Garry Kasparov Featured in NY Times Magazine

Garry Kasparov featured in The New York Times Magazine

In "Garry Kasparov, the Man Who Would Be King" (August 6, 2014), Steven Lee Myers does a great job of laying out the complex political landscape faced by the former world champion as he seeks the presidency of FIDE and, ultimately, to support opposition to Putin.  A must read for chess players.

Kasparov Reviews "Chess Metaphors"

Garry Kasparov's "The Chess Master and the Computer" (The New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010) offers not only an excellent review of Diego Rasskin-Gutman's Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind but extensive reflections by the world's greatest chess player on the effects that computers have had on the game.  I especially liked the way he sums up some of those effects:

There have been many unintended consequences, both positive and negative, of the rapid proliferation of powerful chess software. Kids love computers and take to them naturally, so it's no surprise that the same is true of the combination of chess and computers. With the introduction of super-powerful software it became possible for a youngster to have a top- level opponent at home instead of needing a professional trainer from an early age. Countries with little by way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies. I am in fact coaching one of them this year, nineteen-year-old Magnus Carlsen, from Norway, where relatively little chess is played.

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

The availability of millions of games at one's fingertips in a database is also making the game's best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hours to become an expert" theory as expounded in his recent book Outliers. (Gladwell's earlier book, Blink, rehashed, if more creatively, much of the cognitive psychology material that is re-rehashed in Chess Metaphors.) Today's teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to retain it all. In the pre-computer era, teenage grandmasters were rarities and almost always destined to play for the world championship. Bobby Fischer's 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002. Now twenty, Karjakin is among the world's best, but like most of his modern wunderkind peers he's no Fischer, who stood out head and shoulders above his peers—and soon enough above the rest of the chess world as well.

 Hat tip The Chess Mind.

Kasparov Wins Big in Valencia

Garry Kasparov won the series of fast play games against his arch-rival Anatoly Karpov by a final score of 9-3, "exactly as their ratings predicted" according to ChessBase (which has a nicely illustrated report -- as does ChessVibes). Dennis Monokroussos has annotated all of the blitz games (which Kasparov won 6-2) as well as the two remaining rapid games from the first two days of the match (which Kasparov won 3-1). See my previous post for additional links.

Kasparov - Karpov, Valencia

The rapid game rematch between World Chess Champions and long rivals Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov is underway in Valencia, Spain. ChessBase's "Karpov - Kasparov: Match starts in Valencia today" has good photos, but ChessVibes's "Kasparov Crushes Karpov" has even better ones. Hans Ree has the best commentary in his recent "Kasparov as Lion Tamer" (from his Dutch Treat column at ChessCafe), where he compares it to "a tennis match between Björn Borg and John McEnroe" which fans of a certain generation will watch "with great interest, hoping to see some fine shots, but mainly to evoke old and cherished memories."

The fans did get to see at least one fine shot so far, which came in the second game (see diagram below).

Kasparov - Karpov, Game 2 in Valencia
White to Play and Win

You can follow the games live and after at Chessgames.com's Kasparov - Karpov Rapid Match page, TWIC, ICC (with membership or free trial), or the official site. Next games start at 1 pm ET on September 23. And visit The Chess Mind, where Dennis Monokroussos is annotating the games, with good notes on the first two. Karpov blundered to end the first game with 24.Ne6?! (better 24.b4! unclear) -- possibly losing on time as he did so. But Kasparov's fine shot in the second game was hard to see coming.

Good commentary at Mig's blog (of course), at Dylan Loeb MacClain's Gambit blog (plus NY Times coverage), and from Macauley Peterson's Chess.fm Blog. And take your pick from a Google News search. The match is definitely sparking interest around the globe.

Garry Kasparov Training Magnus Carlsen

News broke today that former World Champion Garry Kasparov, widely seen as the greatest chess player in history, has been training 18-year-old Magnus Carlsen, currently ranked #4 in the world and one of the most likely contenders for the world title. ChessBase quotes Espen Agdestein, who sums it up nicely: "This is the king training his crown prince." Here are some links, and I will add to them as more stories emerge.

