In 1984, at the age of 21, Garry Kasparov challenged Anatoly Karpov for the international chess championship. Karpov won the first four games with little trouble. As he faced the possibility of total humiliation at the hands of the veteran master, the young challenger adopted a new approach.
Rather than continuing his wild style of play, Kasparov decided to make more cautious opening moves. Once he took full account of Karpov’s game strategy, he launched into a series of subtle but incisive moves, striking a balance between offense and defense. The new strategy produced 17 draws over three months. In Game 27, Karpov slipped in another victory to take a 5-0 lead. But Kasparov held his ground thereafter, forcing four more draws and winning the 32nd game. After 14 more draws, he won the next two games. Stalemate ensued—for five more months. Finally, after thousands of hours of play, the president of the International Chess Federation halted play and declared a draw.
From those months of humiliation, exertion, and fleeting triumph, Kasparov emerged a new competitor and a new man. That “long and grueling tutorial” nearly re-wired his brain and launched one of the most storied careers in the history of competition.
In his new rumination on chess, life, and business, How Life Imitates Chess, Kasparov ponders his success on the chessboard and offers lessons for anyone else who thrives in a world of strategy and competition.
Kasparov writes that the key to his success against Karpov—and the key to success in general—was to become “deeply in touch with [one’s] own thought processes.” Relying less on instinct, Kasparov for the first time appreciated the far-reaching consequences of every move.
“Karpov knew that I would consistently give up material for attacking chances, and he used this habit against me in the first match,” Kasparov writes. “Only when I began to rein in that instinct did I begin to out up effective resistance. That was the moment I first began to think about why I made the moves I made.”
Masters of sports, business, and politics often believe that their trials reflect the inner logic of the world. Garry Kasparov makes a good case for chess, which is, of course, a stylized version of an actual, if ancient, form of conflict.
Though Kasparov easily could have written (or, more likely, dictated to a ghostwriter) a trite volume about chess-as-metaphor, How Life Imitates Chess reveals that Kasparov understands life, and politics, at least as well as he does the game that made him famous. In addition to compelling anecdotes about the game itself, Kasparov presents some compelling ideas that bear strongly on both business and politics.
In business, Kasparov preaches the importance of playing your own game. If you’re Nokia, Kasparov says, that means nurturing purposeful chaos—like Kasparov himself. If you’re IBM, that means a more conservative game, exploiting the moves and mistakes of others—like Karpov.
Winning, on the chessboard or in the boardroom, requires risking resources now for payoffs later—and having a strategic vision to guide tactical maneuvers. William Boeing, Kasparov notes, was no expert on flying when he envisioned his dream of an aerospace giant. But he had an intuition that air travel would become a major industry, and he backed it up with big investments in research and team-building. He was ready when Charles Lindbergh changed the national vision of air travel.
Politics also requires attention to the basic values of the battle. Bill Clinton’s 1992 “war room” won admirers for its ability to respond instantly to attacks. But Kasparov says its more valuable role was giving the campaign a focus. The famous mantra “It’s the economy, stupid” insured that everyone in the campaign spoke with one voice that resonated with the mood of the nation.
Kasparov himself has put his intellect, and his notoriety, on the line in the life-and-death world of politics. With much the same approach that he used against Karpov—careful, guerrilla-style maneuvers—Kasparov has since 2005 taken on a power no less daunting than the Kremlin itself. Kasparov sees the administration of Vladimir Putin as an affront to Russia’s burgeoning democracy. Putin has won broad support among a Russian public weary of the Yeltsin era’s chaos, but Kasparov fears a new dictatorship taking hold. He is hoping to bring his passionate and rational voice to the new Russia.
Kasparov’s challenge is that Putin still dominates the chessboard of Russian politics. Putin controls the military, Russian media, and many corporations. Still, Kasparov has access to international media, human rights leaders, and disgruntled forces inside Russia. The conflict is a far cry from the order of the chessboard, but Kasparov insists that there are common ties.
