All played out
The king is not yet dead. but his life support system is having to work overtime. After a drawn game yesterday, Garry Kasparov’s chess world title is slipping away and only the most miraculous of escapes can save him now. The greatest player chess has ever known is about to move quietly into history, and no one knows quite why.
In sport, change comes quickly. When beaten, great champions slide at once from a vibrant present to a revered past. In boxing, a feared champ can end up at the feet of his conqueror – think of that iconic picture of the old lion, Sonny Liston, knocked out by the brash, snarling Muhammad Ali in 1964. Chess is less savage, the violence internalised, but as in boxing there is no hiding place for the vanquished champion. Kasparov, once thought invincible, is taking a beating at the hands of the young pretender, Vladimir Kramnik.
Kasparov once vowed to turn chess into a spectator sport, and yesterday he seemed to have managed it. The Riverside Studios in London’s Hammersmith, which has played host to the world championship match for the past month, was packed for the 14th encounter in the 16-game series. The hermetic world of chess is unused to the spotlight, but yesterday it had it: satellite TV vans at the stage door; a smattering of bright-looking schoolchildren noting down the moves in the auditorium; and a real buzz in the bar, where paunchy middle-aged men with miniature chess sets were waging their own battles.
Bad weather delayed the start (rain stopped play may be a first in a world championship) and when Kasparov failed to appear on stage when his name was announced, there was a moment of panic for the organisers. He has appeared edgy throughout the match, and anything seemed possible, even a default. But a few minutes later he arrived, grimaced and got down to work, tapping his foot, cradling his head in his hands and occasionally staring at the roof for inspiration.
Kasparov’s mental state has become the main talking point. On Sunday, after he had offered an early draw in a game he urgently needed to win, the humbled champion came back on stage to answer questions. “What is wrong with you, Garry?” asked a member of the audience plaintively. “It’s a long story,” replied Kasparov, who has cut an increasingly sorry figure for the past three weeks. “I will tell you when the match is over. I am tired. I don’t hide it.”
Kramnik has played very well, but observers were agreed that the real Kasparov had yet to show up. The hunched, nervous-looking figure at the board was not the player who had held the title for 15 years and terrorised his rivals. The old Kasparov didn’t merely beat his opponents, he destroyed them; but in this match the champion has played passively. Whereas Kasparov used to strut around the stage and glare, here he has looked almost sheepish.
The black-draped stage has come to resemble the set for a bleak psychological drama – Waiting For Garry, perhaps. The confidence he used to have appeared to have drained away, replaced by doubt and neurosis.
Chess is art, not science: a great player lives by his ideas. Preparation counts for much – and, by common consent, Kramnik has been better prepared than Kasparov – but true genius lies in making things happen on the board. Kasparov was, until this match, always dynamic, aggressive, scheming. But as he sat there on Sunday, faced for the fourth time in the match by Kramnik’s studious Berlin defence, he appeared to have no notion how to break his opponent down. He looked a beaten man and, by offering a draw on the 14th move, appeared to be handing the world title to his former protégé.
What has undermined Kasparov’s fighting spirit? Raymond Keene, the match director who has been striding the Hammersmith stage all month and been closer to the players than anyone else, doubts whether there is some great personal crisis at the heart of the champion’s lacklustre performance. “I don’t think it’s a personal thing,” he says. “I think it’s something connected with chess. Kasparov misjudged Kramnik. Kramnik is like an iceberg: very solid and seven-eighths below the surface. He doesn’t strain, and has been letting Kasparov make the running.”
Keene says he found Kasparov’s lack of fight in Sunday’s game extraordinary. “It was amazing. I just don’t know what came over him. I had expected him to fight to the death. If it had been me, I would have wanted to go out with all guns blazing, but he seems only to have a peashooter. He has been a great player and champion for 15 years, and it is sad that he has is going out with a whimper rather than a bang.”
“It’s an affront,” said one of the commentators on Sunday. “It’s scandalous and a bad day for chess.” It was certainly an affront to chess fans who had paid £20 for a ticket for what should have been the decisive battle of the match, though they took it remarkably well. Had it been a boxing match, with the old champ taking a dive in the first, seats would have been torn up and lobbed on to the stage. But the chess fraternity – lank-haired, plastic-bag-carrying, beer-drinking, faintly other-worldly – don’t go in for such acts of collective anger. Chess inspires a kind of insular insanity, as many of its most noted practitioners have shown.
