Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov played 144 world championship games across five matches from 1984 to 1990 — more than any other two players in the history of the title. The first of those matches lasted five months, produced 48 games without a winner, and was stopped not by checkmate but by the president of FIDE in what remains the most disputed intervention in championship history. By the time their rivalry ended, Karpov had scored 19 wins, Kasparov 21, and 104 games had been drawn. No match was ever won convincingly. The chess between Karpov and Kasparov defined competitive chess for an entire decade.

Who Were Karpov and Kasparov Before They Met?

Anatoly Karpov became world champion in 1975 without playing a single decisive game in a world championship match — Bobby Fischer forfeited the title rather than accept FIDE’s match conditions. That origin story followed Karpov for years, and he answered it by dominating the chess world relentlessly. From 1975 to 1984 he won tournament after tournament, losing very little and appearing almost invincible. His playing style was the opposite of romantic: prophylactic, precise, grinding. Karpov did not attack in the swashbuckling tradition of Romantic-era masters like Anderssen. He restricted, accumulated tiny positional advantages, and waited for the position to collapse under its own weight. Opponents would resign in positions that looked playable to the spectators, simply because they knew Karpov would convert.

Garry Kasparov was born in Baku in 1963 — twelve years younger than Karpov — and was clearly a different kind of player. He had absorbed the Soviet training system completely, with its emphasis on deep opening preparation and systemic improvement, but his competitive instincts were explosive. He created complications where quiet positions seemed to rule them out, launched attacks that looked unsound until they landed, and brought to the board a relentless, almost aggressive energy that was in sharp contrast to Karpov’s measured precision. Kasparov was, in many ways, the spiritual successor to Bobby Fischer’s game of the century generation — players who combined supreme calculation with a genuinely combative style.

By the early 1980s it was clear their meeting was inevitable. What no one anticipated was how long and how complex that meeting would turn out to be.

What Actually Happened in the 1984 Match?

The 1984 world championship match between Karpov and Kasparov was played under a format requiring the first player to win six games outright, with draws not counting toward the total. The match opened in September 1984 in Moscow and showed no sign of reaching a conclusion.

Karpov struck early. He won four of the first nine games and then a fifth by game 27, putting the score at 5–0 in his favour. Kasparov had not won a single game. By any historical precedent, the match was over. The 1927 match between Alekhine and Capablanca had been the last time a reigning world champion was dethroned in a match; nothing about what was happening in Moscow in late 1984 suggested a repeat was coming.

Then the match froze. For twenty more games, neither player won. Karpov could not close out his sixth victory. The draws accumulated — forty of them in total over the course of the match — and Karpov visibly deteriorated. He lost 22 pounds over five months of play. Kasparov, by contrast, was growing sharper and more confident with each game. Then Kasparov won two consecutive games to make the score 5–3, and a match that had seemed finished began to change shape.

On 15 February 1985, after 48 games and five months of chess, Florencio Campomanes — the President of FIDE — held a press conference and announced the match was terminated without result. He cited the health of both players. A new match would begin within months on equal terms. Both players publicly stated they wanted to continue; Karpov accepted the termination with quiet relief, while Kasparov was furious and accused Campomanes of acting under political pressure.

The controversy around the termination has grown sharper over the decades. Kasparov had been winning two consecutive games for the first time, and the momentum had demonstrably shifted. The KGB’s interest in the outcome of Soviet chess matches, the internal politics of the USSR Chess Federation, and FIDE’s close relationship with Soviet institutions were all cited as factors in the decision. According to ChessBase’s 2010 retrospective on the match, declassified materials and the recollections of those present made the political dimension difficult to dismiss. No world championship match has ever been ended by administrative decision before or since.

How Did Kasparov Win the Title in 1985?

The rematch began in September 1985 in Moscow, under a best-of-24-games format — the unlimited-game arrangement that had created the 1984 marathon was replaced by a fixed number. Karpov, as defending champion, would retain the title if the match ended tied at 12–12. The structure favoured him.

The match was closely fought and swung back and forth across its 24 games. Game 16 became its defining moment and one of the most celebrated games in world championship history.

Kasparov, playing Black against Karpov’s 1.e4, chose the Sicilian Defence and steered the game into a tense positional battle. The critical moment came on move 16, when Kasparov placed a knight on d3. This is a standard idea in certain Sicilian structures — the d3 square is a powerful outpost, difficult to dislodge — but what made this particular knight exceptional was its longevity. For the next eighteen moves, the knight sat unmolested on d3, deep in White’s position, tying down Karpov’s pieces and limiting every plan White could form. Every White move had to account for the knight’s presence.

When Karpov finally captured it on move 34 with his queen, Kasparov struck: the knight on e4 leapt to f2, forking and giving check to the king on h1. White’s rook captured the intruder, and Kasparov’s bishop swept from g6 to d3, taking the queen. The combination had been waiting for eighteen moves. Chess Informant readers later voted this game the best in the magazine’s first 64 issues.

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Step through it in PGNBase and watch move 16. The engine holds the evaluation relatively stable — the position is complex but not immediately decisive — and it remains stable right up until move 34. Then, when Karpov finally captures the knight, the assessment collapses instantly. The combination that follows took Kasparov eighteen moves of preparation to make possible.

