Improvement
Never Rule It Out
Genius is total openness
Opening
Anatoly Karpov is likely the most underrated world champion of anything. Most non-chess players have never heard his name, but he’s one of the most creative minds to have ever lived. The following position against Gata Kamsy (1993) offers maybe the most singularly unexpected move he’s ever played:
Kamsky (white) is putting serious pressure on Karpov’s kingside. If Karpov castles, he’ll be wiped off the board after Bxh7 (sample continuation below):
This rules out Black’s most natural developing move. Returning to the position, it looks like Karpov is simply stuck:
Black wants to develop his light-squared bishop and castle, but white is ahead in development with easy play and will likely beat him to the punch. If black slowly develops his queenside and both sides castle with straightforward developing moves, we’ll likely end up in a position where white has a slight edge.
White will castle, develop his bishop to e3 or f4 and launch a pawnstorm on the queenside, while black attempts to counterattack on the kingside. With solid play from both sides, white is playing for two results (win or draw).
Middlegame
So what can black do to create some initiative of his own? How is he going to reconcile the mid-term discord between his pieces while also escorting his king to relative safety?
Ke7!! One of the most savage moves ever played; an Allen-Iverseon-stepping-over-Tyronn-Lue kind of move.
It can’t be emphasized enough — nobody in their right mind plays Ke7. The only way this move happens in a live game is if Magnus Carlsen and Hikaru Nakamura play Ke7 as a double-bongcloud prank to the entire chess world. Even then, those two did it on their first moves and agreed to a friendly draw immediately following.
Karpov is playing this on move 11 of a classical game (game link here) against one of the world’s best in what is already an ostensibly disadvantageous position. He’s breaking every principle of opening chess:
- Get your king to safety quickly (Karpov is assuring his king remains in the center of the board with nearly every piece still in play — and while under attack)
- Avoid unnecessary problems with your king and pieces (he’s walking into a pin from white’s queen)
- Develop your pieces in the opening (he’s just not doing that); the king isn’t a piece you traditionally want to activate until the late middlegame / endgame
- Control the center (this move, at first glance, doesn’t necessarily do anything normally associated with building central control) or gain space
- Also — what are you doing Anatoly? Put that man back. Stop it.
GM Simon Williams rightly characterized this move as walking the “fine line between stupidity and genius.” But let’s look more closely — why is this move not just not bad, but great.
In our original position, Karpov is suffering from a lack of coordination between his pieces; he cannot play the move g5 so long as his king sits on e8. In our original position, the white bishop (or knight) can simply capture the g-pawn pawn because the h-pawn is pinned (if hxg5, the white queen would simply capture the black rook with check).
But beyond solving black’s weaknesses, Karpov’s Ke7 also highlights perhaps the only potential weakness in white’s camp: the white queen’s lack of squares. After Ke7, Karpov now subtly is threatening g5 because the black queen now guards the black rook on h8.
There are other continuations, but if white ignores this threat and castles, he’s lost after:
In the game, Kamsky realized the danger and went for a knight plunge to keep chances alive, but Karpov countered; he eliminates the knight and pairs it with a timely queen check to pick up a key central pawn — and went on to win:
Endgame
Don’t simplify away a move like Ke7 under the guise of “well he’s a genius”. It’s easy to think something like “well that’s a former World Champion” and omit the powerful thought process that led to that kind of high-level move. Perhaps better than anyone, Karpov understands how to exploit positional weaknesses; he knew full well the principles he was violating when he played this move.
The real question is: how do I know the one instance to violate the rule, and when to abide by principle? The answer? Raw calculation. Practice. Learning from case-breakers like this game. The central lesson here is that rules are rules because they work in 99% of scenarios, but you should never rule out the 1%.
Heuristics are powerful guides, but they can also blind you. It’s considered morally wrong to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. But what if you’re building security and see someone dangerous entering the premises? What if, in that rare instance, that would be the fastest way — the only way — to get everyone out safely in time? Then and only then does it make sense.
The nature of a move like Ke7 — a move that violates not one, but several foundational principles of chess — is that it requires such immense understanding of those foundational instances to know when it’s time to bend them all in one go.
This is why we have emergency responders and crisis managers and SWAT teams; they’re trained specifically for the high-risk, low-probability scenarios that we have no choice but to protect against. They’re given the mental and physical tools to operate under exceptional scenarios — high stakes, high stress, high fear — that require suspension of traditional faculties and the application of abnormal protocols. The best response in this small fraction of situations would be one of the worst responses under normal conditions (e.g., a SWAT team busting into a Burger King to secure the ketchup dispenser). But when the circumstances themselves are inverted, it’s not just important — it’s necessary — to invert your response in turn.
In your own life, it’s worth asking yourself how often your psychology and associated responses align with the circumstances at hand. Do you buckle under pressure? Or do you rise to the occasion? Do you overreact to little things? Or do you keep it together? We are only as cool-headed as the smallest thing that gets under our skin; only as strong as the smallest thing that overwhelms us.
Begin by assessing where you fall on the pressure-response matrix, and you’ll have a deeper understanding of where you’re strongest and weakest. For what it’s worth, I’m someone who finds immense resolve and rises to the occasion with consistency, but historically have needed to lower those same response mechanisms to less mission-critical scenarios. I sometimes feel I’d be better off if something goes seriously wrong vs. when things are a tad off. And I’ve met plenty of people who are the exact opposite.
Never ruling out the one-in-a-million move is not just a lesson in whether we see the move itself; it’s whether we’re calibrated to have the nerve to play it. And whether we can keep it together for the 50 moves left to play.
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This piece was originally published on Substack at ♟Chess for Life♟
