Garry Kasparov was back. There was the familiar sight: elbows on the table, hands on his head, pieces humming. It wasn’t the first time he had been spotted at the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis: since retiring, in 2005, Kasparov has been an ambassador for the game and a consistent presence in the little chess paradise constructed by the businessman Rex Sinquefield. Still, this was different. He was playing in his first rated tournament in twelve years, the St. Louis Rapid and Blitz. This counted.
The crowds were out to see him. The chessboards on the sidewalks were taken. Tourists wandered in and out of the city’s World Chess Hall of Fame. Audiences lined the silent gallery where the players sat and filled the entrance to the club, where the polished online feed featuring grand-master analysis with the aid of a computer engine was showing. The room at the chess-themed diner next door, where two grand masters analyzed the games as they happened, without help of engines, was packed. The audience swelled online as well; more than a million viewers, a record, tuned in to the high-production stream. “The Garry effect,” the commentators called it.
“I will be the most desired prey in the history of chess,” Kasparov had mostly joked before the start of play. And it was mostly true; everyone wanted to beat him—though, in truth, the top players were probably more concerned about one another. They were playing for a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar total purse, and some were competing for a spot in the Candidates Tournament, which decides who will face the world champion for a chance at the crown. The atmosphere was a little more relaxed than it had been the week before, in the more prestigious classical Sinquefield Cup. Magnus Carlsen, the reigning world champion—and the man who beat Kasparov’s ranking points record—had already left town. The faster time controls of rapid, where players have twenty-five minutes to make all their moves (plus a delay before the clock starts), and blitz, where players have five minutes (plus delay), favor craftiness and creativity. The games were likely to be crazy. Still, there was something to prove against Kasparov. The man often called the greatest player in history was a wild card, literally and figuratively.
In the first round of the tournament, Kasparov faced Sergey Karjakin. Karjakin can be seen as Kasparov’s heir in Russian chess, the latest in the country’s formidable lineage. (It also includes Vladimir Kramnik, who beat Kasparov for the world title in 2000, and who remains an active top player.) Last fall, Karjakin competed against Carlsen for the world championship. He came in as the underdog, but used his fantastic defensive skills to hold games that another player might have lost, managing to make games of slow attrition into thrilling theatre. Karjakin even briefly held the lead, winning a five-hour eighth game after drawing the first seven, but a loss in the tenth evened the score, and two more draws meant a playoff, which Carlsen won. In Russia, the near success was good enough to confirm Karjakin as a star.
Their nationality, though, is nearly all that Kasparov and Karjakin share—and barely that. Kasparov has spent the past twelve years as a prominent dissident, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. (David Remnick’s 2007 Profile of him was titled “The Tsar’s Opponent.”) He has Croatian as well as Russian citizenship, and in St. Louis he played under both flags. Karjakin was born in Ukraine and moved to Russia in 2008. He was granted Russian citizenship by Presidential decree, and he has been a vocal supporter of Putin, who has, in turn, been a supporter of him. Where Kasparov was known as a dynamic, tactical player in his prime, Karjakin’s nickname is “Minister of Defense”—during the world championship, Kasparov describedthe younger Russian’s game as “drab.” In response, Karjakin said that the relationship between them was nonexistent, and that Kasparov was doing “a lot of bad things.” Asked to compare the older Russian with Carlsen, Karjakin said he favored Carlsen’s style; Carlsen, he said, was “a more universal chess player.” Karjakin and Kasparov are both famous for their intense preparation—but the nature of that preparation has changed. Karjakin grew up playing blitz online. He once estimated that a top player like him spends more than $150,000 on computer engines and hardware for training purposes.
In that first match, Kasparov and Karjakin played to draw. Over the next two days, Kasparov made another four draws and one loss. Not bad, considering, but not the triumphant return that some of his fans were hoping for. Kasparov is not a man accustomed to celebrating ties. He consistently came out of the opening well—it was obvious that, despite his insistence otherwise, he had seriously prepared for this tournament—but he was constantly down on time, which made it harder to convert any advantage. Again and again, Kasparov found himself in a defensive posture as the clock ran down.
On Wednesday, in the seventh round, against David Navara, a thirty-two-year-old Czech grand master, Kasparov started to look like the king of old. Playing with the white pieces, he chose a sharp line, including a pawn sacrifice on move nine that allowed him to activate his more powerful pieces faster and gave him a strong blockading knight and big positional advantage. Before he made a move, his fingers would flicker over the position, then he would swiftly slide a piece into its proper place—or, occasionally, he’d pause with his hand on the piece, then move it somewhere else, as if listening to some corrective voice in his head. After trading queens with Navara, he seemed almost certain to convert his advantage to a win. Navara’s position was completely lost.