• Breaking News: Carlsen and Kasparov Join Forces at ChessBase
  The first story, with the best photos.
  
• Garry & Magnus by Mig Greengard
  Greengard, a friend and adviser to Kasparov, gives the inside scoop.
• Magnus Carlsen: "My Job Is to Improve My Chess" by Peter Doggers
  Interview with Carlsen confirms that this is not a fantasy.
• Garry Kasparov hired as chess trainer for Magnus Carlsen by Steve Goldberg

Kasparov Interview at ChessCafe

Hanon Russell has an excellent interview with Garry Kasparov (permanent PDF) at ChessCafe today, where you will also find a positive review (permanent PDF) of Kasparov's latest book Garry Kasparov on Modern Chess, Part 2: Kasparov vs. Karpov 1975-1985 which analyzes every game between the two Ks. Russell seems to do an interview with Kasparov practically every year, and all can be found at the Skittles Room archive.

Latest Low Blow Against Kasparov

I do pride myself on maintaining a family friendly blog here, but this bizarre incident is too shocking to let pass without notice. Go directly to the YouTube video, since you will have to see it to believe it. Truly surreal and almost funny, until you realize that it is an evil Putin trick. According to Mig Greengard, in a comment on one of his blog posts, this was the work of pro-Putin forces out to discredit Kasparov by making him look like a fool. Mig apparently refused to give this more press, however, by making a separate post, though that would have been helpful.

Note: I have corrected my initial post on this subject and hope other bloggers do as well. I have also changed the link. The original video I saw of the event had a misleading translation.

Kasparov's "Life After Chess"

"Life After Chess" is the title of an interview with Kasparov that appears in Newsweek (February 25, 2008). With the death of Fischer (which still receives daily comment in the press) and Kasparov's continued high profile, chess seems quite prominent in the popular press. But as these two giant figures become less central to the game, who will represent chess on the public stage? One of the more interesting exchanges in the Newsweek interview is quite suggestive:

Q: Do you think you're the last chess champion to be well known so broadly?
A: I think it's probably a correct assessment, because chess has changed, you know. It's more like tennis, because the champions are changing too often. If somebody's No. 1, so what?

Reviews of "How Life Imitates Chess"

Carl Schreck's "Game Theory" (online today at Moscow Times website) presents a balanced but ultimately very critical review of Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess, even calling the former champion a "bad businessman," in apparent reference to the failure of "Kasparov Chess Online" (for which Kasparov himself was hardly to blame). I have read reviews both positive (The Wall Street Journal's "It's Your Move") and negative (The Observer's "He was more fun when he was in the pawn squad"). For those seeking to judge for themselves, BusinessWeek features two excerpts from the book: Garry Kasparov's Endgame and Kasparov's Crisis in Seville. I welcome comments from anyone who has read the book.

Kasparov on Bill Maher

Kasparov's book tour continues, also serving (it appears) as a public relations campaign to solidify Western support behind his bid for the Russian presidency. It almost makes you glad that Kasparov has given up chess, since that means he is more likely to appear on TV. His appearance on Bill Maher's show went much better than his mock-interview with Colbert. But both appearances made me recognize the accuracy of Paul Hoffman's portrait of him in King's Gambit as a pugilistic interlocutor, always out to win an argument--or to turn ordinary conversations into arguments to be won. In this case, it served him well and he ruled the board according to ChessBase, Maher's guests, and even Maher himself. I'm curious to see if he can sustain this level of play into the endgame.

Kasparov on Colbert Tonight (Must See TV)

Garry Kasparov will appear tonight on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. The former World Chess Champion and Russian presidential candidate will likely use the time to promote his book How Life Imitates Chess, but he will no doubt talk politics with the brilliant fake-conservative talk-show host. BTW: if you do not know Colbert's work, be sure to check out the amazing video of him roasting President Bush (and the press) at the White House Correspondents Association dinner.

