At the very point where most analysts were predicting a draw, Kasparov realized that somewhere very far ahead, perhaps forty or fifty moves ahead, if he could combine mating threats with invasionary probes of his king and bishop, then he could once again shake the house apart and this time win. He continued to maneuver patiently, slowly dominating squares near and within Karpov’s defensive setup. His little probes caused Karpov to weaken himself, and cracks appeared in the walls of the fort. Soon, Kasparov controlled Karpov’s knight with his bishop, taking away all its moves. Towards the end, Karpov was a fighter with one arm, and worse, he had been maneuvered into a situation called zugzwang, which meant that any move he made had to be self-weakening. When Karpov resigned on the 102nd move, Kasparov’s king had invaded the fortress and he was about to deliver mate.
“The psychology of the match had changed,” said Kasparov afterwards. “It’s something you can’t explain if you’re not playing these games. In games thirteen, fouteen, and fifteen, there were hints of a change, of a different direction. The results of games are important, but it is also important to notice the shift of direction in the match. You can feel it. In game fifteen, Karpov had a big advantage and could win, but in the end he was worse and I offered a draw in a very good position. Somehow this was linked to my win in game sixteen. Why? I don’t know why. Except that as a player, you can sense when you are ready to press an advantage and sometimes it relates to the games that came before.”
The progression of draws had ended. One can imagine how devastating the loss of this marathon was for Karpov. He had been so close to winning a half-dozen games in New York and Lyon, and now this. One might have imagined him reeling with the unenviable task ahead of having to make up two wins in the final eight games—and this psychological deficit alone made his performance in game 17 all the more remarkable. In this one, he simply destroyed Kasparov, who appeared weary following the long sixteenth game. Karpov tricked Kasparov into small positional mistakes and then slowly took control of key squares all over the board. After he had cut the knees out of Kasparov’s feeble counterplay, his win was simple.
Karpov’s fans might have predicted such a comeback. In the past, he had been remarkably resilient following Kasparov wins, often gaining back the point in the following game. But it was hard to understand how either of them could come back from such heartbreaking losses. Kasparov was probably the more vulnerable at such times. After every defeat, he struggled with self-doubt, and his sense of failure often overwhelmed attempts to be lighthearted and optimistic. Immediately following the loss of game 17, Kasparov was inconsolable and slipped into a long simmering rage. In the imposing mansion where he lived on the Boulevard des Bêlges, across the park from the Palais des Congrès, his trainers and his wife maneuvered to stay a room or two apart from him. “Things are very, very bad here,” his mother told me, when I visited the following morning. Garry was upstairs in a funk. “He has no emotional energy to fight any more,” she said, as though describing the end of the championship. Defeat hung on Klara like a shawl. A few minutes later, I spoke with Garry’s friend from Azerbaijan, Kadzhar Petrosean, and he said almost the same thing. “Very bad. Very bad.” He shook his head sadly. Masha gave me a sorrowful smile. All of this despair and rage. She had never imagined that defending the world championship would be like this. The walls of the mansion were bleak with losing. The park outside the big picture windows in the living room was gray with winter gloom. The entire house—wife, mother, cook, trainers, driver—was in mourning. How do you gather yourself to win from such a condition of misery?
Karpov was beginning to resemble the Karpov of 1984, who had pulverized Kasparov in the Hall of Columns in Moscow at the beginning of their first match. Confidence swelled through his body. His haughtiness was damning. While he played his first moves in game 18, he hardly glanced at Kasparov’s responses, and played very swiftly, building up a big advantage on the clock. Several times, he looked out at the crowd, as if they were his legion. In the opening, he offered a pawn sacrifice in exchange for play in the center of the board, and the advantage of two bishops as opposed to Kasparov’s two knights. It was a carefully prepared line, and on the twenty-first move, as Kasparov scratched his head, Karpov strode off the stage as a kind of exclamation point.
When Garry sees a new variation, his first response is often surprisingly casual. What is Karpov up to here? Garry raises an eyebrow. Rocks his head from side to side. He looks with the curiosity of a tourist in a new land.
