Anatoly Karpov

◇Growing up in the Urals

Karpov was born on 23 May 1951 in Zlatoust, an industrial town in the Ural Mountains, and learned the moves at the age of four. In his memoir My Sister Caissa he recalls picking up the rules by watching his father's games; only castling and the en passant capture had to be explained to him. When he began to cry over a lost game, his father told him that if he cried again they would never play again, and Karpov calls those his last chess tears (ch. 2). At twelve he traveled to Moscow for a session of Mikhail Botvinnik's chess school, as Garry Kasparov recounts in My Great Predecessors, Part V (p. 208). Botvinnik's first assessment was skeptical, but the homework he assigned made Karpov consult chess books and work on his opening play. Karpov later spoke warmly of that schooling.

Botvinnik's own Three Matches of Anatoly Karpov gives a measured account of his changing opinion. Karpov's play in a clock simultaneous in Moscow in the winter of 1964 had not particularly impressed him. By February 1969, after Karpov scored 10/11 on the junior board in a Soviet team competition, Botvinnik was publicly predicting success in the World Junior Championship (p. 6). In The Ninth Vertical, written with Alexander Roshal, Karpov recalled that Botvinnik had blundered his queen in that simultaneous game. Karpov asked Botvinnik's assistant to offer Botvinnik the move back, and when Botvinnik declined, Karpov deliberately made an oversight in return, and the game was drawn (p. 20).

At fifteen, in 1966, he became a Soviet master. In 1969 he won the World Junior Championship, and in 1970, at nineteen, FIDE awarded him the grandmaster title after he made the norm at Caracas. In My Sister Caissa he recalls that Soviet officials at first refused the organizers' request for him and Leonid Stein, and gave way only after the president of Venezuela telephoned Premier Alexei Kosygin; their papers caught up with them in Paris. He led for a long time, then let a completely won game against Borislav Ivkov slip and finished out of the prizes, but he still made the norm (ch. 4).

◇The crown nobody handed lightly

The road to the title ran through the 1974 Candidates, and Karpov had to beat three very strong opponents: Lev Polugaevsky, then the former champion Boris Spassky, and finally, in the Candidates final, Viktor Korchnoi, whom he beat +3 −2 =19. The winner was to challenge Bobby Fischer for the world championship.

Karpov later recalled that the match with Polugaevsky brought him a friend. His opponent remained courteous despite the losses, and the two discussed their games openly and in detail. Those analyses drew them closer. “If only all matches would end in this way!” he reflected, as quoted in Kasparov's My Great Predecessors, Part V (p. 248).

That match never happened. Fischer demanded conditions FIDE would not grant in full, and in 1975 the federation's president Max Euwe declared the title forfeited. Karpov became the twelfth World Chess Champion without playing a championship match against Fischer. He had earned the right to challenge through the Candidates, but the unplayed match left him without a victory over the reigning champion.

In My Sister Caissa Karpov calls the unplayed match a great loss, and says that ever since he had felt he was playing sometimes at half strength or eighty percent, rarely at ninety. He met Fischer in Tokyo on 25 July 1976, in talks arranged by Florencio Campomanes, then in Córdoba, and a final time in Washington in 1977. By then the terms were drafted, but Fischer insisted on calling it a world championship of chess professionals, a name Karpov knew the Soviet authorities would not accept. Campomanes persuaded Fischer to sign and settle the name later. Fischer picked up his pen, then put it down, saying he could not agree piecemeal, and Karpov understood that the match would never take place (chs. 6–7).

His own account in Learn from Your Defeats is more specific. After being recognized as champion on 3 April 1975, he wanted to be an active titleholder and was back at the board two months later. That book names Bugojno, but the results table in his One Hundred Winning Games shows that he first played there in 1978 (p. 317). His first tournament as champion was the Vidmar Memorial at Portorož and Ljubljana in June 1975, as Vlastimil Hort's Portoroz/Ljubljana Grandmaster Chess Tournament 1975 records (p. 1). He won it unbeaten with 11/15, a point ahead of Svetozar Gligorić (p. 12). In The Ninth Vertical Karpov wrote that there he first felt how hard it is, both psychologically and physically, to play as champion (p. 149). Learn from Your Defeats also examines his losses from his first years as champion. In its preface he asks, “How do I relate to these losses? Calmly.” He studies the mistakes behind those defeats (preface, p. iv; p. 1).

◇The art of the squeeze

Restriction was central to Karpov's chess. He put his pieces on effective squares, limited the opponent's counterplay and increased the pressure until an inaccuracy gave him something concrete to exploit. His clear technique drew comparisons with José Raúl Capablanca.

His choices also depended on the opponent. In a 1978 commentary quoted by Kasparov, Karpov explained that he preferred simple positions against Tal and tried to complicate the play against Petrosian. He chose the continuation he considered most effective rather than automatically taking the simplest path (My Great Predecessors, Part V, p. 242). His 1974 win against Wolfgang Unzicker at the Nice Olympiad remains a leading example of his restrictive positional play.

In Find the Right Plan with Anatoly Karpov, written with Anatoly Matsukevich, the two authors make that idea explicit: “Restricting the mobility of your opponent’s pieces (and in association with this: domination by your own) – is the most important law of chess.” They present it as a working hypothesis for examining positions (p. 122). In Beating the Grünfeld, Karpov gives a concrete example. Annotating 31.a3 against Kasparov in game 17 of their 1990 title match, he writes, “Why hurry? The fruit will ripen of its own accord.” His passed pawn advanced later, and Kasparov resigned after move 40 (p. 107).

