McCreadyandChess

How does a world champion, who is by all accounts a quiet, courteous man, become embroiled in two of the bitterest rivalries in chess history? Even the KKK couldn’t conjure up anything nearly as nasty as the K-K-K (Korchnoi-Karpov-Kasparov) battles which dominated the chess world for well over a decade. In the following clip the trials and tribulations of being world champion are touched upon by Karpov, and then re-enforced by an ungentlemanly Korchnoi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjLU03_KqbA&feature=plcp.

Are Karpov’s remarks equally valid in the context of the modern game? Probably not, since the title of World Chess Champion does not carry quite the same weight it once did. Not only have some of the top players dropped out of the world championship cycle of late, the rating system is now seen as a more reliable indicator of true playing strength. Anand recently defeated Gelfand yet the chess-playing public largely rejected the notion that the match would establish who the greatest player in the world was, since both competitors were both past their prime and ranked outside the top three. Concomitantly, the gradual dissolution of nationalism coincidently coupled with an ascent to global internationalism in chess, over more recent decades, has dampened or destroyed much of the dogmatism which underpinned many forms of rivalry at the top; the world champion, whoever he may be from now on, cannot be backed or used by a government in quite the same way as was the case in the 70’s, by this I specifically mean there is no back drop of the cold war intensifying measures over the board.

Moving on, the book ‘The Greatest Ever Chess Endgames’ by S. Giddins, contains a game between Kurajica & Karpov (pg.56) which is interesting on a number of levels, it can be found here.  (http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1067946)

Not only does the endgame have a beautiful and instructive winning procedure but Kurajica missed a drawing manoeuvre, thus exemplifying just how incredibly tough the endgame can be even for top players. In the following position, white must not allow black to break up his kingside pawns, which he will later do with a kingside pawn sacrifice. He must create a ‘fortress’ of some kind to stop the black king from invading and should play either h3 or g4. But as several annotators pointed out, placing the pawns on light squares was, psychologically, very difficult to do.

White played 34 g3 ?! here.

It is endgames like the one above that show how strong Karpov was around the time of his ascension to the throne of world champion. Would he have beaten Fischer had they played? Probably not but the match would have been close, with the determining factors being Fischer’s mental health and rustiness.

I must confess that when I studied the above game, I had absolutely no idea of how to win or hold the draw but then I have come to appreciate just how difficult it is to understand the play of a world champion. The disparity in levels between a club player and a world champion is so great that bridging it is a task that requires copious amounts of highly exact analysis as well as a number of well-timed, insightful remarks concerning more general considerations from a guiding author, on top of the obligatory ‘enormous’ commitment by yourself…but even then the most sufficient analysis can still leave a sense of magic untouched. For club players it is probably best not to study world champions, it is more pragmatic to study players around 2400. To contradict myself slightly, here is my favourite Karpov game. http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1022951&kpage=1#reply4

Here’s a clip of Karpov excelling in an area where ex-world champions are not famed for: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQbhtNnlRIY . As one commentator says ‘The world would be a nice place if everyone were like Karpov’ -well said.

MJM