Garry Kasparov, who many consider the all-time No 1 in competition with Bobby Fischer and Magnus Carlsen, has been back in action this week in the $150,000 Chess 9LX tournament at St Louis. In Chess 9LX, also known as Fischer Random, Freestyle Chess or Chess 960, the placing of the back rank pieces is decided randomly by lot.
At 61, Kasparov still has it. Competing against the cream of US grandmasters, he made a 50% 4.5/9 total and missed chances to do still better due to his problems with handling the fast time limit of 20 minutes per player per game, with a 10 seconds per move increment. He missed winning chances against both the world No 2 and reigning US champion, Fabiano Caruana, who won the Chess 9LX event, and against the world No 3 Hikaru Nakamura, where instead of repeating moves by 38…Bc5? Black should play 38…Qb4! 39 Rxc6 Qd2+ 40 Kh3 Bg1! and White is lost.
Kasparov’s scalps were the world No 12, Leinier Domínguez, where the final stages were captured on camera, the 2023 winner and rising talent, Samuel Sevian, and the 2018 US champion, Sam Shankland.
Kasparov’s memory is still incredibly sharp. When the position for the ninth and final round was revealed, he was the only player to notice that it was an exact replica of the final round position from the 2023 Chess9LX event. He lost to Domínguez as White then, but beat Sevian as White this time.
Before the tournament, Kasparov was interviewed by the chess journalist Peter Doggers, whose recent book, The Chess Revolution, discusses chess in the 2020s.
Kasparov played matches with Deep Blue in 1996, when he won 4-2 despite losing the first game, and in 1997, when he lost 2.5-3.5 after his catastrophic defeat in the sixth and final game.
He blames his poor play in the 1997 match on the schedule, with no break between the fifth and sixth games: “After game five, I needed time to brush my thoughts, to detox my nervous system. My preparation was very poor, because I wanted to play some kind of crazy opening, not my style, but just play from the third row, from the back line. More like Petrosian style, not Kasparov style.
“As to game six: I don’t know why I did it. I just believed it would never take on e6.” There have been recent suggestions that Kasparov’s aides incorrectly believed that Deep Blue was taking its opening book from another program in which 8 Nxe6 was not mentioned.
Ironically, if Kasparov had played a different and safer opening, IBM’s team had instructions to offer a draw at move 20, to avoid what happened in 1996 when they refused a draw offer and lost. “The choice of opening was very poor, but I think psychologically I was already crushed.” The moment Deep Blue played 8 Nxe6 “I knew it was over and I wanted to finish as soon as possible.
“In the Soviet Union it was a system I had to fight. IBM was a system, but more about business … I think it got its reputation as the cutting-edge technology company, so it was a massive victory.”
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Nowadays, “you can’t say that AlphaZero or even Stockfish or other programs understand chess better than Magnus Carlsen but the gap is still 600 points.
“And to win a game against the machine, you can survive, but winning the game, the level of precision that is required to win a game against a computer is unheard of for humans. Because we always make inaccuracies, That’s the way we play. With a machine, even the smallest slip from the main road, and either you’re dead, or you can miss a win that could be reached if you just look deep and calculate everything with unheard precision for human chess.”
He enjoys Chess9LX because “by my current standards I’m not supposed to play the strongest players in the world. But again, it gives me great pleasure and sometimes I can bite.
“There’s a fundamental problem I know I cannot overcome. It’s a kind of blackouts. In my prime 25 years ago I could have won a position with my eyes closed, After a first mistake I could still make a draw but all of sudden another blackout and then I just couldn’t recover.”
3944 1…Rg1+! 2 Kh4 Rg5! and White resigned. The g5 rook guards the twice attacked knight, while if 3 Kxg5 the c pawn queens with check, leaving Black a piece up with an easy win. An immediate 1…c1=Q?? loses to 2 Rxc5+ and 3 Rxc1, when White wins on material.
