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Friday, June 28, 2019

The Unbeatable Karpov

     Anatoly Karpov (born May 23, 1951) was the official world champion from 1975 until 1985 when he was defeated by Garry Kasparov.  He is a member of the World Chess Hall of Fame. The Guardian has a lot of articles on Karpov HERE.  
     After becoming FIDE World Champion once again after Kasparov broke away from FIDE in 1993, Karpov held the title until 1999, when he resigned his title in protest against FIDE's new world championship rules. Wikipedia has a pretty good history of all the sordid details of the World Championship mess we suffered through during those years. Does anybody really believe Alex Khalifman, Ruslan Ponomariov and Rustam Kasimdzhanov were really world champions?
     For his decades-long standing among the world's elite, many consider Karpov one of the greatest players in history. His tournament successes include over 160 first-place finishes. He had a peak Elo rating of 2780, and his 102 total months at world number one is the third longest of all time, behind Magnus Carlsen and Garry Kasparov. In his heyday he was considered almost unbeatable. 
     Before the start of the candidates matches in 1974 most experts preferred the chances of both former world champions, Petrosian and Spassky. True, Karpov had tied for first with Leonid Stein in the star-studded 1971 Alekhine Memorial in Moscow, shared second in the USSR Chess Championship and finished equal first with Viktor Korchnoi in the Leningrad Interzonal, but few thought he had a chance in match play against the seasoned veterans. 
     Writing in the August 1974 issue of Chess Life and Review, Paul Keres considered Karpov one of the brightest stars among the rising young players on his way to a match with Bobby Fischer for the world championship. Karpov had developed a style that was rather unusual for a young GM. Most young players prefer sharp, complicated positions, but Karpov was a rare exception...he liked his chess calm and sober, not filled with complications or sharp tactics. For him it was all technique and he seldom lost a game.

     Karpov defeated Lev Polugaevsky by the score of +3 -0 =5 in the first Candidates match, earning the right to face former champion Boris Spassky in the semifinal.  Karpov actually believed Spassky would easily beat him and win the Candidates cycle to face Fischer. He was wrong. 
     Spassky won the first game, but that was it. Karpov won the match by a score of +4 -1 =6 then went on to secure the world title when Fischer wouldn’t play him and leaving the world to forever wonder what the outcome of a Fischer-Karpov match would have been.
     Kasparov put forth the opinion that Karpov would have had good chances against Fischer because Karpov had beaten Spassky so convincingly and was a new breed of tough professional. Additionally, Karpov had been steadily playing a lot of quality games while Fischer had been inactive for three years. Spassky thought that Fischer would have won in 1975 but Karpov would have qualified again and beaten Fischer in 1978. A Chessbase article discusses the issue based on computer models HERE. 


     Getting back to the Karpov-Spassky match, Spassky seemed rather uncertain of himself and did not demonstrate his usual fighting spirit. He also had trouble handling Karpov’s openings and Spassky himself had some dubious opening experiments. 
     Even so, Paul Keres thought Spassky lost the match because of psychological reasons. It was Keres’ opinion that Spassky was unsure of his opening preparation and had simply lost faith in his own abilities. Here is one of the more interesting games of the match, the third game. 

Karpov   0 ½ 1 ½ ½ 1 ½ ½ 1 ½ 1   7.0
Spassky 1 ½ 0 ½ ½ 0 ½ ½ 0 ½ 0   4.0

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