Kasparov argues that chess—quite unlike politics—is the world’s only purely intellectual form of competition. The game comprises a board and pieces that are visible to all. No one can hide assets or change the rules. Neither luck, nor misinformation, nor brute force ever comes into play. Success, then, requires a mix of cold calculation, relentless questioning, and fantasy.
Kasparov’s worldview is an exhilarating combination of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Zen mastery of living in the moment, and constant self-analysis. “Every move has a consequence; every move either fits into your strategy or it doesn’t,” he writes. “If you aren’t questioning your moves consistently, you will lose to the player who is playing with a coherent plan.”
Kasparov’s ability to concentrate on one thing—and to make it everything—requires an intellect so steady that most people probably cannot fathom. Normally, getting through the day requires taking most things for granted. The bus will arrive. The coffee will be hot. Rogue nations will behave themselves. You can’t question everything all the time, or you would never get out the door. But Kasparov suggests that even those of us who are not grand masters can learn to stop at key moments and make more deliberate decisions.
Winning requires a powerful combination of intellectual rigor and free spirit. You need to look several moves ahead (or several matches, if you’re seeking a world championship). But no matter how smart you are, Kasparov says, you can only calculate five or six moves ahead. Kasparov explains: “For every move, there might be four or five viable responses, then four responses to each of those moves, and so on. The branching of the decision tree grows geometrically. Just five moves into the game, there are millions of possible positions. The total number of positions in a game of chess is greater than the number of atoms in the universe.”
Precisely because so many moves are possible, a great chess player needs to find ways of reducing the number of viable moves. “The decision tree must be constantly pruned,” Kasparov writes.
Here’s where Kasparov turns to fantasy. He writes that he likes to imagine pieces as action figures with minds of their own, fighting in imaginary worlds. To conjure these whimsical images, Kasparov trained himself to take a daring leap away from logic.
“At the board I always tried to let my mind wander, to occasionally ignore the fog of variations and take a mental stab in the dark,” he writes. The subconscious holds more possibilities than any calculator could ever consider. Stepping outside pure rationality brings a new dimension of tactics and strategy. “Moves with an extra charge of fantasy can startle your competition into making mistakes.”
As he surveys the board, Kasparov often thinks about material, time, and quality—MTQ, in his shorthand. Each piece has an initial value—pawns 1, knights and bishops 3, rooks 5, and queens 9. But in practical terms, the pieces’ values change with every move.
In his competitive days, Kasparov usually played an aggressive game, sacrificing pawns and even a bishop (his favorite piece as a child) to set up an advance on the opponent’s king. Those pawns didn’t mean much to Kasparov except as wedges into enemy territory; but he got stuck on the other side of the board, with nothing to protect his superior pieces, the pawns would have been worth a lot more.
Kasparov’s recent involvement with an computer chess competition underscores the importance of understanding the whole game, not just focusing on moves or pieces that seem tantalizing or even brilliant in the moment. Kasparov and other masters programmed the game to force tough decisions and consequences on the players. The idea was to get the players to be more deliberate and thoughtful with every move—and always ask why a particular move was valuable, and whether it would hold its value as the opponent mounts his defense. But players were too impatient.
“Players would immediately click on whatever caught their eye and, if unhappy with the result, jump back and try again, or they’d go off in a totally different direction. They ignored most of the menu choices we worked so hard to perfect.”
Kasparov argues that this sort of reactive play reflects how people in all fields make decisions about their lives. On countless decisions—investments, home purchases, jobs, relationships, kids’ schools, and indeed sports and games— “players” tend to click impulsively and then back out if it doesn’t work and click something else. This would be fine if all we were doing was playing chess.
But from the office to fields of battle to Kasparov’s own struggle for the heart of Russia, the stakes are much higher, and the proper strategy that much more crucial. Can Kasparov and his allies challenge Putin’s thugocracy? When Putin leaves the board, can he anoint a new king more powerful than all the pawns that Kasparov and other reformers assemble? And which side can win the queen, knights, bishops, and rooks?
Even more important, can Kasparov and his allies get the Russian people to open themselves to the fantasy–and, just maybe, plot out the reality–of a free Russia?