But, instead of making an obviously good push with his pawn, Kasparov rubbed his chin and moved his knight instead. And, suddenly, the huge advantage was gone. Navara, not Kasparov, saw the brilliant final combination: a pretty queen sacrifice that led to a second promotion of pawn to queen. When Kasparov realized his fate, he leaned back, looked at the ceiling, and resigned. While Navara helped the arbiter reset the board, Kasparov grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair and left the hall. When I asked Yasser Seirawan, a four-time U.S. champion and a contemporary of Kasparov, whether he had ever seen anything like it from the Russian, he did not hesitate before answering no. Blunders happen, even to the top players, especially in short time controls; many of the games in St. Louis, in fact, were a crazy, exciting mess. But they don’t usually happen like that to Kasparov, whose consistency was part of his brilliance. “Seeing Garry here is great,” he told me, “but not seeing him at his best is not so great. Getting old is not all it’s cracked up to be.”
In the next round, Kasparov secured an unconvincing win against Quang Liem Le, who was the 2013 world champion in blitz. This time, it was his opponent who blundered. In the final round of the day, Kasparov played Fabiano Caruana, a former U.S. champion currently ranked third in the world. In person, Caruana is Kasparov’s inverse—twenty-five years old, quiet and birdlike. But as a player, he shares several qualities with Kasparov: incredible preparation, fantastic calculation skills, the ability to find unsettling strategic moves, and fierce competitive intensity. Rather than use a more contemporary opening, Caruana, playing white, chose a line that Kasparov was familiar with. He told me later that he regretted that decision. Kasparov quickly neutralized white’s opening advantage. But he mismanaged the clock yet again, taking minutes on standard moves that most top players would have spent seconds on. Caruana knew there was danger, but he played with a characteristic assertiveness. “Once it got sharp, he didn’t really have time to consider the options,” Caruana said. For those who looked to the tournament hoping to indulge in some nostalgia, it had been a rough few days. Kasparov lost against Caruana, finishing the day tied with Navara and with the other older player present, Viswanathan Anand—a former world champion himself, and the man whom Kasparov had faced for the 1995 Professional Chess Association world championship—for last place.
When the blitz portion began, on Thursday, Kasparov once again sat across from Karjakin. Given another chance to beat him, Kasparov played the King’s Gambit—apparently for the first time in his life—and chose a rare line. (“Garry has said that he hasn’t been doing anything different than before retiring,” the American Hikaru Nakamura told Chess.com prior to their first game together. “We all know that’s not true.”) Karjakin countered with several offbeat moves of his own, trying to elude Kasparov’s preparation. It seemed to work, as Kasparov eventually handed Karjakin a free pawn, and Karjakin weakened the defense around Kasparov’s king. Karjakin was clearly winning, but, somehow, Kasparov found the tactical resources to draw again.
They played for a final time on Friday. By then, their tournaments had diverged completely. In nine rounds of blitz on Thursday, Kasparov came away with only one win and several frustrating losses. Karjakin, meanwhile, had won seven—an incredible result, considering how common draws are among the super-élite players. (He also drew Levon Aronian, the tournament leader.) With the white pieces, Karjakin played an unconventional opening, surely chosen to evade Kasparov’s plans against him. He gained a time advantage. In the middle of the game, Kasparov moved his queen and, before he even removed his hand from the piece, immediately saw that it would allow Karjakin to play a critical tactic. Kasparov pulled the queen back, but it was too late; he had already touched the piece, and it had nowhere good to go. He slid it back to the poisoned square. The clock was ticking, and his king was exposed. Less than thirty seconds. Fifteen. With five seconds left, he faced a losing ending. The king resigned, and the young Karjakin, continuing his brilliance, soldiered on.
This is what happens as time passes: it starts to slip and stretch and rebound in strange ways. Kasparov started to discover his form as the day continued, racking up two wins in a row against the top American players. But it was too late; he could only hope to climb a little way up the leaderboard. Aronian, a daring, devilish player, clinched the tournament when he drew Kasparov. Before that match, when asked whether it would be meaningful to clinch the tournament with his result against the old champion, Aronian had shrugged and said he didn’t care.