Anatoly Karpov

Anatoly Karpov: The Boa Constrictor of the Chessboard

When the twelve-year-old arrived at Mikhail Botvinnik's chess school, the great man's verdict was brutal and wrong: "The boy does not have a clue about chess." Eleven years later that boy became World Champion — and spent the next decade proving he deserved a title he had won without playing a single game for it, because Bobby Fischer refused to appear.

Zlatoust to Leningrad

Anatoly Yevgenyevich Karpov was born on 23 May 1951 in Zlatoust, an industrial town in the Urals. He learned the moves at four. Botvinnik's dismissal was followed by Botvinnik's homework, which forced him into the chess literature and taught him to work; he later credited exactly that. At fifteen, in 1966, he became the youngest master in Soviet history, equalling Boris Spassky's record of 1952.

He transferred to Leningrad State University in part to study with the grandmaster Semyon Furman, whom he named as the decisive influence on his development. In 1969 he won the World Junior Championship at Stockholm with an undefeated 10/11, taking the International Master title; the grandmaster title followed in 1970. His rating climbed from 2540 in 1971 to 2660 by 1973.

A Title Nobody Handed Over

In the 1975 championship cycle Karpov beat Lev Polugaevsky, then Spassky, then Viktor Korchnoi in the final at Moscow, earning the right to challenge Fischer. Fischer demanded a match to ten wins with draws not counting and the title retained at 9–9. FIDE refused, he ignored the deadline of 1 April 1975, and on 3 April the FIDE president Max Euwe declared the title forfeit.

Karpov became champion having never faced the reigning champion — a fact that shadowed him for years. His answer was to enter almost every strong tournament on earth and win them. He took Milan in 1975, the Soviet Championship in 1976 (the first of three), Las Palmas in 1977 with 13½/15, Tilburg four times, Bugojno three times, and shared first at the 1979 Montreal Tournament of Stars with Mikhail Tal ahead of an extraordinary field. He put together nine consecutive tournament victories, a streak only Kasparov later beat. The profession stopped arguing.

He defended twice against Korchnoi, who had by then defected. At Baguio in 1978 he led +5–2 before Korchnoi came back to level, and won the last decisive game to keep the title. At Merano in 1981 he won 11–7 so comprehensively that it is remembered as the Massacre in Merano. Across six Chess Olympiads for the Soviet Union he played 68 games and lost two.

Kasparov

The rivalry that defines both men began in Moscow in 1984, in a match to six wins with no game limit. Karpov led 4–0 after nine games. Then came seventeen consecutive draws, a world championship record. He held winning positions in games 31 and 41 and converted neither. Kasparov won games 47 and 48, and FIDE's president Florencio Campomanes unilaterally terminated the match on health grounds — Karpov had reportedly lost ten kilograms. It remains the most controversial decision in the history of the championship.

The 1985 rematch was capped at 24 games, with Karpov keeping the title at 12–12. He needed to win the last game and lost it, 13–11. He challenged three more times and lost none of them by more than a point: London and Leningrad in 1986 (11½–12½), Seville in 1987 (12–12, Kasparov retaining), New York and Lyon in 1990 (11½–12½). Seville was the cruellest — he won game 23, then needed only a draw in the final game, cracked under time pressure, missed a forcing line to the draw and resigned on move 64. Across five matches and 144 games from 1984 to 1990, the score was 19 wins to Karpov, 21 to Kasparov, 104 draws.

The Second Reign, and Linares

When Kasparov and Nigel Short broke away from FIDE in 1993, Karpov reclaimed the FIDE title, beating Jan Timman, then defending against Gata Kamsky in 1996 and winning the 1998 FIDE championship against Viswanathan Anand on rapid tiebreaks. He declined to defend in 1999.

In the middle of that sits the finest tournament performance of his life and arguably of anyone's. Linares 1994 had the highest average rating ever assembled to that point, 2685, with Kasparov, Shirov, Kramnik, Anand, Topalov and Judit Polgár in the field. Karpov scored 11/13 without losing a game, two and a half points clear of Kasparov and Shirov — the best world-class tournament percentage since Alekhine at San Remo in 1930. His performance rating of 2985 stood as the highest in history until Magnus Carlsen's 3002 in 2009, and the statistician Jeff Sonas rates it the best tournament result ever played.

Why Anatoly Is Called a Genius

Karpov's specific cognitive gift was the accumulation and conversion of almost nothing. Where Tal attacked and Kasparov calculated at terrifying depth, Karpov played a game of microscopic advantages, taking minimal risk and squeezing until the position collapsed of its own weight — the style universally described as that of a boa constrictor, and most often compared to Capablanca's. He stated the philosophy himself with unusual bluntness: "If clear positional pressure leads to an endgame with microscopic chances of victory, I would choose that without thinking twice." Tal, who played the opposite way, described the experience from the other side of the board: "He is like a tank that cannot be diverted from his goal. His iron persistence is torture for the faint-hearted." Botvinnik, having revised his first impression, noted that Karpov "is emotional, like many people, but he masters and controls himself well, creating a false impression." More than 160 first-place tournament finishes, 102 months as world number one — third only to Carlsen and Kasparov — and nine Chess Oscars are the arithmetic of that method.

The counter-case has two halves. The first is the asterisk he could never fully erase: he was handed the championship in 1975 by forfeit, and although his tournament record over the next decade is the most compelling possible answer, he never did play Fischer. The second is Kasparov, who beat him in 1985 and held him off three times after, leaving the lifetime classical score 28–20 with 119 draws in Kasparov's favour. Karpov is a genius of a particular and slightly unfashionable kind — of technique, patience and self-control rather than of imagination — and he had the misfortune to be the second-best player of his era only because the best player of any era arrived in the same country at the same time.

Politics and Later Life

After 1997 he largely stopped playing classical chess for Russian politics. He had sat in the Supreme Soviet and led the Soviet Peace Fund; he became a deputy in the sixth, seventh and eighth State Dumas, joined the Public Chamber of Russia in 2005, and has chaired its ecological safety commission since 2006. He opened a chess school in Lindsborg, Kansas, in 2003, which renamed itself the International Chess Institute of the Midwest after 2022.

His politics have cost him. He supported the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and during the Russo-Ukrainian war he was sanctioned by the European Union and the United Kingdom; in March 2022 the FIDE Council suspended his title of FIDE Ambassador for Life following the invasion of Ukraine. In November 2022 he was placed in an induced coma after a head injury his daughter and the Russian Chess Federation attributed to an accidental fall. He recovered.

Legacy

He holds the Order of Lenin (1981), the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1978) and the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, third class (2001), and won nine Chess Oscars between 1973 and 1984. Asteroid 90414 bears his name. Away from the board he assembled a chess library of 9,000 volumes and a collection of Belgian and Belgian Congo philately covering 1742 to 1980, auctioned in 2011–12.

The games remain the argument. Two generations of players learned positional chess by studying how Karpov turned a slightly better bishop into a win a hundred moves later.

Achievements

• Order of Lenin — 1981
• Competed at 20th Chess Olympiad, 21st Chess Olympiad and 24th Chess Olympiad
• Discipline: chess