However, today I want to focus on a different aspect of his book – competition. As a former world chess champion, Kasparov is in some ways uniquely positioned to discuss the nuances of competition and I thought many of his comments reflected a deep understanding of the competitor’s mindset.
One of Kasparov’s main strategies in any match was to prevent the opponent from playing to his, her, or – in the case of IBM’s Deep Blue, its – strengths. This is a concept I’ve heard echoed over the years by competitors in all manners of fields. Michael Lombardi describes this in the context of helmet football as making right-handed opponents play ‘left-handed’ while Paul Graham has written that small companies can beat larger companies if they make their bulkier competitors ‘run uphill’. What Kasparov’s writing lacked in colorful analogies was more than made up for by direct tactical recommendations – if an opponent was good with the bishops, he would congest the center to reduce the possibility of diagonal movements.
This thought leads naturally to its inverse – a good player cannot maintain success unless there is constant variation in play. A good player becomes a great player by becoming unpredictable because an opponent cannot easily identify which strengths to nullify. To recycle the above example in this context, the strategy of nullifying or removing the bishops is less effective if the opponent is comfortable playing a closed game that emphasizes the knights.
A strong competitor also understands the difference between a true weakness and a theoretical weakness. A good player either wastes training time by futilely working on all weaknesses or takes no action to protect against having weaknesses exploited by crafty opponents. Such a player’s discomfort with weakness means too much or too little preparation time is spent considering how to best prevent weaknesses from leading to a defeat. A great player understands that a theoretical weakness is irrelevant if an opponent cannot exploit it and only worries about the true weaknesses that an opponent is able to take advantage of during competition.
The observation I liked the most was that some competitors make for better challengers than they do champions. There are undoubtedly many explanations for this – perhaps some will cite the ‘underdog mentality’, which at the very least makes for a nice newspaper story. But the explanation I like the most takes a slightly different angle – when winners credit their own good play ahead of their opponent’s poor play, success can be the enemy of future success. Although this isn’t necessarily how every new champion views the accomplishment, I suspect the ones who do struggle to remain at the top are at some level too convinced of their own superiority to treat challengers with the same respect that they once gave to the champions they worked tirelessly to dethrone.
