I WROTE this a long time ago.
The Romance of the Chess World Championship Match and the World Champions that won them: 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.
Magnus Carlsen.
The crocodile in the swamp.
Carlsen, the long awaited next great Western master after Fischer, is the first post-Soviet era raised World Champion. His ascension therefore represents a new era in chess.
He has dominated international chess for four years before wresting the World Championship title from Anand. He is expected to become the next dominant World Champion after the likes of Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Fischer, Karpov, and Kasparov; and not merely a first among equals.
And with no close competitor from among masters of his age bracket and younger, there is every indication that he is going to reign for a long long time. (When I wrote his, I didn’t know he was going io abdicate.)
Perusing through his games, my first impression was that Carlsen closely resembles Karpov in style, and it’s still my impression at present. However, the more I ponder, the more I now think that Carlsen also plays like some kind of super-Petrosian.
Like Karpov and Petrosian, Carlsen rarely produces scintillating sacrificial brilliancies (see his notable games); instead, he tends to produce positional masterpieces and long endgame grind-outs.
Carlsen’s style is to grab every square, diagonal, and file that he can, while prophylactically disallowing effective counterplay by calculating nearly every variation within say a 5 move ‘radius’; and simultaneously creating weaknesses in his opponent’s camp and playing against them thoroughly until literal exhaustion.
The prophylaxis is especially important in his style; and he does it far better than any other active player today.
In this sense he plays quite similarly to Karpov and in a way like a super-Petrosian. Imagine a more active Petrosian unwilling to give away early draws and is as relentless as Fischer is in endings, playing out every little advantage until there is nothing left to play for.
He is a great defender and counter-puncher. He is the only current top master who seems comfortable in maneuvering his pieces, often in the 1st and 2nd ranks, in cramped but sound positions.
With his trademark grinding game, he inexorably and progressively grabs squares away from his opponent at every opportunity, and his ability to exploit the most miniscule positional advantages and conjure wins out of seemingly dead dry endgames has already become legendary.
Addition: As for openings, in many of his games, he possesses minimum opening preparation. Carlsen’s technique is to often get out of the ‘book’ (and the computer) as quickly as possible. Carlsen exemplifies the importance of knowing the principles behind the opening over rote memory of its variations (and computer analyses of these variations).
Sometimes he even ends up in openings that don’t seem to have near equivalents to other well-known ones.
The net effect in any case is that his opponent (and Carlsen too) is forced to play on his own early on, relying mostly only on his knowledge of the principles of chess, experience, good attitudes, and inherent abilities, with just the scoresheet and clock beside him, and the chess board in front.
The way most games have been played for hundreds of years. (There seems to have been another World Champion that was also famously known for this.) (Send comments and
suggestions to mabuhibisaya2017@gmail.com)/PN
