Anatoly Karpov
Anatoly Karpov
Anatoly Yevgenyevich Karpov, PhDis a Russian chess grandmaster and former World Champion. He was the official world champion from 1975 to 1985 when he was defeated by Garry Kasparov. He played three matches against Kasparov for the title from 1986 to 1990, before becoming FIDE World Champion once again after Kasparov broke away from FIDE in 1993. He held the title until 1999, when he resigned his title in protest against FIDE's new world championship rules. For his decades-long standing...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionChess Player
Date of Birth23 May 1951
CountryRussian Federation
I have found after 1.d4 there are more opportunities for richer play.
You can't play chess if you're groggy from pills.
If the opponent offers keen play I don't object; but in such cases I get less satisfaction, even if I win, than from a game conducted according to all the rules of strategy with its ruthless logic.
Like dogs who sniff each other when meeting, chess players have a ritual at first acquaintance: they sit down to play speed chess.
I still love to play chess. So I do not even spend a minute on the possibility to step back.
To be champion requires more than simply being a strong player; one has to be a strong human being as well.
The first great chess players, including the world champion, got by perfectly well without constant coaches.
By all means examine the games of the great chess players, but don't swallow them whole. Their games are valuable not for their separate moves, but for their vision of chess, their way of thinking.
Chess is everything: art, science, and sport.
If, in our first match for the world champion's title, I had managed to make the score 6-0, there would have been no Kasparov as a good chess player at all.
I didn't know so well chess theory, the theory of chess openings. And so, of course I knew the theory, but not on the level of the best players, so this was my... this was always my weakness.
Russia is a state within a state. To understand the population of Russia, you need to know the areas of the country; you need an understanding of the people and their interests.
I didn't picture myself as even a grandmaster, to say nothing of aspiring to the chess crown. This was not because I was timid - I wasn't - but because I simply lived in one world, and the grandmasters existed in a completely different one. People like that were not really even people, but like gods or mythical heroes.
But how difficult it can be to gain the desired full point against an opponent of inferior strength, when this is demanded by the tournament position!