"The Tsar's Opponent" in The New Yorker

For those who wonder about the status of Garry Kasparov's campaign for the Russian presidency, David Remnick's "The Tsar's Opponent: Garry Kasparov takes aim at the power of Vladimir Putin" (The New Yorker, October 1, 2007) makes an excellent and informative read. I am always intrigued by the way that chess becomes conflated with politics (see here, here, and here for instance), and Remnick's analysis is often quite astute in this regard. I was especially struck by the following aside about the way that chess championship matches are always mapped onto concurrent political situations in the public imagination:

Like heavyweight championship bouts, matches for the world chess championship have a way of taking on political meaning. Bobby Fischer’s psychodramatic match with Boris Spassky in Iceland, thirty-five years ago, was a Cold War epic (of a particularly neurotic type). In the popular press, it was not enough to say that Spassky failed to contend with Fischer’s brilliant and unpredictable openings; more comprehensibly, it was a triumph of American ingenuity over a sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy.

In 1984, when Kasparov made his first bid for the world title, the political drama was purely Soviet. The regime was in its last year before perestroika. Konstantin Chernenko, a career apparatchik, directed the imperium from his sickroom. His senescence was a symbol of the regime. The market stalls and store shelves were bare. The technological age had arrived—but not in the Soviet Union. Karpov, the world champion, was an exemplar of the Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko “era of stagnation,” an obedient member of the nomenklatura. As a player, he was a defensive artist, whose style, like Kutuzov’s in war, was to absorb and smother attacks and then destroy his confounded opponent. Like Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, he was a living symbol of official Soviet achievement.

Kasparov represented a new generation. At twenty-one, he was ironic, full of barely disguised disdain for the regime. He was a member of the Communist Party until 1990—his chess ambitions required it—but no one saw him as subservient. Rather, he was cast, in his challenge to Karpov, as a champion of the young and of the outsiders. His chess style was swift, imaginative, daring—sometimes to the point of recklessness. Karpov painted academic still-lifes; Kasparov was an Abstract Expressionist.

The full text of this wonderful article is available online at The New Yorker's website along with a 22-minute audio clip ("His Next Move") from Remnick's interview with the former chess champion.

Life Imitates Chess

There is an intriguing review of Garry Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess in this week's Times Literary Supplement titled "Garry Kasparov's Deadly Game" by Daniel Johnson. In some ways it is less a review than a reading between the lines to find an explanation for Kasparov's most dramatic life decision: to give up chess for the dangerous game of Russian politics. With his recent arrest (he was released after a $38 fine) and with Putin's approval ratings in the 70 percent range (well over twice those of Bush and Blair), you have to wonder about his chances for success. Yet, as Johnson concludes his review: "this coded manifesto of a book is only the latest sign that his courage at the chessboard has not deserted him in the political arena."

Kasparov vs. Putin

Every week at the club, one of our members asks me when I think former World Champion Garry Kasparov will turn up dead like the many Russian journalists we are hearing about in the news. I hope that never comes to pass, though he is surely risking a great deal. The New York Times has a good story in today's paper titled "Kasparov, Building Opposition to Putin One Square at a Time" (more permanently available in the International Herald Tribune). Kasparov reveals that since the famous incident where he was attacked with a chessboard, he now travels with bodyguards to ward off similar crazy people. But he has a realist's (some might say "fatalist's") view of his chances of surviving an assassin's attack. As he says in the Times piece: "If the state goes after you, there’s no stopping them.”

A student of Botvinnik's, Kasparov has approached chess as he approaches life, with as much objectivity as he can muster. As he says: "I am absolutely objective ... I think we can lose badly, because the regime is still very powerful, but the only beauty of our situation is that we don't have much choice." I continue to be impressed. So long as the regime does not sweep the pieces from the board in anger to end the game, I think Kasparov has the best chance of anyone to win it.