Anatoly Karpov

Anatoli Yevgenyevich Karpov (????????? ??????????? ???????) (born May 23, 1951) is a Russian chess grandmaster and former World Champion. He is the most successful tournament player of all time, and as of July 2005 he has 161 first-place finishes to his credit. From 1978 to 1998 he played in every FIDE World Championship match. His overall professional record is 1,118 wins, 287 losses, and 1,480 draws in 3,163 games. His peak ELO rating is 2780.

Champion again

It came as a surprise, then, that Karpov lost a Candidates Match against Nigel Short in 1992. But in 1993, Karpov reacquired the FIDE World Champion title when Kasparov and Short split from FIDE. Karpov crushed Jan Timman—the loser of the Candidates final against Short. Once again he had become World Champion, and once again he did so controversially. He defended his title against Gata Kamsky (+6 -3 =9) and Viswanathan Anand (+4 -2 =2) in 1996 and 1998, respectively. However, in 1998, FIDE largely scrapped the old system of Candidate Matches, instead having a large knock-out event in which a large number of players contested short matches against each other over just a few weeks. In the first of these events, champion Karpov was seeded straight into the final (as in previous championships), but subsequently the champion had to qualify like other players. Karpov resigned his title in anger at the new rules in 1999, upon which Alexander Khalifman became World Champion.

Related Topics:
Nigel Short - Jan Timman - Gata Kamsky - Viswanathan Anand - Alexander Khalifman

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However, the FIDE champions were not recognized as such by the general public. The fact that the FIDE champions were regularly crushed by Kasparov in tournaments testified to his dominance. The FIDE matches received little public attention, while Kasparov's matches with the PCA and subsequently Braingames were widely reported in the media. For more details about these series of champions, see the World Chess Championship article.

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