Kasparov pays tribute to Korchnoi

The first and foremost tribute and testimony comes from the 13th World Champion Garry Kasparov, whose admiration and respect for Korchnoi went far beyond the usual. These are not idle claims either. Consider Garry Kasparov's magnum opus, the five-volume series "My Great Predecessors". The fantastic work is a detailed analysis of all the world champions that preceded him, from Steinitz up.

The five volumes are more than a lovely addition to any library or coffetable, they are also
wonderful to read casually and to study. You will notice that all five volumes only have pictures
of actual world champions, except volume five, where Viktor Korchnoi was given special due.

Naturally, one cannot analyze a world champion without context of the rivals of their day, so one will see games of the other greats throughout chess history, but Korchnoi is the one exception. In the final fifth volume, two players are covered in the nearly 500 pages: one is Kasparov's greatest rival, Anatoly Karpov, and the second before him is.... Viktor Korchnoi.

Mind you, we are not talking about a quaint tribute of X pages to him, but a massive chapter spanning 200 double-column pages with 49 deeply annotated games. Whereas all the previous chapters followed a scheme of titles such as Lasker the second, or Boris the tenth, Korchnoi's was appropriately 'Viktor the Terrible'.

Kasparov justifies his exceptional decision in the first pages: "This chapter is fully comparable in size with some of the chapters devoted to world champions. Here it is a question not only of the unique length of Korchnoi’s chess career, but also of his rare inventiveness, and his tireless attempts to find something new in seemingly exhaustively studied positions. All his life he has been at the leading edge of chess thinking and he has made a valuable contribution to the development of the game. It was this fact that induced me to devote a large section to the original play of Viktor Lvovich, and to focus attention on his most important and vivid features."

The chapter on Korchnoi in volume five effectively starts at page 7 and ends on page 206

Needless to say, as a proud owner of the five beautiful hardcovers, I can only recommend it to any chess lover. There is more than just deeply analyzed games by Kasparov, which would be enough to justify the price of entry, there is a wealth of information and analysis of the players themselves. Consider this snippet from the chapter on Viktor, in which the grand old warrior casts an unflinching look at his own history and failure to become world champion:

"Later he bitterly lamented that he had lost a great deal of time in his youth, that he had not been taught to play correctly, to fight fiercely for the initiative: ‘I realised that I had to re-learn, that my play was littered with deficiencies, and that I was frequently unfamiliar with the rudiments of grandmaster chess. And for a good ten years I endeavoured to master these rudiments. In the end when, fully armed with my knowledge and understanding of chess, at the age of forty plus I was ready to battle with anyone for the title of world champion, I had already exhausted much of my God-given energy. Therefore I did not in fact manage to become world champion ... ’"

Upon learning of Viktor Korchnoi's death, Kasparov posted on his Facebook the following tribute and story:

This is the Facebook tribute and testimony posted by Garry Kasparov,
and reproduced below with kind permission

Garry Kasparov: 

"The great Viktor Lvovich Korchnoi passed away today in Switzerland at the age of 85. His longevity as a top-level player and his fighting spirit were such that it was easy to hope that he might trick Death himself in a rook endgame and live forever! Instead, we have our memories of “Viktor the Terrible” and his unmatched lifetime of games that will indeed live forever. I’m sure there will be many detailed obituaries of him, so I will limit myself here to a few personal anecdotes and impressions.

I first played against Korchnoi in 1975 when I was 13 and faced him in a clock simul in Leningrad, a traditional competition that pitted teams of youngsters against top Soviet Grandmasters. [photo] But I wouldn’t say I really met him then, since he had little time for chit-chat with young upstarts, even those, or especially those, who drew against him as I did! Korchnoi was as legendary for his irascible character and sharp wit as he was for his chess. Born in Leningrad in 1931, a survivor of the Great Siege, Korchnoi had already had a worthy chess career before becoming a repeat world championship challenger and an infamous (from the Soviet perspective) defector to the West in 1976.

I saw Korchnoi play against Karpov in 1974, during my first visit to the Hall of Columns in Moscow—where I would later play a world championship match of my own against Karpov. I was visiting with a group of coaches and students from the Botvinnik School. It was game 21 of what would retroactively become a de facto world championship match when Bobby Fischer refused to defend his title against Karpov in 1975. (I remember being shocked when Karpov missed the tactical blow 13.Nxh7!, quickly spotted by my classmates and I, and lost in just 19 moves.) Korchnoi narrowly lost that match, and then two bitter world championship matches in 1978 and 1981, a period that earned him the bittersweet title of the strongest player never to win the world championship.

Korchnoi’s energy and uncompromising search for the truth at the chessboard impressed me greatly as a teen. I recall following his 1977 candidates match with Polugaevsky with my trainer Nikitin and being amazed that such a strong player as Polu could be dominated like that. The score was 6-1 for Korchnoi after seven games!

There are too many great Korchnoi games to choose from, and I wrote about many of them in the fifth volume of the “My Great Predecessors” book series, but I will single out his fantastic endgame play against Karpov in game 31 of their 1978 match. That win also brought Korchnoi even with Karpov and a win away from the title. But Karpov won the very next game to take the match."

Viktor Korchnoi - Anatoly Karpov (1978 WCh, Game 31)

"Korchnoi had a direct impact on my life beyond his chess. We were scheduled to face each other in a 1983 Candidates match slated to take place in Los Angeles. A great deal of controversy and provocation by the international and Soviet sports authorities around which site would host the match led instead to my being forfeited. It is impossible to say what would have happened had anyone but Viktor Korchnoi been my opponent, but there is no doubt he did what he could to make sure our match was decided at the board, not the boardroom. Despite being 32 years my senior and an underdog in our match, winning without playing was unacceptable to Korchnoi. He was a man who enjoyed picking fights, not dodging them! And if he could antagonize the hated chess authorities of the USSR and Karpov in the process, more the better. (He had defected in 1976 and was non grata in the USSR and blacklisted by the Soviets. The political struggles for him and his family are well documented.)

We met to negotiate at the 1983 Nikšić tournament, when organizers later held a blitz event in Herceg Novi that broke the blacklist by including Korchnoi. (The audience even applauded when he and I shook hands at the board.) I remember Korchnoi telling me that now that I was playing in the West, I had to get better shoes, that you could always tell a Soviet man by his shoes! After negotiations to reschedule our match in London succeeded, I wanted to thank Korchnoi but he was having none of it. This wasn’t a present to me; he was planning to beat me! He was returning to form and also wanted revenge for a wild loss to me two years earlier at the Lucerne Olympiad. Indeed, he won the first game of our match in excellent fashion, showing as he would for another few decades that he wasn’t strong only for a player of his age, but damned strong period!

His run at the world championship was soon over, but the great Viktor would continue to take top-level scalps well into his sixties and seventies. Viktor Korchnoi loved chess like no one else before or since, and chess was lucky to have him for so long."