Adam Black, the first secretary of the Professional Chess Association, which Kasparov founded when he broke away from the Fédération Internationale des Echecs (Fide) in 1993, also doubts the theory that some personal cataclysm lies behind Kasparov’s insipid form. “Kasparov has been sounding like he did when Deep Blue [the IBM supercomputer] beat him in 1997. He doesn’t seem able to come to terms with it. But he obviously wasn’t properly prepared here. In his great matches against Karpov in the 80s, he was playing for his life. He had an appetite then that hasn’t been apparent in this match.”
Black sees the defeat by Deep Blue as a major factor in Kasparov’s decline. “I think it affected his confidence,” he says. “Deep Blue removed his aura of invincibility. Before, he didn’t believe that anyone could out-think him strategically. He felt he was omnipotent and would always win in any match situation. But against Deep Blue he double-bluffed himself and tried to turn himself into a computer; he lost and for the first time he could conceive of defeat.”
Age may be another factor. Chess players, like mathematicians, are usually at their best and most creative when young. Kasparov, now 37, became champion at the age of 22, the youngest ever; Kramnik is 25; the great Russian tactician, Mikhail Tal, became champion in 1960 at 24; the eccentric American genius, Bobby Fischer, won the crown in 1972 at 29. There have been older champions – Alekhine, Botvinnik, Petrosian – but they were products of a Soviet system that tended to protect its champions. That protection no longer exists: hungry young players now go in merciless pursuit of the ageing, slowing giants of the game.
Kasparov has had a momentous 15 years as champion. Born in Azerbaijan to a Jewish father and Armenian mother, he was forced to toe the line in the old Soviet Union, even to the extent of Russifying his name (he was christened Harry Weinstein). But when the Soviet Union collapsed he was at the forefront of demands for change. He became a leading figure in the Democratic Party of Russia, an advocate of capitalism, and a contributing editor for the Wall Street Journal. He launched his own website and spends much of his time globe-trotting to promote it.
The chess player had become a global business player, and that has inevitably limited the time available for competition and preparation. Kasparov also has to divide his time between Moscow, where he lives with his wife and son, and New York, where his internet company has an office and where his former wife and daughter live. Again, such complications may not be conducive to playing top-level chess.
When we spoke before the match, I asked him whether he was match fit, and he assured me that he was. “When I’m in training I don’t do less than six hours’ preparation a day,” he said. “Even when I’m not preparing for a match, I always try to keep an hour a day to check positions. It’s like being a pianist: you have to exercise your fingers.”
He didn’t underestimate Kramnik, who had worked as Kasparov’s second in his 1995 world championship match against Vishwanathan Anand. Indeed, it was Kasparov who propelled the young Kramnik into the Russian national team and predicted that he would be the player to succeed him. But not here, or now. “I rate him very highly,” Kasparov told me at the beginning of the match. “I saw him growing from the age of 12 and I always believed he had a great talent. But everything is relative: Kramnik has a major problem in that he has never been in a tough match fight.” He has now.
Kramnik has proved durable. Unlike Kasparov, with his numerous interests and distractions, Kramnik is the ultimate chess nerd: quiet, unflappable, living for the game. He was born in a village close to the Black Sea – his father is a sculptor and his mother a music teacher – and has played chess since the age of four. Where Kasparov is voluble and charismatic, Kramnik is quiet and reserved. But that detachment has stood him in good stead in this match where, in effect, he has had to kill his chess hero and father figure. Kramnik has passed the Oedipal test.
Keene doesn’t see any way back for the former champion if he loses. “He has had the stuffing knocked out of him,” he says. Chess is unforgiving on former champions. Only two, Alexander Alekhine and Mikhail Botvinnik, have regained the title. If he does lose his crown, it would need a supreme effort to regain it. Kasparov would have to rediscover all his old single-mindedness and self-confidence. He would also have to qualify for the right to face the new champion, and that would mean pitting himself against all the ambitious twentysomethings of world chess. He may feel that, after 15 years at the summit, he does not want to start the ascent all over again.
← Out of the shadows
Joy for the jester →
