This is the game which won Vladimir Kramnik the World Championship in his match against
Garry Kasparov. This was game 15 of the scheduled 16 games and Kasparov, playing
with the white pieces simply HAD to win. As we know now he did not succeed.
Kramnik
Kasparov
There were many great reports of the match around about that time but
amongst the best was the following:
This is the how Daniel Johnson of The Guardian reported the end of
Kasparov's reign:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
It is not Garry Kasparov's defeat but rather his grace in defeat that strikes Daniel
Johnson as very odd
AT the climax of Vladimir Nabokov's chess novel The Luzhin Defence, the eponymous
grandmaster hero (marvellously recreated by John Turturro in the recent film) tells his
wife: "I have to drop out of the game." Nabokov had in mind the kind of chess
problem which is only solved by self-mate - or, in life, by suicide.
That is the situation in which Kasparov found himself. The strongest player in the
history of chess met his match in his protege, Vladimir Kramnik. After the hubris of his
15-year reign, Nemesis has struck with a swiftness that left the world champion
bamboozled, baffled, broken.
In ancient Persia, whence the game's terminology derives, checkmate meant "the
king is dead". But Garry Kasparov did not die in battle: he surrendered, capitulated,
abdicated from his throne.
The best evidence that something very odd has happened to Kasparov is that he has taken
his defeats very well. Normally he is the world's worst loser. His response to losing a
game to Nigel Short in their 1993 match was histrionic.
When I drew a long game with him at a simultaneous display three years ago, Kasparov
was so angry he refused to shake hands, though we have been acquainted for nearly a
decade. Yet towards Kramnik he has been courteous, even graceful, in defeat. He appears
not to care any more.
It is this which his tens of millions of admirers around the world cannot fathom. Why
was his play against Kramnik so lacklustre? Why could he not win once in a 16-game match?
Why, when he was struggling two games down, did he not unleash his incomparable
combinative skill?
One theory, based on his own comments, is that personal reasons connected with an
acrimonious custody dispute with his first wife have undermined his equanimity. Another,
put forward by his old rival Nigel Short, is that Kasparov's real playing strength has
been in decline for many years and he has just been beaten, fair and square, as much by
Time as by Kramnik.
Both theories may be true, yet neither explains his loss of nerve. Some have argued
that, after 15 years, he no longer has anything to prove. Emanuel Lasker, the only world
champion to lose a match without a single victory, had already offered to resign his title
to the much younger Jose Raul Capablanca and was more interested in mathematics and
philosophy. That was 1921 and Lasker was two decades older than Kasparov, who is 37, and
had held the title much longer.
It is clear that Kasparov has felt unable to give free rein to his aggression ever
since his defeat three years ago in the second exhibition match against the Deep Blue IBM
supercomputer. Although his title was not at stake, his self-confidence was. The willpower
which could crush human egos made no impact on microchips.
It was Kasparov's willpower which, 16 years ago, enabled him to hang on, four down, for
months against his predecessor Anatoly Karpov, drawing game after game until he finally
started to win and the match was stopped, in dubious circumstances, to enable the
exhausted Karpov to recover.
Kasparov won the rematch, to become the youngest world champion at the age of 22. After
the Cold War symbolism of the Fischer-Spassky match in 1972, when the American genius
broke the Soviet monopoly, no chess duel has had the political resonance of the four
Karpov-Kasparov matches fought out between 1984 and 1987.
They seemed to signify the triumph of the new, reformist Russia of Gorbachev and
Yeltsin over the Stalinist old guard. The ascendancy of the brash, open-minded,
pro-Western Kasparov seemed to anticipate the collapse of Communism.
Of Jewish-Armenian extraction, Kasparov considers himself Russian but was born in Baku,
Azerbaijan. (He had to rescue his family by helicopter during a pogrom.) His talent was
recognised when still a boy and his Jewish surname, Weinstein, was changed to Kasparov to
suit his anti-Semitic Soviet image-makers.
Trained by the former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik (an unreconstructed Communist),
Kasparov was the last and finest product of the Soviet school, founded by Lenin and
Stalin, which dominated chess after 1945.
But Kasparov was also an individualist, an entrepreneur and something of a buccaneer.
His ambition having propelled him to the top of his cerebral profession, he set about
remaking the chess world in his own image. His attempts to take over or replace FIDE, the
world chess federation, have failed. It remains a deeply flawed organisation. In 1993
Kasparov and his British challenger, Nigel Short, broke away, but after two successful
title defences, Kasparov was left high and dry.
For the last five years no human challenger could raise the $2 million needed for a
match until the dotcom revolution made it possible for a London consortium, Braingames
Network, to organise the present encounter.
Kasparov has made a fortune out of chess, but he is also a philanthropist, who has
promoted the game as an educational tool around the world. He dabbled in post-Soviet
politics, founded a party and even considered standing for the presidency. He is the
best-known Russian in the world, after Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
What will he do next? He is committed to playing in three tournaments next year.
Comebacks, though, are rare in chess. The psychological damage inflicted by defeat is too
severe. I like and admire Garry Kimovich Kasparov, but I do not know how he will survive
the loss of his nimbus of invincibility. Like Luzhin, he may have no choice but to drop
out of the game.
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