How Life Imitates Chess by Ethan

Author:Ethan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 2011-04-01T05:27:13+00:00

PART III

QUESTION SUCCESS

Success is the enemy of future success

We know that complacency is a dangerous enemy. Satisfaction can lead to a lack of vigilance, to mistakes and missed opportunities. (ienerally we are interested in curing the disease, not just treating i lie symptoms, but in this case we run into something of a paradox. Success and satisfaction are our goals, but they can also lead to negative patterns of behaviour that impede greater success and satisfaction, or even to cata strophic failure at a key moment.

On 9 November 1985 I achieved my lifelong goal of becoming world champion (if it is proper to discuss lifelong goals when they are attained at the age of twenty-two). During the celebrations I was taken aback by the words of Rona Petrosian, the wife of the former world champion. 'I feel sorry for you,' she said.

The greatest day of your life is over.' What a thing to say at a victory party! But I often heard those words in my head in the years that followed.

The gravity of past success

I he next fifteen years were a constant battle to augment my strengths and eliminate my weaknesses. I was always convinced 1 hat if I worked as hard as I could and played to the best of my ability no one could defeat me, and I felt that way until the day I retired in February 2005. So how then to explain my loss to my countryman Vladimir Kramnik in our 2000 world championship match? We have already looked at his success purely at the chess level, at how he managed to select the battlefield for our contest. I his strategic failure on my part had deeper origins, however.

I had always known that psychology played a role in chess, but it took the loss of my title to show me just how big a role. One of the strongest points of my game had always been the ability to adapt to meet new challenges, and Kramnik's strategy used that against me. Despite feeling uncomfortable in the positions he led me into, I insisted that I would be able to adjust during the match in time to recover and win. Realistically there wasn't enough time for this in a match of only sixteen games. In my first world championship match, against Anatoly Karpov in 1984-5, there had been no limit to the number of games. I had had time to adapt and recover. I wouldn't have that chance in London.

It was difficult for me to realize this because of where I was in my career at the time. In the two years prior to the October zooo match I had been playing some of the best chess of my life, refuting the critics who had predicted the end of my reign at the top of the rating list. They pointed to my advanced age - at thirty-five I was already a decade older than most of my opponents. In 1999 I pushed my record rating to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.