World Chess Championship 1984

The world championship match between Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov, contested in the Hall of Columns of Moscow’s Trade Union House between September 1984 and February 1985, is the longest, the most controversial, and the most consequential championship match ever played. It lasted forty-eight games and five months. It produced four decisive results — three for the defending champion, one for the challenger — and forty-four draws. It was suspended by FIDE president Florencio Campomanes in mid-stride with no winner declared, the only match in world championship history to end without a sporting conclusion. And it set in motion a rivalry that would consume the next two decades of Soviet and post-Soviet chess.

The format that nearly broke the match

FIDE’s rules for the 1984 cycle specified a match to six wins; draws did not count. The format had been used in the original world championship match of 1886 between Steinitz and Zukertort, abandoned in 1907, revived in 1978 for Karpov–Korchnoi, and used again here. The intention was to guarantee a sporting result rather than a winner-by-attrition. The unintended consequence was that the players had no defined endpoint. A match between two players with similar drawing tendencies could go fifty games, or eighty, or — in principle — never end.

Karpov entered the match as the four-times-defending champion: he had won the title by forfeit from Fischer in 1975, defended against Korchnoi in 1978 and 1981, and was the strongest active player in the world by every measure except Kasparov’s rapidly rising rating. He was twenty-three years older than the challenger — Karpov thirty-three, Kasparov twenty-one — and was widely expected to win without difficulty.

Kasparov was the youngest challenger in world championship history. He had emerged from Botvinnik’s school, won the Soviet Championship at twenty, and qualified through the Candidates Tournament of 1983 by defeating Korchnoi and Vasily Smyslov. His style — sharp, dynamic, calculation-heavy — was the antithesis of Karpov’s positional restraint. The match was billed, before it began, as a clash of generations and of philosophies. Both billings turned out to be correct, but neither anticipated the duration.

The first nine games

Karpov won game three. He won game six. He won game seven. He won game nine. By the conclusion of the first nine games, the score was 4–0 to the champion. Kasparov had not drawn close to winning a single game. The match looked, in conventional terms, already decided — Karpov needed only two more wins to retain the title, and Kasparov had shown no sign of being able to win a game at all.

The chess world’s reaction was conflicted. Karpov supporters celebrated; Kasparov supporters insisted that the challenger was finding his rhythm; neutral observers wondered whether the format was producing a fair contest or merely a slow execution. The Soviet press, which followed the match daily with state-television coverage, gave Kasparov no public quarter. He had played badly in the openings, blundered in time pressure in game six, and resigned game nine in a position many commentators thought defensible. The momentum belonged entirely to Karpov.

The seventeen-game drawing streak

Then, from game ten onward, the match shifted into a pattern that nobody had foreseen and nobody could break: Kasparov, unable to win, refused to lose. Game ten was drawn in eighteen moves. Game eleven, twenty-four. Game twelve, sixty-one (a long technical struggle). The drawing streak continued through game twenty-six — seventeen consecutive draws, fifteen of them in fewer than thirty-five moves. The match was now four months old and the score had not changed since November.

Karpov’s failure to win a fifth game during the seventeen-draw streak has been variously explained as exhaustion, complacency, or careful play in the absence of pressure. Kasparov’s later account, in the second volume of his series on the great predecessors, attributes the streak to a deliberate strategy: he had concluded after game nine that he could not outplay Karpov in sharp positions and would have to wear the champion down by depth of preparation in quieter ones. The draws were, on this reading, not stalemates but waiting moves on a strategic scale.

Whichever explanation is correct, the consequence was that Karpov, by the end of February, had not won a game in nearly three months. His weight had reportedly dropped by ten kilos — a figure Soviet medical reports later confirmed. He was visibly exhausted and, by all evidence available to the press, suffering from the effects of the prolonged competition.

The comeback that forced the suspension

Kasparov won game thirty-two — his first victory of the match. He won game forty-seven. He won game forty-eight. The match score was now 5–3 in Karpov’s favour, but the trajectory had reversed and Karpov’s exhaustion was no longer concealable. Three more Kasparov wins would tie the match and bring the title within reach of the challenger.

On February 15, 1985, with the match in its sixth month and Karpov audibly close to physical collapse, FIDE president Florencio Campomanes flew to Moscow and convened a press conference. He announced the suspension of the match without a winner, the cancellation of all results, and a fresh match — best of twenty-four games — to begin in September of the same year. The grounds, Campomanes said, were medical: continuing the match would endanger the defending champion’s health.

The decision was greeted with anger by both players. Kasparov, asked at the press conference whether he agreed with the suspension, said publicly that he did not. Karpov, who had reportedly preferred to continue, said publicly that he accepted FIDE’s authority. Neither player has, in the four decades since, accepted that the suspension was a fair sporting decision. The widespread chess-world view — confirmed by detailed accounts in both players’ memoirs — is that the Soviet chess apparatus, sensing that its champion was about to lose, used FIDE’s authority to stop the bleeding.

Aftermath and the second match

The second match — the famous twenty-four-game contest of September–November 1985 — was won by Kasparov, 13–11. He became, at twenty-two, the youngest world champion in history (a record that would hold until Gukesh in 2024). The Karpov–Kasparov rivalry, which had begun in 1984 with the suspended match, continued through five more world championship matches over the following six years: 1986, 1987, 1990, 1993, and 1995. Kasparov won three; Karpov drew one and lost two; the rivalry remains the longest sustained competition for the world title in chess history.

The 1984/85 match’s place in the official record is awkward. FIDE lists it as “unfinished” with no result; chess statisticians treat it variously as a Karpov win on points (he led at suspension) or as a no-contest. The cumulative score across all six Karpov–Kasparov matches — including 1984/85, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1990, and 1993 — is approximately Kasparov 72, Karpov 60, draws 87, with Karpov retaining or sharing the title formally in 1984/85 and Kasparov holding it from 1985 onward.

Forty years on, the 1984/85 match is the case study used in every chess governance discussion of how not to design a championship format. The “first to six wins” rule has not been used since. The match-of-twenty-four-games structure that replaced it produced four further Karpov–Kasparov contests, none decided by exhaustion. And the figure of Florencio Campomanes — for many in chess the villain of the story, for some the figure who saved a player from collapse — became inseparable from the history of the title cycle itself. The suspension was the last time a non-player, by administrative action, decided who held the world championship.