World Chess Championship 2000

The match between Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik, contested in the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, west London, in October and November 2000, is the only world championship match of the modern era in which the defending champion failed to win a single game. Kramnik won two; the other thirteen were drawn; Kasparov was dethroned 8½–6½ after fifteen games of what most observers had expected to be a comfortable Kasparov defence. The chess that produced this result was the most successful single piece of opening preparation in title-match history.

The split title

The match was, in formal terms, the second world championship contested outside FIDE’s official cycle. Kasparov had broken with FIDE in 1993, after the federation announced that his match against Nigel Short would be held in Manchester for a smaller prize than Kasparov demanded. He and Short played their match in London instead, under the auspices of the Professional Chess Association — and from that point forward, the world title was split. Kasparov defended the PCA title against Anand in 1995 and held it until 2000; FIDE conducted its own parallel cycle, which produced Karpov (by default in 1993, then a series of disputed matches) and later Anand, Khalifman, and Ponomariov as FIDE world champions.

By 2000, Kasparov’s title was widely regarded as the more prestigious — the “classical” title, conferred by lineal succession from Steinitz through Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, and onward. The FIDE title was contested in knockout tournaments with rapid tiebreaks and was treated by most of the chess world as a parallel cup competition rather than as the true world championship. Kasparov’s opponents, sponsorship base, and rating dominance had made him the obvious world champion for the previous fifteen years regardless of any organisational claim.

His selection of Kramnik as challenger followed the rejection of Anand, who had refused to sign a contract that gave Kasparov a rematch clause. Kramnik, twenty-five years old, had been one of Kasparov’s seconds during the 1995 match against Anand and was Kasparov’s chosen challenger in part because Kramnik was thought less dangerous than Anand and less likely to seize a tempo. The choice would prove to be the single largest miscalculation of Kasparov’s career.

The Berlin reborn

The reason Kasparov failed to win a game in London was Kramnik’s revival of the Berlin Defence to the Ruy Lopez — a line that begins 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Nf6 and had been considered drawish since the nineteenth century. Steinitz had played it; Lasker had played it; but after Lasker’s match against Tarrasch in 1908, the line had drifted out of top-level practice. Kasparov in particular had built his entire reputation as White after 1.e4 on the Ruy Lopez Closed (3…a6), an opening in which his preparation was overwhelming. He had never had to defend against the Berlin in serious competition.

Kramnik’s choice was strategic. He had concluded that he could not match Kasparov in dynamic, sharp middlegames; the only path to the title was to neutralise Kasparov’s whites and to create winning chances of his own with the black pieces in a separate opening (he prepared the Nimzo-Indian for that role). The Berlin would do the neutralisation: it leads to an early queen trade and an endgame which, while slightly worse for Black on paper, was so technical and so far removed from Kasparov’s strengths that he could not hope to convert it without enormous investment of energy.

The Berlin had a second virtue: it had been so out-of-fashion for so long that no one had updated the theory in computer-assisted analysis. Kramnik’s team, led by his coach Evgeny Bareev, spent the year before the match working out fresh lines in positions that the chess world had assumed to be exhausted. The result was that Kramnik knew the Berlin endgames better than Kasparov did — not by general principles but by specific move-orders and concrete piece manoeuvres.

Fifteen games in London

Game one was drawn in twenty-five moves: Kasparov played 1.e4 and met the Berlin for the first time in a serious match. He prepared no improvement; the game ended in a comfortable draw for Black. The chess press, watching Kasparov drift toward a draw in his trademark opening, registered surprise.

Game two was decisive. Kasparov, playing Black against Kramnik’s 1.d4, lost in forty moves to a quiet but precise positional squeeze. The challenger had won the first decisive game of the match. Game three was drawn. Game four: another Berlin Defence, another draw for Kramnik, another failure for Kasparov to break the line.

The pattern of the match was now clear. Kasparov could not win with White against the Berlin. He attempted to vary — switching to 1.d4 in some games, to 1.c4 in others — but Kramnik had prepared each of these too, and every game ended in a draw. By game ten Kasparov had not won a single game in the match, and the score stood at 6–4 in Kramnik’s favour.

Game ten was a Nimzo-Indian, with Kramnik playing Black; Kasparov pushed hard for a win and overreached. He lost in forty-one moves. The score was now 7–4. Kramnik needed two further draws or any other non-loss in the final five games to clinch the title.

Games eleven through fifteen were drawn — partly because Kramnik played for safety, partly because Kasparov could not find the resource to win even when he needed to. Game fifteen, the final game, was drawn in thirty-one moves; the world’s most aggressive player took a draw with the white pieces in a position where he was slightly better but no better. Kramnik became the fourteenth classical world chess champion.

Final score: Kramnik 8½, Kasparov 6½. Two wins for Kramnik, no wins for Kasparov, thirteen draws. The shortest championship match by decisive games since 1937.

Aftermath

Kasparov never played for the world title again. He continued at the top of the rating list until his retirement from professional chess in 2005, but the matches that the chess world expected — a Kramnik rematch, a unification with the FIDE title — did not materialise. He played in several proposed unification cycles that fell apart; he was beaten by an unfancied opponent in the 2002 Linares super-tournament; he retired in March 2005, citing exhaustion and a sense that the title cycle had become too political to be worth re-entering.

Kramnik defended his title against Péter Lékó in 2004 (drawing the match 7–7, retaining the title) and lost a unification match against Veselin Topalov in 2006 (controversially decided by rapid tiebreaks). He continued at the very top until his retirement in 2019, and produced — in the years 2000 to 2008 — some of the most technically refined positional chess of his generation.

The Berlin Defence has been the most-played defence to the Ruy Lopez in elite chess ever since. The opening that had been dormant for a hundred and ten years became, within five years of the London match, an obligatory part of every top player’s repertoire. Every world championship match between 2006 and 2018 — Topalov, Anand, Carlsen, Caruana — featured the Berlin in some form. Kramnik’s revival is, by general consensus, the single largest single-event change in opening theory in the post-war period.

The match’s deeper meaning is harder to pin down. Kramnik did not become a dominant champion in the way Karpov or Kasparov had been; he was beaten by Topalov and overshadowed by Anand. But the match itself — the most-feared champion of the era, defeated by an opponent he had picked himself, with an opening from the nineteenth century — became the template for everything that followed. Carlsen’s later world-championship defences would follow the Kramnik pattern: neutralise the white pieces, build winning chances slowly with the black, and let the opponent’s frustration provide the tempo. Kasparov, the architect of the modern aggressive style, was beaten in 2000 by chess’s classical style returning under a new name. It has been the dominant style at the top of the game ever since.