I WROTE this a long time ago.
The romance of the Chess World Championship Match and the World Champions that won the.
There can only be two.
The champion to hold the title he beat all the masters for.
The challenger on quest for same title of yore.
Anatoly Karpov
Anatoly Karpov, one of the greatest of World Champions in chess history, has played all the post World War 2 World Champions at least a dozen times each in serious classical games except for Bobby Fischer and Mikhail Botvinnik.
Karpov holds the unique distinction of having played the most games against the most World Champions. He has negative scores against Garry Kasparov and Viswanathan Anand; tied scores with Tigran Petrosian and Vladimir Kramnik; positive scores against Vasily Smyslov, Mikhail Tal, and was massively dominating against Boris Spassky, who once complained that he could not fathom Karpov’s style.
During his heyday from 1974 to 1984, Karpov so totally dominated the chess world that tournaments he joined essentially became fights for second place, as it was almost a foregone conclusion that he would win first even before the start.
No one in the horizon played chess close to Karpov’s level then (after Fischer’s retirement and before Kasparov’s ascension). His puzzlingly peaceful but profoundly unbeatable brand of chess made it look like he was going to reign forever.
Karpov was unlucky in the sense that the latter part of his era coincided with Kasparov’s career. If Kasparov were never born, it’s possible that Karpov may have been world champion until 2000, a 25-year reign. He would have been right at Emanuel Lasker’s ballpark.
Karpov claims that the first player that he seriously studied was Jose Raul Capablanca, yet many fans see in his prophylactic style a kind of more active and aggressive Petrosian.
Karpov’s stylistic attitude in a game seems to be to control every square of the board that he could, while calculating every possible variation in an approximately five move range. This gives the impression of a prophylactic boa constricting the opponents’ pieces onto their last breath, while allowing no serious counter play.
Karpov won the title by default from Fischer who would not play him in 1975, and lost it to Kasparov in their second match in 1985.
In their fourth match in 1987, Karpov nearly won the title back, but lost in the very last game. Had Karpov drew or won that last game, Kasparov’s superiority over him would not have been that clearly demonstrated.
In the tradition of Lasker, Alexander Alekhine, Botvinnik, Smyslov, and the almost World Champion Victor Korchnoi, Karpov played world-class chess until he was 50, and until 1999, he arguably might still have had reasonable chances of beating anybody in a World Championship Match except Kasparov.
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