EVERY time I show this picture around, I always get asked about this person. He’s sullen, seemingly unfriendly and suspicious of everything and everyone around him.
Surely not a chess player? But of course, he is. That’s Gata Kamsky – formerly from the Soviet Union but now a naturalised US citizen; previously a challenger to the world chess championship title, and a contender again.
Gata Kamsky has been playing chess since he was 14.
As you read this, Kamsky is playing Veselin Topalov in Sofia, Bulgaria. They have been at it since Tuesday in an eight-game match to determine the player who will go on to meet Viswanathan Anand in a world chess championship match at the end of the year.
Eight games means a very short match. If you think that last year’s match between Anand and Vladimir Kramnik was short, this is even shorter. That means the players do not have much margin for error. If one of them were to lose a game, the match would be almost over unless the loser could strike back immediately in the next game.
So this match which is supposed to end on Feb 28, assuming that it lasts the full eight games, may finish well before this date. It will be a pity if the match ends too fast because by all accounts, this is going to be an exciting match with high stakes and involving two chess titans.
Topalov needs no introduction. Regular chess players will recognise him as one of the former World Chess Federation’s (Fide) world champions. Unfortunately in an acrimonious unification match in 2006, Topalov lost to his great rival, Kramnik.
One of the conditions of the unification match was that the loser would be required to play a special candidates match with the winner of the Chess World Cup 2007.
Now, Kamsky happens to be the winner of the Chess World Cup. He had gone through the 128-player knock-out tournament, eliminated the rest of the field and earned the right to meet Topalov.
Beneath all that sullen and unfriendly look is a great chess player who has gone through plenty of trials in his youth. He’s now 34 but he has been playing chess for more than 20 years.
He was a recognised chess prodigy. In 1989, when he was only 15, his father took him and fled Russia. The next few years were challenging and he concentrated on his chess while leaving his father to fight his off-the-board battles. It reached a stage where he felt that the rest of the world was against him.
But that’s nothing new, isn’t it? History is full of chess geniuses who believed that the world was against them. It was a lonely battle but Kamsky overcame them to reach his ultimate aim in 1995 and 1996: a shot at both the Fide and the Professional Chess Association’s (PCA) world chess crowns.
It was a very unique position for a player to be in: qualification in two separate world chess championship series at the same time. However, he failed in both matches. First, at the PCA world championship match in 1995, Kamsky lost to Anand. One year later when the Fide world championship match was played, he lost to Anatoly Karpov.
When that match ended, Kamsky announced his retirement from the game. He went to college, then later attended medical school briefly before switching to law school. During those eight years away from the public eye, he only appeared in public once to play chess and even then, it was only two games.
The year 2004 marked his gradual comeback to competitive chess. Initially, he tested the chess waters in the United States only but as confidence returned, he returned to the international chess scene. Twice, he led the United States team to a bronze medal finish at the Turin chess Olympiad in 2006 and the Dresden chess Olympiad in 2008.
In 2007, he won the Chess World Cup and earned the ticket to play Topalov in this match in Sofia.
Earlier this week, Topalov acknowledged that Kamsky was a great fighter and possessed nerves of steel. This would not be an easy match either for him or his opponent. It would be a hard fought match but one which Topalov believed he could win.
Topalov’s confidence stemmed from his recent successes in two high-level tournaments in past months. Last December, he came tops in the Nanjing super-tournament in China. Months earlier in September, there was a strong tournament in Bilbao, Spain, in which he won with a clear 1½-point margin ahead of his closest rivals.
Those results had pushed Topalov to the top of the Fide rating list in October 2008 and he has held onto this top rating spot since then. By comparison, Kamsky is ranked 20th in the Fide list.
There is an 86-point rating difference between the two players and on paper, Topalov would seem to be the favourite to win this match, especially since it is also being played in Bulgaria which is Topalov’s home country.
But don’t let this rating difference deceive us because Kamsky is also an equally experienced player. He didn’t get so far on luck alone. And in fact, Topalov has insisted many times that there is no such thing as home advantage in chess: “What do you think, people will enter and start cheering? There will be nothing like this. This is chess.”
There are various websites covering the match but the most popular ones will be chessdom (http://www.chessdom.com), Chessbase (http://www.chessbase.com) and Susan Polgar’s blog (http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com). Here’s the first game between the two players.
White: Veselin Topalov (2796)
Black: Gata Kamsky (2725)
1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 d5 4.cxd5 Nxd5 5.e4 Nxc3 6.bxc3 Bg7 7.Bc4 c5 8.Ne2 Nc6 9.Be3 0–0 10.0–0 Na5 11.Bd3 b6 12.Qd2 e5 13.Bh6 cxd4 14.Bxg7 Kxg7 15.cxd4 exd4 16.f4 f6 17.e5 (Very aggressive play by Topalov who seems intent on smashing his way through Kamsky’s position) 17….Bd7 18.exf6+ Qxf6 19.Ng3 Kh8 20.f5 gxf5 21.Bxf5 Bxf5 22.Rxf5 Qd6 23.Raf1 Nc6 24.Ne4 Qe7 25.Qh6 Rxf5 26.Rxf5 Ne5 (This was about the only move in this position because anything else would have allowed 27.Ng5) 27.h3 Ng6 28.Rh5 Rg8 29.Nf6 (Forcing further simplification into a draw) 29….Rg7 30.Nxh7 Rxh7 31.Qxg6 Qe3+ 32.Kf1 Qc1+ 33.Kf2 Qd2+ 34. Kg3 Qe3+ 35.Kh2 Qf4+ 36.Kg1 Qc1+ ½-½