Virtuoso Performance in Seville

By J.D. Reed

Even for devoted fans, the two-month-long world chess championship in Seville had been something of a sleeper. The games had been mostly lackluster, with all but six of the first 22 ending in a draw, as the two Soviet opponents reined in their simmering disdain for each other. But last week the chess world came awake with a jolt.

! In Game 23, a stunned Gary Kasparov, 24, the world champion since 1985, was forced to concede after making an amateurish blunder. With that, Challenger and former Champion Anatoly Karpov, 36, took a 12-11 lead. To keep his crown, Kasparov had to win the 24th and final game. A draw would give him only half a point, and would allow Karpov to regain the title that he had surrendered to Kasparov two years earlier. But in the tense match game, with an astonishing virtuosity, Kasparov forced Karpov to resign. That left the final count tied at 12 and meant he retained his championship. The feat had the capacity crowd of 700 in the ornate Teatro Lope de Vega offering a 20-minute standing ovation. One expert called it the "most dramatic finish ever seen in world- championship chess."

The match was just the latest installment in the bitter rivalry between the "two Ks," as the competitors are known. The two are a study in chess contrasts. The athletic Kasparov favors flamboyant attacks and unusual defenses. Karpov, on the other hand, plays the game as though he were dissecting a microchip. In his newly published autobiography, Child of Change, Kasparov claims that he is a living example of the new Soviet glasnost and Karpov is a hidebound apparatchik. Karpov, who became champion by default after Bobby Fischer gave up the crown in 1975, has dismissed these charges as merely "part of prematch psychological warfare."

At the board, the acrimony between the two Ks could melt pawns. Their first championship contest, in Moscow in September 1984, with an exhausted Karpov leading 5-3, ended when officials of the World Chess Federation, the sport's ruling body, stopped play for "medical" reasons. Kasparov's loud complaints about political favoritism fell on deaf ears. In their next meeting, nine months later, the challenger got his revenge. He became, at 22, the youngest champion in history. Last year in Leningrad, he retained the title, beating Karpov by one point.

In Seville both players were showing signs of strain and had made elementary errors. Although Kasparov's dangerously careless play in Game 23 had badly unnerved him, he regained his composure for the final meeting last Friday. The defending champion opened the contest with an uncharacteristically conservative strategy designed to build an advantage slowly. The tactic seemed to wear down Karpov, who was short of time. When play resumed on Saturday after an adjournment, the champion methodically advanced his queen into the challenger's territory. It took just 24 moves for Kasparov to renew his hold on the title.

Afterward the weary opponents shook hands and stayed onstage for several minutes discussing the game. But the two Ks' show is hardly over. In 1990 the glasnost man must defend his title. His opponent? Don't bet against the dour "apparatchik."

With reporting by Jane Walker/Madrid