He could also choose a much less controlled fight. Annotating his win over Musil at Portorož/Ljubljana in 1975 for Hort's book, he wrote: “When you are consciously playing for a win you sometimes have to avoid the objectively strongest move in order to keep the position tense and complicated” (p. 109). Against Jan Timman in the fourth game of their 1990 Candidates final in Kuala Lumpur, he played 51.Qh1 and allowed his queenside pawns to fall while pursuing a kingside attack. He explains in Beating the Grünfeld: “I didn’t feel like settling for a draw, and decided to provoke mind-bending complications by abandoning my queenside to its fate while going ahead on the kingside. Obviously there could be no question of calculating the variations to the end.” Karpov eventually won, while acknowledging in his annotations that accurate defense would have held a draw (pp. 167–172).

◇Tournament life

Learn from Your Defeats includes a loss that had little to do with the position. Against Alexander Beliavsky at Leningrad in 1977, Karpov had about a minute left for the final move before the time control. He considered five replies to a check, became absorbed in choosing between them, and forgot the clock. Only when the chief arbiter, Vladas Mikenas, approached his table did he realize that his time had expired. He ended the account: “But you can’t argue with the clock!” (pp. 17–18).

His commitment to playing also appears in his account of Montreal 1979. His father died in March 1979. Karpov was playing in a tournament in Munich when a doctor urged him to return to Leningrad; he withdrew, but his father had died before he reached the hospital (My Sister Caissa, ch. 7). Karpov says he would have declined the Montreal invitation if he had not already promised the organizers he would attend. He went despite the bereavement, believing that his withdrawal might prevent the planned tournament from taking place (Learn from Your Defeats, p. 41). He shared first place with Tal.

At Amsterdam in 1987 he shared first place with Jan Timman and was declared the winner on tie-break. Dutch gardeners had spent eight years trying to produce a pink chrysanthemum, and it had been decided beforehand that the new flower would be named after the tournament winner. “And if you, the readers of this book, hear somewhere about the ‘Karpov Chrysanthemum’, then please don’t think that its name was my choice,” he wrote in The Semi-Closed Openings in Action (p. 30).

◇Korchnoi, and a Cold War on sixty-four squares

The man Karpov beat for the right to the crown became the great antagonist of his reign. Viktor Korchnoi defected from the Soviet Union in 1976, and when he twice fought his way back to challenge the champion, the matches carried the full freight of the era — the loyal Soviet titleholder against the exile the state had branded a traitor.

At Baguio City in the Philippines in 1978 the match ran to the very edge: Karpov led, Korchnoi clawed it level, and the champion finally took the last decisive game to win +6 −5 =21. The 1981 rematch at Merano was no contest at all — Karpov won so crushingly, +6 −2 =10, that it entered chess lore as the Massacre in Merano. For seven years he had turned back every challenger the world could send.

In the post-match interview collected in World Championship Match: Merano-81, Karpov explained what Baguio had taught him. In 1978 he had treated reaching five wins as the main task and assumed the sixth would follow. At Merano he understood that the sixth was the hardest: after his fifth win, he approached every subsequent game intent on winning again (p. 11).

◇Five matches with Kasparov

Then came Garry Kasparov, twelve years younger, and the fiercest rivalry the game has seen. Their first match, in 1984–85, turned into a marathon: it ran past five months and forty-eight games before FIDE president Florencio Campomanes controversially stopped it with no result, citing the players' health, while Karpov led 5–3. When they met again in 1985, Kasparov won the title 13–11. Karpov never beat him in a match again, though he came very close: he drew the 1987 Seville match 12–12 (the champion kept the title on a tie) and lost 11½–12½ in 1986 and again in 1990. Across five world championship matches the two played 144 title games, the longest such series in history.

Karpov returned to that first match in his later books. Of its 41st game, which he could have won, he wrote in The Open Game in Action: “By winning this game I would have won the match with a score of 6:1. After this chess history would have taken an entirely different turn . . .” (p. 65). In Chess Stories, written with Evgeny Gik, he says that the Soviet federation's letter to Campomanes had asked only for a three-month break. The decision caught him unprepared, and under Campomanes's pressure he agreed to a new match; he then sent the president an open letter asking for the match to resume (pp. 14–17).

In the 1985 match he was leading before the eleventh game, which he lost with a blunder at move 22, made with no time trouble. In The Semi-Closed Openings in Action he called it “one of the most dramatic in the entire history of chess” and wrote that the defeat unsettled him so much that he did not recover his form for the rest of the match (pp. 55–56).

In The Semi-Open Game in Action, Karpov describes the end of the 1985 match without evading his loss: “I resigned in this position and was the first to congratulate Kasparov on obtaining the title of World Champion.” He also acknowledges that Kasparov's successful results in their Sicilian games affected him psychologically. In the 1986 rematch he did not open a single game with 1.e4 (pp. 7, 14).

A TASS interview reproduced in Averbakh and Taimanov's World Championship Match Karpov–Kasparov records his plans immediately after the 1985 defeat. He intended to play first board for the Soviet team at the World Team Championship in Lucerne, beginning on 16 November. He thought further competition would help him recover better than shutting himself away and dwelling on missed opportunities (p. 144).

Losing the title didn't finish him. When Kasparov broke away from FIDE in 1993, Karpov took the FIDE world title and held it for the rest of the decade, beating Jan Timman in 1993, Gata Kamsky in 1996 and Viswanathan Anand in the 1998 knockout final. And in 1994, at Linares, the supposedly fading champion had perhaps the greatest tournament result in history: 11/13 against the strongest field ever assembled, two and a half points clear of Kasparov himself, with a performance rating of around 2985.