm a material advantage. This was not so hard to grasp. After all, teamwork, feints and displacements proved decisive in many sports. But in the endgame, the principles were both many and frequently paradoxical, and you had to know them to have any idea who was better. To begin with, the playing field of the endgame is nearly barren, with only a handful of survivors on the sixty-four squares. In the first weeks of the match, Manny had been inclined to think that with just a few chessmen to keep track of, the action ought to be easy to follow. But he had soon discovered that he was wrong.
The great endgame player can be defined by his ability to read the meaning of disengagement and empty space. He judges the importance of unoccupied squares, of the critical number of spaces separating the two kings, of the number of steps a king must traverse along empty pathways to achieve a goal that would be a complete mystery to an amateur. In this sparse terrain, pieces yield space to edge around one another. But the implications of these austere and seemingly indirect moves are often more grave than in the middlegame, where the loss of a tempo—when a player is stalled from his plan for a move—frequently means no more than the loss of initiative in a hectic battle. A player can struggle back from middlegame errors. But the loss of a tempo or an inaccurate move in the endgame is likely the end of the game; you lose.
The stupefying principles of endgame play, explained to him by the pressroom grandmasters, left Manny befuddled. To play beautiful endgames, for example, you have to know, as Kasparov did in game 15, that one can be significantly behind in piece activity or even in material and still manage to survive by constructing a clever defensive formation or fortress. But to do this a player must know the engineering principles involved. In some fortresslike positions, the knight and
bishop protect critical squares so that neither the king nor queen can invade, and the game is a draw. Creating a fortress or attacking a shaky defensive setup, and especially promoting a pawn, often depends upon the manipulation of tempo. In arriving at a critical position, at the end of a long variation, it may be essential for it to be your opponent’s move rather than yours, or vice versa. To gain winning and saving tempos, one must understand the principles of opposition, zugzwang and triangulation—interactive techniques so delicate and complex that they sometimes confuse the greatest endgame players. Over the decades, there have been countless articles, many books, thick encyclopedias, exploring the intricacies of rook and pawn endings, knight and bishop endings, king and pawn endings. Today, computer research has changed evaluations of critical endings previously thought of as incontrovertible and fully explored. The jungle of endgame theory continues to thicken, and the active tournament player must keep up with this proliferation of data.
But learning all the endgame principles is still a long way from being able to feel the ending, as Kasparov might say. When the queens come off the board, the character of the game shifts, and the master must change his demeanor as well as his technique. The Marines are no longer storming the hill. The endgame is chilly and minimalist, and to play effectively in this new terrain, the heedless attacker must quiet himself and be patient, precise and perhaps a little detached.
In the pressroom, Manny intimated neediness and naiveté, not unlike the television character Columbo, which he used to his advantage while slyly rummaging for material for his stories. Chess masters began to look out for him, and crucial analysis fell into Manny’s lap in time to meet his deadline. During the beginnings of games, when neither of us could follow the opening theory and we had time on our hands, Manny, in his understated style, would hold me captive with tales of murder and lust. One evening, he spoke of the insatiable sex life of the child murderess Alice Crimmins, and recalled her love-making with Pasquale Picassio, the barber, in the back seat of his automobile parked behind the barber shop in Queens, New York. During a King’s Indian defense, Manny reminisced about Lynnor Gershenson and concluded that her case was, in the end, a story of enduring love. The pretty junior high teacher and her principal had plotted to have the man’s wife chloroformed to death while he lay asleep beside her, as though some third party had committed the murder. Ten years later, when they came out of jail, they married with the ardor and commitment of young love, and moved into the same house where the crime had taken place. Manny told me many stories during the openings, and in turn, I would find myself recalling something that Kasparov had told me the night before, and occasionally it found its way into one of Manny’s articles.
Despite the depleted pressroom in Lyon, Manny, old pro that he was, developed key sources. In the thick of difficult endgames, he was often to be found analyzing with grandmasters Spassky, Speelman and Seirawan, and the tactically gifted American senior master, Maurice Ashley. Of course Manny took notes from these sage chess thinkers, but he also worked at the games himself, which was the reason his articles were lively and accessible to so many. As the months passed, Manny watched and learned, and chess began to open up for him. More and more, he related these battles on the board to other dramas that had engaged him—war movies, pro football, boxing, murder stories—and he began to feel the exhilaration, fear and despair that pushed Karpov and Kasparov to find great moves. By the end of the match, Manny knew that he wanted to write more about chess, but his deepest connection to the game remained something entirely personal. More than all else, the great games of Karpov and Kasparov brought back memories of his father.
Manny’s father, Isaac Topol, had been born in a small town on the border of Poland and Russia in the region called White Russia. Isaac was a chess master, and as a young man he valued the game beyond all else, except his family and religion. He was a scholar of Judaism, and sometimes he would ponder connections between the mysteries of the Talmud and the game that dominated his fantasies.
