MARK RUBERY CHESS

The 14th world chess champion, Vladimir Kramnik, reflected on his remarkable career in an interview with David Cox of Chess.com. Here follows an extract…

Q: Tell us about your approach to chess, because it’s very different from other players. Most are extremely competitive, with Bobby Fischer describing his attempts to “crush the opponent’s mind.” I believe you see chess in a very different light.

My case is quite strange. For most players, winning is by far the main goal. But since my childhood, I have not been competitive at all. Even now, if I play tennis or football, I don’t care about losing. I enjoy the process, and it doesn’t make any difference if I win or lose.

Instead, I just have this permanent will to become better and improve, and I think that this actually leads to a greater motivation than if I were fixated on the results. If you really like what you do and you enjoy the process, then that gives you a driving force to keep working at it, even when things are stressful.

Q: Do you think this mindset helped you during your career?

I think so, because with my approach to chess, I was never intimidated or felt afraid of anyone. I think this particularly helped against Garry, whenever we played. I could clearly see that whenever other players faced him, there was a fear, up to the point of panic. For me this was always quite strange. Of course Garry was a special player, and I’ve always had deep respect for his chess, but when you play any opponent, you’re just playing a game. You can lose, but so what?

In any relationship between two people, it’s always the case that if you don’t get intimidated, nobody can intimidate you. There’s nothing the second person can do, if you don’t feel like this. For me, playing Garry was always more of an exciting and interesting challenge. I was happy to play him because it was a chance to show my best against such a great player. For me this was only a positive feeling. Throughout my career, I always loved to play the most difficult opponents. The challenge brought meaning for me.

That’s interesting, because as well as winning the 2000 world championship match against Kasparov, you were one of the few players to hold a positive record against him in classical chess.

Besides his incredible chess strength, a signature part of Garry’s victories was this kind of psychological domination of the opponent. With almost every player, there was this feeling from the first move: “We must understand who the better player is here. Let’s prove it.”

But somehow with me, it was not the case, perhaps because I was not afraid to lose. For me it was just a game, an experience, and when you’re not afraid to lose, you don’t fear your opponent. Those two things are very connected, especially when you play a world championship match as there is a very strong psychological exchange between the two of you. I think Garry always had a very strong sense of this, and it was maybe why I was quite a difficult opponent for him throughout his career. I think it was a very strange experience for him, just because he was so used to smelling the fear of the person sitting in front of him.

One of the writer’s favourite studies…