drunknknite
He was winning,
but he didn't see it
and I escaped - as usual.
-Levon Aronian

Best game in the history of chess?!

By drunknknite
So I was reading a Chesscafe Book Review about the new book on Kasparov by Tibor Karolyi and Nick Alpin (I have their book on Karpov and it is very good) and the author mentions that Kasparov-Topalov, Wijk Ann Zee 1999 is probably the best game of Kasparov's career or "even in the history of chess". So of course I went to my database to look it up (I've seen it before I'm sure, it's in Stohl's book too, Stohl's annotations are in Chessbase). And it is quite a game. Kasparov's intuition is almost incomprehensible (apparently even to Topalov) and he sacs a rook and then a knight with very little apparent compensation and no end in sight. Just wondering what you guys think about the thought of a "best game in history" and this Kasparov game.
 

2 comments so far.

  1. Blue Devil Knight November 30, 2007 at 10:02 PM
    Did Kaspy himself ever annotate it? That was just insane! I wonder if he calculated all those moves or it was just an intuition that the K out there in the open was vulnerable.
  2. drunknknite November 30, 2007 at 11:49 PM
    Stohl says that because Qc3 is inaccurate (Ra7 is much more efficient) it is clear that this was just intuition. And Kasparov himself admitted that he did not see most of the best tries for Black, the annotations were worked out for a few years afterwards by a lot of other players.

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