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By Yasser Seirawan
This past week was quite a trip down memory lane. It started with my coaching session for the Lindenwood University Chess team. At the instigation of one of the team members, Nolan, he suggested it might be fun to go over some of my games against the world champions and to share my thoughts, stories, emotions as well as the variations that I had calculated during the games…
A week earlier we had looked at some of my games versus Tal and Karpov. For this session I asked the team if they would like to focus upon one game in particular… A game I had played against Kasparov in Sweden during the Grandmaster Association’s World Cup tournament. Why not? And so for the next four hours (!) our focus became this one game… But what a game! To my mind this single game was the pinnacle of my career. Not because I played brilliantly and won. I didn’t. Not because it was a hard fought draw. It was. Rather because the battle involved some of the longest, sharpest, most combinative lines of play that I’ve ever calculated and had to calculate in a single game.
The game started placidly enough. In the Opening Garry had found an extremely good antidote for my favorite “Averbach Variation” in the King’s Indian Defense. I had a fantastic score in this line of play and I was amazed and overconfident when Garry played right smack dab into one of my favorite lines. Unfortunately, his play was so good that right out of the Opening I found myself in a grossly inferior strategic game. His treatment would kick this particular variation out of my Opening repertoire so good was his novelty. Under pressure I found a very good defensive plan to stay in the game and quite understandably Garry overestimated his position and played a strategic howler.
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