Personal Lessons from the World Champion
When I first played for the chess world championship in 1984, I was a young challenger up against a champion who had held the title for almost ten years. I was twenty-one years old and had risen to the top of the chess world with such speed that I couldn’t imagine that this last hurdle could block my way. I was therefore shocked when I quickly found myself down four losses without a win, only two defeats away from a humiliating rout.
If ever there was a time for a change in strategy, this was it. Instead of giving in to my feelings of desperation, I forced myself to prepare for a long war of attrition. I switched to guerrilla warfare in game after game, reducing my risks, waiting for my chance. I could not afford to expose myself in an open clash, so I played cautiously, awaiting my chance. My opponent, fellow Soviet Anatoly Karpov, fell in with my plan for his own purposes. He wanted to teach the upstart a lesson by scoring a perfect 6–0 score, so he also played cautiously instead of pressing his advantage and going in for the kill.
Karpov was also inspired by the shadow of his predecessor as champion, Bobby Fischer. En route to the title he claimed in 1972, the American had scored two perfect 6–0 wins against world-class opponents, both times without ceding even a draw. Karpov had it in mind to in some measure imitate this legendary feat when he altered his strategy against me. But conjuring Fischer’s ghost turned out to be a serious mistake.
An incredible seventeen games followed without a decisive result. It appeared my new strategy was working. The match dragged on month after month, breaking every record for the duration of a world championship match. My team and I spent so much time thinking about how Karpov played, which strategies he would employ, that I uncannily felt as if I were becoming Karpov.
During the hundreds of hours of play and preparation I also got a good look at my own play, and at my own mind. Up until that point in my career everything had come easily for me, winning had simply become the natural state of things. Now I had to focus on how I made my decisions so I could fix whatever was going wrong. It was working, but when I lost game twenty-seven to go down 0–5, it looked as though I wasn’t learning fast enough to save the match. One more loss and it would be three long years before I could even hope for another shot at the title.
As the match entered its third month, I stayed in my defensive crouch. I wasn’t winning, but the change in style had made things much tougher for Karpov. I felt I was getting closer to solving the puzzle, while at the same time my opponent was becoming more frustrated and tired.
At last the dam broke. After surviving game thirty-one, in which Karpov failed to land a decisive blow, I won game thirty-two and went on the offensive. Another five weeks of drawn games followed, but the difference was that I was now creating more winning chances than my opponent. Meanwhile, the world began to wonder if the match would ever end. No championship match had ever gone beyond three months, and here we were entering the fifth. Karpov looked exhausted and I started to press harder. After coming close to winning game forty-six, I won game forty-seven in crushing style. Could there be a miracle? Exactly at that moment the organizers decided the players needed a break, and the next game was postponed for several days. Despite this unprecedented decision I also won the next game. Suddenly it was 3–5 and the momentum was on my side.
Then, in a bizarre twist, on February 15, 1985, in Moscow, the president of the international chess federation (known by the acronym for its French name, Fédération Internationale des Échecs, or FIDE), Florencio Campomanes, responding to pressure from the Soviet sport authorities, called a press conference to declare that the match was canceled. After five months, forty-eight games, and thousands of hours of play and study, the match was over without a winner. We would have to return six months later to do battle again, and next time there would be a limit of twenty-four games. Karpov was removed from immediate danger and could be content that he would hold on to his title a while longer. The official press release stated that Karpov “accepted” the decision and Kasparov “abided” it. A curious but accurate semantic distinction.
I learned a huge amount from this long and grueling tutorial. In fact for five relentless months, the world champion had been my personal trainer. Not only had I learned the way he played, I was now deeply in touch with my own thought processes. I was increasingly able to identify my mistakes and analyze why I made them. From that process I learned how best to avoid making them again, to improve the decision-making process itself. This was my first real experience at questioning myself instead of relying only on my instincts.
I recognized that I had been too aggressive due to overconfidence. This in turn made me predictable. Karpov’s vast experience allowed him to exploit my constant attempts to attack his position directly. He understood my play better than I understood his—and, more important, better than I understood my own. Karpov knew that I would consistently give up material for attacking chances, and he used this habit against me in that first match. Only when I began to rein in that instinct did I begin to put up effective resistance. That was the moment I first began to think about why I made the moves I made.
When the second match got under way in Moscow, I didn’t have to wait months for my first win; I won the very first game. The match was still a tough fight—I trailed for most of the early stages—but this time I wasn’t the same innocent twenty-one-year-old. I had patched the holes Karpov had so successfully exploited at the start of the first match. Now a savvy veteran at twenty-two, I became world champion and went on to hold the title for fifteen years. When I retired in 2005, I was still the highest-rated player in the world, but for a chess player forty-one is old. Still, I had remained at the summit for nearly two decades, while many of my opponents were in their teens.
It wouldn’t have been possible for me to stay at the top for so long without the education Karpov gave me about my own game. Not just revealing to me the weaknesses, but the importance of finding them for myself. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but the notorious “Marathon Match” showed me the key to success. It’s not enough to be talented. It’s not enough to work hard and to study late into the night. You must also become intimately aware of the methods you use to reach your decisions.
Self-awareness is essential to being able to combine your knowledge, experience, and talent to reach your peak performance. Few people ever perform this sort of analysis. Every decision stems from an internal process, whether at the chessboard, in the White House, in the boardroom, or at the kitchen table. The subject matter of those decisions will be different, but the process can be very similar.
With chess having been the focus of my life from such an early age, it is no wonder that I tend to see the rest of the world in chess terms. I find that the game is usually accorded either too much or too little respect by those who look at its sixty-four-square world from the outside. It is neither a trivial pursuit nor an exercise to be left only to geniuses and supercomputers. At the heart of the game is strategy, and that is where we must begin.