The history of sport has seen many great gladiatorial clashes: Ali v
Frazier in boxing, McEnroe v Borg in tennis, Prost v Senna in motor
racing. None however can quite compare to the intensity of the rivalry
between those two great world chess champions: Garry Kasparov and
Anatoly Karpov. Between 1984 and 1990 they contested an astonishing five
World Championship matches consisting of 144 individual encounters. This
volume concentrates on the first two of those matches. * The epic
1984/85 contest which was lasted six months before being controversially
halted "without result" by the then President of FIDE Florencio
Campomanes. * The 1985 match when Kasparov brilliantly won the final
game to take the title and become - at the age of 22 - the youngest ever
world champion. Great chess contests have often had resonances extending
beyond the 64 squares. The Fischer v Spassky match was played during the
Cold War with both champions being perceived as the finest products of
their respective ideologies. The Karpov v Korchnoi battles (three
matches between 1974 and 1981) were lent an edge with Karpov being a
Russian hero of the pre-Glasnost era whilst Korchnoi was the disaffected
dissident. The Kasparov v Karpov encounters mirrored a battle between
the new Russia and old Russia with Kasparov seen as a symbol of the new
ideology emerging under Gorbachev whereas Karpov was seen to represent
the old regime of die-hard Communists such as Brezhnev. In this volume
Garry Kasparov (world champion between 1985 and 2000 and generally
regarded as the greatest player ever) analyses in depth the clashes from
1984 and 1985, giving his opinions both on the political machinations
surrounding the matches as well as the games themselves.