In the late twenties and early thirties, there were pogroms against Jews throughout the area. Synagogues were closed and desecrated and Jewish homes were broken into. People were beaten by fascists and anti-Semites. Isaac’s father was beaten and murdered. The Jewish community was terrified and many wanted to leave, but it was very difficult. Isaac somehow managed to get a ticket to Palestine, but then he gave it to a married friend and it was impossible to get another. He was afraid that he would be killed. He wanted to travel to the United States, but at the time there were harsh restrictions on Jewish emigration. Isaac had no money. What was he to do?
Isaac conceived of a plan to walk out of Poland. He laid out his route carefully. To survive, he would stop in places where there were little chess tournaments, or cafés and outdoor parks where chess players gathered and he could hustle games for food or money. That’s what Isaac did. He moved from town to town, playing games, walking, occasionally riding on the back of a truck, sleeping in the homes of chess players or in a barn or beneath a tree. He chess-hustled his way south through Poland to Czechoslovakia, hiked through Austria and Switzerland, skirting Germany, and into France. After more than half a year, he arrived in Cherbourg with barely enough money to pay his passage to Argentina. Many of his friends and family who had remained at home were murdered, but in this unlikely way, Isaac survived. He stayed in Argentina for a few years, subsisting as a chess player and peddler, then met and married an Eastern European immigrant and eventually they gained entry to the United States.
When Manny was a teenager in Brooklyn, his father would talk to him about chess. “It’s more than a game, Manny,” his father said in Yiddish. Chess had given Isaac pleasure while growing up in a grim land, and then the game had saved his life. Naturally, he wanted to pass this gift on to his son. Isaac taught Manny the basics and they played many games. “I never won one,” said Manny. “He played an old-fashioned game. Now, from watching Kasparov, I know it’s the Ruy Lopez.” But at the time, Manny had never thought to ask. Isaac tried to tell the boy how chess could sharpen his thinking and help in many areas of life. “Mainly he was trying to get through to me. This was the best way that he could be my father,” said Manny, trying to hold back his tears. But while Isaac was explaining the magic of Capablanca’s endgames to his son, Manny was thinking about Jackie Robinson. He wanted to go outside and play baseball with his friends. Probably because his father wanted him to play so badly, Manny resisted learning chess. He loved his father, but Isaac’s European customs and thick Yiddish accent were an embarrassment to Manny. For the youngster, chess was also from the old country.
“I should have listened, I should have listened,” he said, more than forty years after Jackie Robinson had prevailed over the Ruy Lopez. “There was a life philosophy beneath those chess lessons, but I couldn’t hear him . . . Oh, what I would give today to have one more chess game with my father.”
Karpov played the opening horribly in game 16. After fifteen moves, his pieces were misplaced, and Kasparov’s pair of bishops and queen-side rook dominated the board. After a half-dozen more moves, Karpov was down a pawn and his position was technically lost. And then he staged a remarkable marathon defense. For many moves, he dodged and weaved, avoided Kasparov’s mating threats, sacrificed an exchange in order to survive, and when the two players neared the fortieth move, both in time trouble, it was Kasparov who once again played inaccurately and squandered most of his advantage. The preeminent Russian chess coach, Mark Dvoretsky, will remind a gifted student that if he has a poor position but remains alert, sooner or later he will have an opportunity to pull himself back into the game. The fifth world championship match between Kasparov and Karpov was proving this again and again.
But when play resumed on the second day of game 16, Kasparov still retained an edge. The world champion was up the exchange for a pawn, Karpov’s black pawns were disconnected, which made them vulnerable, but on the other hand, the players had bishops of opposite color, which of
ten made winning in the ending difficult. Within a few moves, Karpov’s defensive idea became clear. Using his bishop, knight and two central pawns, he created a fortress in the center of the board for his king. The pieces controlled many squares, making it hard for Kasparov to break through. At this point, grandmasters in Lyon gave Karpov excellent drawing chances. But Kasparov kept coming ahead. He squeezed Karpov with his rook, bishop and king, edging in, eventually loosening Karpov’s pawns, the main pillars of the fortress. The structure began to change in shape, then apparently fell away in different directions, but suddenly erected itself again, this time more formidably. It was all part of Karpov’s plan and was nimbly shadowed by Kasparov. “For thirteen games, I couldn’t beat Karpov,” said Garry. “Unbelievable, thirteen games. And then I had a chance to win. A chance. But Karpov showed a great defense.” By move sixty-five, most grandmasters in Lyon, including former world champion Boris Spassky, considered the position drawn and Karpov’s defensive conception absolutely dazzling.
The assessments and predictions of even top grandmasters often have a static quality, however. Their conclusions are reasonable enough based upon a current position, a snapshot in time, but they often miss the living and slithering progression of the game, which can only be truly felt by the players themselves. “Karpov created a castle for his king,” said Kasparov. “But . . .” The world champion shook his head slowly, and sniffed the air, as though recalling a rotten smell from within the fortress.
Mortal Games Page 22