When you hear the words world chess champion, the familiar faces of Magnus Carlsen, Viswanathan Anand, Garry Kasparov or Bobby Fischer will flash by. Carlsen was the maverick who rose to unimagined heights; Anand the nice guy who stretched the Russian hegemony; Fischer the iconoclast; Kasparov, equally genius and controversial.
But the line of world champions — 17 names long — begins with Wilhelm Steinitz. He was crowned the world’s best player in 1886, after he reinvented his devil-may-care attacking style of youth. He influenced a generation of players, because he wrote extensively about his theories.
“Steinitz for me is the guy who wrote down the constitution. For chess, he was the guy who put down these famous rules and for many years we took them as the literal truth about how we start off in chess,” Anand once told Chess dot com.
Emanuel Lasker, who succeeded him, approached the game like science. His close circle included Albert Einstein. His methodical and pragmatic approach saw him overwhelm Steinitz. A world champion for 27 years, he considered chess as a psychological tug of war between two players. His style of play was fluid, because he believed in playing the man opposite him, not the positions on the board. Opponents accused him of playing bad moves just to upset them, because he believed that the best move on the board was the one that made the opponent most uncomfortable.
The next two— Jose Raul Capablanca and Alexander Alekhine — were as different as chalk and cheese. Once the duo was invited to watch a live performance in a theatre. Capablanca’s eyes, as the story goes, were glued to the chorus. Alekhine, apparently, never looked away from his pocket chess set.
“There were times in my life when I came very close to thinking that I could never lose a single game. Then I was defeated, and the lost game transported me back from dreamland to earth. That’s why nothing is as healthy as a beating at the right time”
José Raúl Capablanca #chess pic.twitter.com/iErCkyN0H8— JustChessMiniatures (@JustChessMini) November 19, 2024
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Capablanca, from Cuba and who worked as a diplomat, was renowned for positional play and once went eight years without defeat. Alekhine was a Soviet Union-born grandmaster who loved chess so much that he named his cat, Chess. “It was impossible to win against Capablanca,” Estonian GM Paul Keres once remarked. “Against Alekhine, it was impossible to play.”
It is said that Alekhine prepared for eight hours every day. He was a grinder while Capablanca was a natural. When Alekhine lost his title to the Dutchman Max Euwe, he relinquished alcohol, bought a cow and put himself on a regimen of fresh milk. Euwe was a math teacher with a PhD. His reign was short-lived, as Alekhine, powered by alleged bovine intervention, reclaimed the title.
Era of Soviet supremacy in chess
Only death ended Alekhine’s reign. But it opened the door for Soviet supremacy. The patriarch was Mikhail Botvinnik, an engineer who prepared like generals before wars. He sifted through his opponents’ games to find biases. If someone preferred to save his knight over a bishop, he knew about it. Stories abound on how he trained with music blaring in the background and coach blowing cigarette smoke in his face.
Despite his meticulous prep, he was vanquished first by the imaginative Vasily Smyslov, then by Mikhail Tal, nicknamed the Magician of Riga, and later by Tigran Petrosian.
World Chess Championship: Mikhail Tal takes on
Mikhail Botvinnik in an undated photo.
(Photo: @EmbassyofRussia/x)
Ever the dazzler, Tal’s knights seemed to move with a light-footed menace and his queen seemed to have additional powers than the adversary’s. Tal played with the attitude of someone who was convinced he had twice as many pieces than his opponent. His piece sacrifices were legendary.
Anatoly Karpov, Lev Polugaevsky, Garry Kasparov, and Mikhail Tal. https://t.co/bdS99k5441#chess #ajedrez #schach #scacchi #echecs #xadrez pic.twitter.com/bYhtXSYwQm
— JustChessMiniatures (@JustChessMini) November 20, 2024
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“Tal doesn’t move his pieces by hand. He uses a magic wand,” gushed Viacheslav Ragozin, Botvinnik’s trainer. Some accused Tal of trying to hypnotise them by staring into their eyes during games.
Watch: Mikhail Tal’s fans hoist his car after he became world champion
They don’t welcome world chess champions like this anymore. This is an extended version of the wonderful Latvian archival footage that captured Mikhail Tal’s arrival in Riga after winning the world championship at the age of 23 in May 1960. pic.twitter.com/lanko7PY0Z
— Olimpiu Di Luppi (@olimpiuurcan) May 10, 2023
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Conversely, Petrosian’s pieces seemed to move in slow motion. He gained advantage one inch at a time. The best compliment for his defensive style came from Fischer, who remarked that Petrosian had the ability to smell and eliminate danger 20 moves before it arose.
Boris Spassky displaced him. Spassky was a universal player, who moulded his style according to his opponent. Compared to the Soviet predecessors, Spassky became a household name because he battled Fischer for the World Championship and lost.
Fischer wasn’t dethroned. He abdicated it, with Anatoly Karpov taking his spot.
Anatoly Karpov’s demeanor in this March 1975 simultaneous exhibition at the “Pravda” headquarters is probably the closest you’ll ever see him to the role of a perfect Soviet villain in a James Bond movie. pic.twitter.com/kSmhgKM63j
— Olimpiu Di Luppi (@olimpiuurcan) November 20, 2019
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Karpov is best known for his five world championship battles against Kasparov. The latter had described their styles as ‘fire and ice’. Karpov, famous for his mastery of positional chess (act of playing for small improvements to improve overall position), killed his prey at a slow and steady pace. Kasparov, who became the youngest world champion at the age of 22, preferred clubbing his opponent on the head. “Kasparov is a knockout kind of player. He was so strong in the opening and played so aggressively and with such power that his opponents often crumbled,” Carlsen once said in an interview.
Vladimir Kramnik, the man who came after Karpov and Kasparov, was a protege to Kasparov, who assisted him against Anand in the 1995 World Championship. Five years later, the duo faced off and the protege emerged the master. Kramnik earned the moniker ‘Vlad, The Impaler’. These days, Kramnik spends time playing detective on the internet, trying to fish out grandmasters who he believes are cheating.
It is to this elusive and eccentric club that 18-year-old Gukesh is looking to join.