Three of Kasparov’s coaches, Dolmatov, Gurevich and Azmaiparashvili, were sitting behind Klara, Masha and myself. They were discussing Karpov’s novelty and how Garry should answer it. In risky situations, Mikhail Gurevich sometimes counseled Garry to seek practical solutions that held a measure of safety, but Garry tended to go for broke. The coaches were still annoyed with Garry after game 17. He had played badly, and then afterwards had become angry at them. And now here was this novelty, which no one on the team had anticipated. If Garry lost this game, there would be hell to pay tonight. “What can you do?” one of them remarked. The trainers reminded me of coaches in the National Basketball Association who got together for beers after the game and commiserated that no matter how well you mapped out the play, if your guys didn’t make the jumpers, you lost. During the past two and a half months, Kasparov had missed a lot of open jumpers.
Klara sat with her head leaning to the side. She could not bear to look at Garry. She turned around and asked a question of Sergey Dolmatov, a candidate for the 1993 world championship. He answered her politely. This, too, was part of his job.
Now Garry was digging into the position, layer by layer. What does Karpov want? What is my enemy here? Are these two bishops so powerful? What about the pawn sacrifice? Is it any good? Should I give it back? What does he expect me to do? How can I surprise him? After a period of looking and sensing, he began to calculate concrete variations. The tendons in his face were working. His jaw was grinding. After a time, he smirked, seeming to say, this sacrifice will win Karpov nothing. The audience was reading all of this by watching Kasparov on the big screen. He was a fan’s delight. His face told every secret.
Klara looked off to the side. Occasionally, she turned her head a little to glance at the image of her son, but never at Garry himself, though we were sitting no more than a dozen yards away. Most of the time she stared off into space with eyes that were tiny slits.
Garry wiped his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. It was a gesture which said, let’s clear the slate and look at this one more time with a fresh perspective. Let’s try to see the position more clearly.
In the pressroom, I noticed that the fourteen-year-old Rumanian prodigy, Gabriel Schwartzman, was having a conversation with Michel Noir, the mayor of Lyon. Gabriel was a remarkable child. At the time, he was very short; with his baby face and bangs he could have passed for eleven. But Gabriel spoke five languages fluently and was one of the three or four best chess players in the world for his age. I had known him for several years, from international youth tournaments, and whenever we spoke I had the uncomfortable sensation that he fully grasped my meaning while I was still struggling to bring it into focus. Gabriel sought out adults for conversation; he had little interest in palling around with other teenagers, but was pleasantly curious about them. When he was with me, he would inquire about Josh or relate an observation of his own about my son, as if we were two caring parents engaged in shop talk. I had never seen Gabriel run or play, except with chess pieces or a computer data base. To get to chess tournaments around the world from Rumania, he had learned how to wheel and deal with organizers, airlines and sponsors. Like Kasparov, young Gabriel knew that his chess life had forced big trade-offs. His arresting smile played against gestures that were road-weary, and hinted of an awareness of the transitory nature of things.
Gabriel spelled out to Michel Noir the terms of a match he desired between himself and Eloi Relange, the youth champion of France. From his confidence
and tone, it sounded like he was tidying up a done deal, though this was the first that the mayor or anyone else had heard of it. Gabriel spoke of appearance fees, the prize fund, even suggested a playing site in Paris, unless Noir preferred to have it here in Lyon. Noir, one of the smoothest politicians on earth, was taken aback by the composed quality of this short boy with his Buster Brown face and weary eyes. The mayor was at a loss for words, and while he vacillated, Gabriel noticed me standing by and immediately improvised boldly. Since he was planning to go to the United States soon to play the champion Joshua Waitzkin, he said, with a pregnant glance in my direction (which I took to mean, Mr. Waitzkin, why not a match between me and Joshua?), the U.S. match would provide momentum and advance publicity for the French match, which would make it attractive for a commercial sponsor. Perhaps Air France would be interested? What do you think, Mr. Noir? Noir did not know what to think. Young Gabriel was a show-stopper. He and his father had arrived here from Rumania like gypsies, with little money in their pockets and nowhere to stay. In the pressroom, Gabriel traded his bewitching smile for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which he shared with his father. While I watched him, I was again reminded of the privations of this sport. If Gabriel had been born with comparable talent in tennis, he would already be a millionaire. There is no other sport in the world like chess, where the world champion can make millions and the third or fourth in line is fortunate to make a few thousand, and after the first twenty, you’re out of luck, buddy.
“They have both lost their confidence, but the question is, who is more afraid?” Former world champion Boris Spassky was commenting on game 18 for several journalists who were taking notes. Since losing the world championship to Bobby Fischer, Spassky, an engaging showman, had spent much of the past twenty years traveling the world doing analysis at important tournanments, and giving simultaneous exhibitions and speeches in which he described his match with Fischer and enticingly alluded to recent conversations on the phone with Bobby. Occasionally he played in serious tournaments. But now, in his early fifties, Spassky seemed to lack heart and stamina. In such events, he often sought quick draws, much to the dismay of tournament organizers who had paid his appearance fee. Before the reporters in the pressroom, he was pompous, theatrical, funny. He imitated the high nasal speaking voice of Karpov. Mimicking Kasparov, he lumbered around like a gorilla on speed. He grabbed his nose with his hand to signal that there was something rotten about how Karpov and Kasparov were playing, but teasingly refused to elaborate. Then he crossed his fingers to signal that the game would be a draw. “They do not want to fight.” His melodic voice dripped with disgust.
Nearby, grandmaster Iosif Dorfman was speaking to another Russian grandmaster. “They both play very strange,” he said, in response to Karpov’s pawn sacrifice. Dorfman is one of the several great chess trainers in the world. From 1984 through the last match, he had been a respected member of the Kasparov team, but this time he had not been asked back. “When you are on the inside, you have a feeling for the order of the openings,” he said, meaning that the players cunningly set one another up for later games with opening choices in earlier ones. “But now.” He shook his head. He didn’t know if Kasparov had lost all direction, or if being on the outside, he had lost all perspective. After serving on Kasparov’s team, to be a spectator was strange and humiliating. Dorfman was confused about why he had not been invited back.
Later, Garry explained to me that it had been nothing personal. “We needed a little change,” he said. “A breath of fresh air. Each time I like to change one member of the team. Bring in some new ideas.” It made sense, but it was also cold-blooded. Dorfman’s dismissal did not leave him in the same position as, say, a professional football or hockey coach who has lost his job but knows that he is likely to be picked up by another team in the league. In the chess world, the descent from the world championship team is precipitous. In the pressroom, Dorfman looked forlorn, a man who had been cast out of paradise. Maybe in the next match, Mikhail Gurevich would be on the outside looking in.
Kasparov has said that, in the struggle to outdistance one another, he and Karpov have been able to push the outer limits of the game. At the same time, each has learned to play in the style of the other. In game 18, while Kasparov pondered his response to Karpov’s pawn sacrifice, he found himself having to defend a relatively passive position while up a pawn. He was the guinea pig, as it were, for Karpov’s carefully-devised gambit, a classic role reversal. “There is no question that the novelty is a good one,” offered senior master Maurice Ashley, who was known for his own creative sacrifices and tactical melées. “It creates a lot of problems for Kasparov.”
“Karpov decided to use this innovation because he knows that sometimes after I’ve lost a game, I’m vulnerable in the next one,” explained Kasparov. “He wanted to catch the initiative.” But in this match so far, novelties had often failed. The one who had had to play against the deeply-researched innovation, with his back against the wall, so to speak, had often found inspiration to create a winning idea over the board. “Game 14 showed something about the psychology of innovations,” observed Kasparov. “I made an innovation. It was a long, exciting plan. But in my home preparation, I had made an error. In the game, I spent twenty-eight minutes on my first eighteen moves, and Karpov spent one hour and forty-two minutes. Later on, when the complications started, Karpov was better prepared for it. [He understood the position better.] He made better moves and got to a winning position. I had to concentrate very hard to save the game . . . Of course, sometimes the innovation is very good and wins,” he added.
The pressroom was far more populated than usual for game 18, because Bessel Kok, chairman of the Grandmasters Association, had scheduled a GMA meeting for that evening. In the past few months, the chess world had slipped into a state of organizational chaos. In the June agreement between the GMA and FIDE, the two warring organizations had agreed to split a share of revenue from world championship matches and to divide a number of organizational responsibilities pertaining to chess worldwide. But in the months since it had become less clear who was in charge of doing what. The grandmasters tried to address this muddy question. Then they squabbled for an hour over several technical rule changes.
