Gray Kasprov

There are two good reasons Igor Stohl starts his second collection of Garry Kasparov’s best games in 1994. The first reason, which Stohl mentions in Garry Kasparov’s Greatest Chess Games: Volume 2, is that 1994 marks the time when Kasparov started to use computers seriously. The switch to computers made Kasparov’s games (and following him the rest of the chess elite’s games) more concrete and dynamic. The second reason to start in 1994, which is probably connected to the first one but not mentioned in his book, is that 1994 is about the time when I, Chessbug, stopped understanding any of Kasparov’s games. Although I read the games with annotations from daily papers and serious periodicals, such as New in Chess, I just could not get it, and my sense is that this is true for other amateurs.

The games would make sense in the first three moves and would start resembling chess at around move 20, but anything in between seemed totally chaotic. All the principals that I thought I understood (piece development, king safety and avoidance of long term weaknesses) were not to be seen in the games of Kasparov (and later Shirov, Morozevich, Topalov, Aronian...) What made it even worse was that most games seemed to be decided in those very moves which I did not understand. With a good annotator I could understand Capablanca, Tal, or even Karpov, but the late Kasparov games were like abstract art explained in Chinese. For this reason I thought that the greatest challenge for Stohl would be to explain the games I did not understand. Stohl handles the challenge in a most impressive way (and he even tops it with other goodies).
The first game that I rushed to see was Kasparov-Anand, as I had spent many hours with this “encrypted” game. Here are the questions I still remembered and (in parentheses) the answers I got from Garry Kasparov’s Greatest Chess Games: Volume 2. Why did Kasparov play such a dubious opening against an opponent as mighty as Anand? (Psychology, my dear Watson, Kasparov wanted to play ultra aggressive and defeat Anand just before their World Championship match) What is so wonderful about 7 Be2? (Not much, only that it has hardly ever been played before) Why didn’t Anand castle? (He probably should have castled on move 12) At what point did the game become totally won for White? (After Black’s 18th move) And, most difficult, wasn’t Anand’s resignation somewhat premature or in more direct words why the _ _ _ _ did Anand resign? (He resigns for very good reasons, which Stohl demonstrates with a couple of straight forward variations). Stohl passed the first test and I continued reading with a lot of anticipation. The rest of the games were not disappointing, not disappointing at all. Stohl has the right mixture of variation annotations, verbal explanations, some psychology and background explanations, and short surveys about the development of the opening variations Kasparov used in his games. This means you can read the book in three different levels of reading: you could either skim through the games and read it as a bedtime book, or you could read it as a guide for modern chess thinking (to see how the top players of the last decade think about the game), or, and this is the best way in my opinion, you can read every game deeply, go with the annotations and beyond and gather many chess insights. Let us take one game for example and see these three options of reading. The game Kasparov – Panno, Argentina-Kasparov simul, Buenos-Aires, 1997 is a game that you can just read through and understand its place in the history of the development of the Nimzo-Indian defense or you can read it from a “positional” interest and see the work of the passed pawn and later the restricting effect of White’s h pawn on Black’s pawns, or you can try and understand another one of Kasparov’s mysterious games. The third option can be achieved only by taking out your board, playing through the game, and going through the variations that Stohl gives. For example look at the following position: