2000-11-16 - 23:59:43

The King Is Dead - Long Live The King

My other job, besides the comic store, is writing a local chess column. I've been doing it for over ten years now, and I've covered international events, but only recently I've come to think of myself as an actual chess journalist. A few months ago, much to my astonishment, I won a national award for it. So I guess that makes me part of the chess press. Heh. I made a rhyme!

A couple of weeks ago something important and historic happened in the chess world - we have a new World Champion.

I suppose I could go into a long complicated explanation about how there are really two World Championship systems in chess now, but it was generally recognized that Russian grandmaster Gary Kasparov was the real World Chess Champion.

Recently Kasparov played a match in London with another Russian grandmaster named Vladimir Kramnik and got beaten badly, 8 1/2 - 6 1/2. That doesn’t seem like a wide margin of victory but the match consisted of two Kramnik victories and 13 draws. Kasparov, one of the greatest players of all time, lost a title match without winning a single game!

Before the match, everyone was betting that Kramnik didn’t have a prayer. Kasparov is a player with a lot of match experience, and this coupled with his world-class preparation, his iron determination and fearsome reputation made him almost seem like a sure bet. Of course few took into account the fact that Kramnik had never lost a game to Kasparov and had beaten him three times (with many draws) in the last decade.

In an interview after the match Kramnik said a couple of interesting things. He explained that he'd never been afraid of Kasparov the way many of his contemporaries were. He said that he saw players so sure of losing to Scary Gary that they practically beat themselves. As a chess player myself I can testify that a surprisingly large part of the game is confidence and attitude. If you think you are going to lose, you probably will.

Still, is that the reason that Kasparov seemed unbeatable for so long? Did he have everyone hypnotized? Surely it must take more than that for him to earn the highest chess rating in the history of the game.

And truth to tell, Kasparov did not seem like himself during this match. There were reports that he seemed listless and depressed, and he himself hinted that he was having personal problems that interfered with his concentration.

I'm inclined to take this last with a grain of salt; chessplayers are famous for coming up with excuses to explain their defeats. One witty grandmaster once said that he'd never won a game from a healthy opponent!

Kasparov has been World Chess Champion since 1985. His uninterrupted reign of fifteen years is the longest in modern times: in chess history he is second only to Emmanuel Lasker who held the world title from 1894 to 1921.

So chess is now at the end of the Kasparov era - a period that has lasted over a third of my life. The question occurred to me: what sort of champion was Kasparov? Was he good for chess?

The answer is rather complicated - it seems to be yes and no.

On the positive side, there is no doubt that Kasparov is one of the all-time greats and truly deserved to be world champion. In fact, his tournament and match record over the last 15 years may be unequaled in chess history. Kasparov's results in the mid-1990s made him look frighteningly unbeatable. His tournament record in recent years has been almost as good, and it partly excused the fact that he played no world title matches between 1995 and 2000.

Kasparov has also been a great popularizer of the game. A dynamic, forceful individual, Kasparov has gotten chess a lot of media coverage during his reign as champion. For example, a few months ago I saw him on a television commercial for an internet search engine.

Not only that, Kasparov was the interview of the month for Playboy magazine (Oct. 1989) and he's been on the David Letterman Show several times. Kasparov seems to "give good interview" as they say in the trades. Kramnik is also a great player, and he also speaks very good English, but I doubt we'll be seeing him on Letterman anytime soon.

Kasparov has also made a point of doing a lot of personal appearances in the United States. Not surprisingly, he feels that since the U.S. is the most affluent country in the world that it is a great untapped market for chess.

So Kasparov has done a lot of good for chess during his reign as champion, but he's has also done some things that were very destructive as well.

In spite of all the good things Kasparov has done, probably most members of the non-chessplaying public know him as "the guy that lost the match to the computer, Deep Blue."

It really shouldn't be underestimated how big a blow that was to many people. I've talked to several people who practically gave up playing chess because of Kasparov's defeat. However, as a journalist that was covering the event, I can tell you that Kasparov didn’t have to lose that match: he made a lot of unnecessary mistakes. He didn’t take the computer seriously enough, and it was a terribly psychological blow to him when he resigned the second game in a position where he could have drawn.

I'll tell you this: Kramnik would never have lost to Deep Blue. In fact, one of Kramnik's specialties is beating computers. That's because he seems to be a big old computer nerd. Again we see the psychological factor in chess: Kasparov was overawed by chess computers, which planted the seeds of defeat in his mind.

However, Kasparov's defeat by Deep Blue did more than disappoint some chess fans. IBM feels (wrongly in my opinion) that since they have won one match they have "solved" chess, and so have utterly stopped their research into chess computers. And it's not just IBM: before the match computer firms were generous sponsors of chess tournaments and exhibitions. Now, that seems to stopped almost completely. Sponsors of chess events are always in short supply, so losing these computer firms was a real blow to the game.

And here's some more negative fallout from Kasparov-Deep Blue: prior to the match the computer firm INTEL was sponsoring a series of top-level chess events to the tune of a million dollars a year. When Kasparov agreed to play IBM's Deep Blue the first time (in 1997) INTEL took it as an affront, and yanked their sponsorship. This shows Kasparov's worst fault: he consistently has screwed over chess and his fellow grandmasters to make a quick buck for himself or to inflate his own ego.

In the 1980s Kasparov twice started "grandmaster organizations" to help organize tournament tours and boost corporate sponsorship. However Kasparov scuttled both these organizations when they got too democratic for his liking. He has a strong dictatorial streak, and tends to balk the minute someone gainsays him. He set up both those organizations as "democracies" but supported them only so long as they did what he said.

The wreckage of these organizations has left both corporate sponsors and his fellow grandmasters with the opinion that Kasparov is a prima donna and an untrustable flake. I can't say I blame them for feeling that way.

Earlier I mentioned that there are two World Chess Champions now. That is also Kasparov's fault: in 1992 he broke away from FIDE, the World Chess Federation, to set up his own World Championship. This was not good for chess, and it was not good for FIDE, especially since the World Championship was one of its major sources of income.

Now that Kramnik, a milder and more reasonable man, has the crown there are already rumors that there is a FIDE reunification match in the works. However, in many ways the damage has already been done.

So I watch Kasparov depart the World Championship stage with mixed feelings. Sometimes he annoyed the hell out of me, but he was nearly always fun to watch. I hate to admit this, but I find Kramnik kind of boring compared to his predecessor. Shhh! Don’t tell anyone I said that!

The thing that I am most curious about is: how will Kasparov take being ex-Champion? He's held the title for most of his adult life - how will his huge ego handle this loss? Will he be a great ex-champion, or a has-been?

Kasparov's shutout by Kramnik calls to mind another World Championship match from years ago. In 1921, Emmanuel Lasker (who I mentioned before) was beaten by Jose R. Capablanca 9 to 5 with Lasker not winning a single game. He did have a valid excuse though - the match was held in Havana and Capablanca, a Cuban native, was better able to handle the tropical heat than Lasker, a German.

However, in spite of this crushing defeat, Lasker went on to win many great tournaments years afterward and was one of the world's best into his late sixties. This was in spite of many personal reversals - i.e.: Lasker lost everything when he fled the Nazis in the late 1930s.

I wonder if Kasparov has that kind of strength of character? I guess we'll all find out, won't we?