Garry Kasparov was back. There was the familiar sight: elbows on the
table, hands on his head, pieces humming. It wasn’t the first time he
had been spotted at the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis:
since retiring, in 2005, Kasparov has been an ambassador for the game
and a consistent presence in the little chess
paradise constructed by the businessman Rex Sinquefield. Still, this was
different. He was playing in his first rated tournament in twelve years,
the St. Louis Rapid and Blitz. This counted.

The crowds were out to see him. The chessboards on the sidewalks were
taken. Tourists wandered in and out of the city’s World Chess Hall of
Fame. Audiences lined the silent gallery where the players sat and
filled the entrance to the club, where the polished online feed
featuring grand-master analysis with the aid of a computer engine was
showing. The room at the chess-themed diner next door, where two grand
masters analyzed the games as they happened, without help of engines,
was packed. The audience swelled online as well; more than a million
viewers, a record, tuned in to the high-production stream. “The Garry
effect,” the commentators called it.

“I will be the most desired prey in the history of chess,” Kasparov had
mostly joked before the start of play. And it was mostly true; everyone
wanted to beat him—though, in truth, the top players were probably more
concerned about one another. They were playing for a
hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar total purse, and some were competing
for a spot in the Candidates Tournament, which decides who will face the
world champion for a chance at the crown. The atmosphere was a little
more relaxed than it had been the week before, in the more prestigious
classical Sinquefield Cup. Magnus
Carlsen,
the reigning world champion—and the man who beat Kasparov’s ranking
points record—had already left town. The faster time controls of rapid,
where players have twenty-five minutes to make all their moves (plus a
delay before the clock starts), and blitz, where players have five
minutes (plus delay), favor craftiness and creativity. The games were
likely to be crazy. Still, there was something to prove against
Kasparov. The man often called the greatest player in history was a wild
card, literally and figuratively.

In the first round of the tournament, Kasparov faced Sergey Karjakin.
Karjakin can be seen as Kasparov’s heir in Russian chess, the latest in
the country’s formidable lineage. (It also includes Vladimir Kramnik,
who beat Kasparov for the world title in 2000, and who remains an active
top player.) Last fall, Karjakin competed against Carlsen for the world
championship. He came in as the underdog, but used his fantastic
defensive skills to hold games that another player might have lost,
managing to make games of slow attrition into thrilling theatre.
Karjakin even briefly held the lead, winning a five-hour eighth game
after drawing the first seven, but a loss in the tenth evened the score,
and two more draws meant a playoff, which Carlsen won. In Russia, the
near success was good enough to confirm Karjakin as a star.

Their nationality, though, is nearly all that Kasparov and Karjakin
share—and barely that. Kasparov has spent the past twelve years as a
prominent dissident, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. (David
Remnick’s 2007 Profile of him was titled “The Tsar’s
Opponent.”)
He has Croatian as well as Russian citizenship, and in St. Louis he
played under both flags. Karjakin was born in Ukraine and moved to
Russia in 2008. He was granted Russian citizenship by Presidential
decree, and he has been a vocal supporter of Putin, who has, in turn,
been a supporter of him. Where Kasparov was known as a dynamic, tactical
player in his prime, Karjakin’s nickname is “Minister of Defense”—during
the world championship, Kasparov
describedthe younger Russian’s game as “drab.” In response, Karjakin said that
the relationship between them was nonexistent, and that Kasparov was
doing “a lot of bad things.” Asked to compare the older Russian with
Carlsen, Karjakin said he favored Carlsen’s style; Carlsen, he said, was
“a more universal chess player.” Karjakin and Kasparov are both famous
for their intense preparation—but the nature of that preparation has
changed. Karjakin grew up playing blitz online. He once estimated that a
top player like him spends more than $150,000 on computer engines and
hardware for training purposes.

In that first match, Kasparov and Karjakin played to draw. Over the next
two days, Kasparov made another four draws and one loss. Not bad,
considering, but not the triumphant return that some of his fans were
hoping for. Kasparov is not a man accustomed to celebrating ties. He
consistently came out of the opening well—it was obvious that, despite
his insistence otherwise, he had seriously prepared for this
tournament—but he was constantly down on time, which made it harder to
convert any advantage. Again and again, Kasparov found himself in a
defensive posture as the clock ran down.

On Wednesday, in the seventh round, against David Navara, a
thirty-two-year-old Czech grand master, Kasparov started to look like
the king of old. Playing with the white pieces, he chose a sharp line,
including a pawn sacrifice on move nine that allowed him to activate his
more powerful pieces faster and gave him a strong blockading knight and
big positional advantage. Before he made a move, his fingers would
flicker over the position, then he would swiftly slide a piece into its
proper place—or, occasionally, he’d pause with his hand on the piece,
then move it somewhere else, as if listening to some corrective voice in
his head. After trading queens with Navara, he seemed almost certain to
convert his advantage to a win. Navara’s position was completely lost.