There was an air of unreality about the meeting. In the theater and on the monitors in the pressroom, Kasparov offered a pawn sacrifice to win back the initiative. None of the grandmasters seemed to notice or care. This was arguably the pivotal game of the match, but Bessel and the grandmasters were locked into their own agenda. It was as if the commissioner of professional football were holding a league meeting to debate the merits of instant replay, while Joe Montana was in the midst of a thrilling fourth-quarter drive in the Super Bowl.
Making things even more bizarre, many, if not most, of the propositions discussed directly or indirectly impacted upon the world champion. Should the current practice of adjournments during tournaments and the world championship be continued? The ensuing debate was grave and acrimonious, as though the outcome would be written in chess history for centuries to come. But if Kasparov retained the championship, he would certainly refuse to allow this board to legislate any change in the playing rules for his defense in 1993. What about the grandmasters’ ambitious plans for GMA tournaments in the future? Little more than wishful thinking. No one at this meeting knew if Kasparov would even agree to play in GMA tournaments, and without his name and charisma, it was difficult to believe that organizers would put up big sums to hold these events.
The grandmasters seemed oblivious to the futility of their decision making. Running through this lengthy meeting was a general distaste for Kasparov, and a reckless optimism that professional chess could do without him. Garry’s withdrawal from the GMA before the match had angered a number of his colleagues, who grumbled about his need to get his own way. One of the grandmasters called Garry “a demagogue impersonating a democrat,” and another branded him “a typical communist.” A large majority of th
e players favored Karpov in the match, and several days before, when he had won game 17, a group of them stood and cheered. In 1984, Karpov had been much hated in the chess world, but grandmasters in Lyon were calling the new Karpov “a regular guy” and “a gentleman,” claiming that when you got to know him, “he was very kind.”
Bessel seemed to be the only one who truly understood that without Kasparov the GMA was an empty shell. He wanted Garry to take back his position as president of the organization. Privately, he spoke of his break with Garry sadly. “It was a good synergy between us,” he said. “A very forceful, driving top chess player and someone who could structure and think strategically how to build up an organization. Garry and I both wanted to have a totally independent organization [from FIDE], but I like to make tangible progress, to sign a contract and then get on to the next goal. Garry is the man who says no way, we have to go full bore, no compromise. He thinks I’m too slow. I think he is too rough. He says we should take over the interzonals.* I say, who is going to organize it? Who’s going to find the sponsors? Garry is always one year ahead. He doesn’t look backwards. He always looks forwards. I admire him, but he doesn’t [think in terms of infrastructure]. We have to create a strong base. Sometimes Garry makes jumps in logic. We must build step by step, and he doesn’t think this way.”
As the grandmasters debated into the second hour, Nigel Short, who was considered a possible challenger for the championship in 1993, introduced a new topic—the necessity to focus more or less exclusively on improving the careers of only the very strongest of the world’s grandmasters. The organization was in no position to assist weaker grandmasters as well, he said. While Nigel was explaining his position, which made a few of his lower-rated colleagues uneasy, fourteen-year-old Gabriel Schwartzman raised his hand from the back of the room. “Gentleman,” he began in his Rumanian-accented English. “Vat about the children? Vat about the children?” Gabriel pleaded that the GMA must find some means of financial assistance for talented but impoverished teenagers around the world who wanted to develop into strong players. If not, he said, professional chess was ultimately doomed. While Gabriel spoke, I recalled the army of children in the streets of Timisoara, Rumania, where I had first met him at the international youth world championship two years before. Rumanian players with unsmiling faces and threadbare clothes had seemed physically hungry for wins when they squared off against rosy-cheeked Western opponents wearing high-performance Nikes. The grandmasters in Lyon had no answer for Gabriel. “Vat about the children?” Gabriel’s unexpected plaint silenced the drone of chess politics for a minute or two, and soon after the GMA meeting sputtered to an end.
Mortal Games Page 23