A lot of heated exchanges back and forth between Kasparov and Carlsen

Despite trying a hand in Russian politics, Garry Kasparov seems to miss chess
Nov 17, 2013, 05.00AM IST
By: Jaideep Unudurti

Chennai. The eve of Game 4 of the world championship match between Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen. At one end of the hall is the enclosure where the board and pieces await. In the darkened hall, the stage is an island of light. The giant screen on the side shows the countdown clock to the first move.

Anand and Carlsen have already come down about 10 minutes ago, taking their private lifts. Minutes tick down. They wait in a wing just off the stage. Both sit in large armchairs, oblivious to each other, staring into space. The tension is thick, curdling the atmosphere. Photographers beat against the glass like moths. There is a sudden whoosh as the cameras swing back suddenly.

“Garry is in the hall!,” someone screams. For a brief moment, all lenses are trained away from the players, on a man, sitting in the third row. Almost reluctantly, the cameras swivel back to the stage. Garry Kasparov’s star has not faded nearly a decade after retiring. And he is not afraid to use it. Chennai is just one square he has hopped on to, a knight on a global chessboard, in his bid to become FIDE president. Next is Indonesia, Malaysia, the southeast of Asia.

Kasparov times these interventions well. He has an uncanny instinct of positioning himself in a media storm. Before and during the visit the players and organizers were inundated with questions on how Kasparov was going to be treated and so on. Like a persistent ghost of Christmas past, he turned up last year as well in Moscow for the Anand-Gelfand world championship match. He held court during Game 6 and let forth with a volley of criticism. “As for Vishy, I think he’s just sliding downhill” is a representative example.

Anand had told me after the match, “Kasparov was in complete overdrive. And he always comes up with eminently quotable statements which makes them much worse.” Boris Gelfand, the challenger then, too got plenty of abuse from Kasparov, who called him the weakest challenger ever. What he didn’t reveal was he had offered his help to Gelfand before the match.

Kasparov of course had an enormous bank of preparation or “prep” built up over two decades of duels at the top. These are chess state secrets, combinations of moves played in the opening, attacks that can gain an advantage, defences that neutralise an opponent’s onslaught. Even though prep has a half-life, decaying in usefulness rapidly, his considerable resources would still have helped the Israeli challenger.

The bespectacled, balding Gelfand, nicknamed The Professor, however is a very decent man. He refused pointblank, thus provoking Kasparov’s volcanic ire. How could anyone turn him down? Gelfand refused. No thank you, I have my own team. As Gelfand later said, “I invited people who wanted to help me and be with me to the end, not people who just wanted to hurt Anand”.

Gelfand knew exactly why Gazza had descended from the heavens, brandishing his thunderbolts. “As far as I know, Anand refused to help support him and Karpov in the battle for the FIDE presidency. He thought that after he had helped Anand against Topalov, Anand would now support him.” In the 2010 match against Topalov, Garry had Skyped Anand a few times with some inputs. Kasparov considered these favours which he hoped to cash in later. Anand showed no inclination to help Kasparov install his one-time rival Karpov on the FIDE throne.

For a man who retired to unseat Vladimir Putin he has been spending a lot of time and energy on Anand instead. As the champ once said, “”Kasparov retired in 2005, he has been trying to make me retire since 2011”. The latest appearance was another page from the Kasparov playbook. Once again he offered his help to Magnus Carlsen. With Carlsen at least he had a shared history, the wunderkind being his one-time ward in 2009-11. The Carlsen-Kasparov combine eventually foundered on the reef of the Russian’s insatiable desire to control. Hallgeir Opedal, a Norwegian journalist who wrote a book Smarte Trekk on Carlsen was in Chennai.

In an interview with The Times of India, he said “As a coach, Kasparov was quite overbearing, and Carlsen does not particularly like being always told what and how to do things. It was a clash of egos.” Matters came to a head during the Corus Chess tournament (now called Tata Steel) in Wijk aan Zee. Opedal said, “Carlsen’s round nine match against Vladimir Kramnik in Corus in 2010 rung the death knell for their association.

The night before the match Carlsen posted on his Facebook page: I’m going to crush Kramnik like a bug. It was just not very typical of Carlsen to do so, [but] he was probably driven to such an extent. Kasparov wanted to have total control, for instance he would call an hour ahead of the game and change the opening strategy. He did that just ahead of this game as well. Carlsen was not convinced about it,but did as he was told. He lost the game, his first in 39 games”. Kramnik played one of the best games of his life, a counter-attacking thriller routing the Norwegian.

Opedal continues: “After which, there was a lot of heated exchanges back and forth between Kasparov and Carlsen.” Chess commentator Leonard Barden wrote that, “For the rest of the Corus tournament, Carlsen refused to talk to Kasparov. He recovered from the defeat, but afterwards asked his father to terminate the contract. It was a bitter rejection for Kasparov, and a PR attempt to portray the split as amicable was widely disbelieved.”

Terminated! Nobody terminates Gazza’s contract. After this debacle, Kasparov cast around and roped in another young talent, the Japanese-American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura. Again this too ran a fairly predictable course. Nakamura was not particularly greatful to be a cast as a protege. The first hint was when during an interview, “Naka” damned his mentor with faint praise.

More here.