But, instead of making an obviously good push with his pawn, Kasparov
rubbed his chin and moved his knight instead. And, suddenly, the huge
advantage was gone. Navara, not Kasparov, saw the brilliant final
combination: a pretty queen sacrifice that led to a second promotion of
pawn to queen. When Kasparov realized his fate, he leaned back, looked
at the ceiling, and resigned. While Navara helped the arbiter reset the
board, Kasparov grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair and left
the hall. When I asked Yasser Seirawan, a four-time U.S. champion and a
contemporary of Kasparov, whether he had ever seen anything like it from
the Russian, he did not hesitate before answering no. Blunders happen,
even to the top players, especially in short time controls; many of the
games in St. Louis, in fact, were a crazy, exciting mess. But they don’t
usually happen like that to Kasparov, whose consistency was part of his
brilliance. “Seeing Garry here is great,” he told me, “but not seeing
him at his best is not so great. Getting old is not all it’s cracked up
to be.”

In the next round, Kasparov secured an unconvincing win against Quang
Liem Le, who was the 2013 world champion in blitz. This time, it was his
opponent who blundered. In the final round of the day, Kasparov played
Fabiano Caruana, a former U.S. champion currently ranked third in the
world. In person, Caruana is Kasparov’s inverse—twenty-five years old,
quiet and birdlike. But as a player, he shares several qualities with
Kasparov: incredible preparation, fantastic calculation skills, the
ability to find unsettling strategic moves, and fierce competitive
intensity. Rather than use a more contemporary opening, Caruana, playing
white, chose a line that Kasparov was familiar with. He told me later
that he regretted that decision. Kasparov quickly neutralized white’s
opening advantage. But he mismanaged the clock yet again, taking minutes
on standard moves that most top players would have spent seconds on.
Caruana knew there was danger, but he played with a characteristic
assertiveness. “Once it got sharp, he didn’t really have time to
consider the options,” Caruana said. For those who looked to the
tournament hoping to indulge in some nostalgia, it had been a rough few
days. Kasparov lost against Caruana, finishing the day tied with Navara
and with the other older player present, Viswanathan Anand—a former
world champion himself, and the man whom Kasparov had faced for the 1995
Professional Chess Association world championship—for last place.

When the blitz portion began, on Thursday, Kasparov once again sat
across from Karjakin. Given another chance to beat him, Kasparov played
the King’s Gambit—apparently for the first time in his life—and chose a
rare line. (“Garry has said that he hasn’t been doing anything different
than before retiring,” the American Hikaru Nakamura told Chess.com prior
to their first game together. “We all know that’s not true.”) Karjakin
countered with several offbeat moves of his own, trying to elude
Kasparov’s preparation. It seemed to work, as Kasparov eventually handed
Karjakin a free pawn, and Karjakin weakened the defense around
Kasparov’s king. Karjakin was clearly winning, but, somehow, Kasparov
found the tactical resources to draw again.

They played for a final time on Friday. By then, their tournaments had
diverged completely. In nine rounds of blitz on Thursday, Kasparov came
away with only one win and several frustrating losses. Karjakin,
meanwhile, had won seven—an incredible result, considering how common
draws are among the super-élite players. (He also drew Levon
Aronian,
the tournament leader.) With the white pieces, Karjakin played an
unconventional opening, surely chosen to evade Kasparov’s plans against
him. He gained a time advantage. In the middle of the game, Kasparov
moved his queen and, before he even removed his hand from the piece,
immediately saw that it would allow Karjakin to play a critical tactic.
Kasparov pulled the queen back, but it was too late; he had already
touched the piece, and it had nowhere good to go. He slid it back to the
poisoned square. The clock was ticking, and his king was exposed. Less
than thirty seconds. Fifteen. With five seconds left, he faced a losing
ending. The king resigned, and the young Karjakin, continuing his
brilliance, soldiered on.

This is what happens as time passes: it starts to slip and stretch and
rebound in strange ways. Kasparov started to discover his form as the
day continued, racking up two wins in a row against the top American
players. But it was too late; he could only hope to climb a little way
up the leaderboard. Aronian, a daring, devilish player, clinched the
tournament when he drew Kasparov. Before that match, when asked whether
it would be meaningful to clinch the tournament with his result against
the old champion, Aronian had shrugged and said he didn’t care.