Kasparov won the 1985 match 13–11, becoming World Champion at 22. It was the first time a reigning world champion had lost a match since Alekhine dethroned Capablanca in 1927.

What Happened in the Three Matches That Followed?

Karpov demanded — and received — an immediate rematch, and the rivalry continued across three more matches over the following five years. Each had a different character and its own dramatic moment.

London and Leningrad, 1986. The match was split across two cities for the first time in world championship history. Karpov fought back hard, taking the lead at several points, but Kasparov retained by the narrowest margin: 12.5–11.5. The 1986 match is less well-known than the 1985 or 1987 encounters, but it produced some of the finest attacking chess of the entire rivalry. Kasparov’s kingside attacks in the London games became part of his legacy as a player who could conduct dynamic operations at the very highest level.

Seville, 1987. This is the most operatically dramatic of the five matches, and it came down to the final game in conditions of maximum pressure. Karpov had won game 23, putting himself ahead in the match for the first time. Going into game 24, he needed only a draw to claim the title. Kasparov needed a win.

Karpov played with the caution that his lead demanded, but time pressure in the first session caused him to overlook a drawing line that would have ended the match in his favour. The game was adjourned with Kasparov holding an extra pawn. He ground it down in the second session and won on move 64. The match ended 12–12, and under the rules, the defending champion retained the title.

Kasparov later described Game 24 as one of the hardest wins of his career — less for the chess itself than for the psychological weight of what was at stake. Karpov had played for a draw and lost. He walked away having spent most of the match ahead, only to fall at the last moment.

New York and Lyon, 1990. The fifth and final match was played as the Soviet Union was beginning to fracture. Kasparov had become a public critic of Soviet political structures; his career had always carried a political subtext, and by 1990 that was openly acknowledged. The match was held partly in the United States for the first time, signalling chess’s changing geopolitical centre of gravity. Kasparov retained 12.5–11.5, the same margin as 1986. It was the last world championship match either man would play against the other.

Why Does This Rivalry Belong to Chess History?

No two players have met as many times for the world title. The 144 games across five matches represent not just an extraordinary quantity of elite chess but a sustained artistic argument played out over a decade, with the same two voices in continuous dialogue.

The argument was genuinely interesting. Karpov’s approach — restricting the opponent’s activity through prophylaxis, converting microscopic advantages through perfect technique, winning in the endgame by giving the opponent nothing to hold — was a coherent and formidable system. Kasparov’s countered it with equally systematic preparation, but combined with a combative instinct that could convert any imbalance into a winning attack. The same themes recur across the 144 games: Black finding dynamic counterplay against White’s positional squeeze, or vice versa. Watching the opening preparation evolve from match to match is a study in how two elite players try to outlearn each other under the highest pressure.

The political dimension was inseparable from the chess. Karpov represented the established Soviet chess order — state-supported, disciplined, producing excellence within a controlled system. Kasparov represented a challenge to that order. The 1984 termination brought the political reading into the open, and it never fully closed. As engines arrived and began reshaping preparation — a story told in how computers changed professional chess — Kasparov was among the first players to understand and exploit what they offered. The rivalry between Karpov and Kasparov was, in part, a rivalry between two eras of chess.

The games hold up. The knight-on-d3 game from 1985 belongs in any discussion of the greatest world championship games ever played. The Seville Game 24 endgame is a masterclass in technique under conditions of extreme pressure. The attacking games from the 1986 London leg show both players at the height of their powers in dynamic positions. Studying this collection is one of the best ways to understand what elite pre-engine chess looked like and why it still deserves close attention.

Studying the 144 Games Today

Every game from all five matches is available in PGN format and richly worth working through with a modern engine. What makes this collection uniquely valuable for improvement is the repetition. Because Karpov and Kasparov met five times over six years, you can watch specific opening structures recur and be handled differently at each encounter. You can trace how Kasparov’s preparation in the Sicilian evolved in response to Karpov’s attempts to find an antidote, and how Karpov’s handling of the endgame shifted as the rivalry progressed.

Particular games to look for: Game 16 from 1985 (the knight-on-d3 masterpiece embedded above), Game 22 from the 1986 London match (a model attacking game by Kasparov), and Game 24 from Seville 1987 (the match-saving endgame). Each rewards step-by-step analysis more than a quick overview, because the quality lies in the moves, not just the result.

Import the full match collections into PGNBase to compare games from different matches side by side — tracking how Karpov handled the Sicilian in 1985 against 1987, or how Kasparov’s handling of the endgame improved from the first match to the last. The patterns across 144 games are visible in a way they never could be from any single game.

Conclusion

Karpov and Kasparov played 144 world championship games and neither ever dominated the other cleanly. The scores across the five matches — 5–3 abandoned, 13–11, 12.5–11.5, 12–12, 12.5–11.5 — tell a story of close, hard-fought chess with no comfortable margins. Karpov never lost a match to Kasparov in the formal sense; but he also never won one after 1984, and the title stayed with the younger man for the rest of the decade.

The chess endures. The knight sitting on d3 for eighteen moves, the 22 pounds Karpov lost in Moscow, the adjournment envelope in Seville — these details are part of the game’s history in a way that statistics alone cannot convey. A hundred and forty-four games are still there to be played through, one move at a time.