Anatoly Karpov

By his style of play Karpov can be compared with the Cuban genius Capablanca, although there is also one important distinction… Karpov’s games initially startle you by their strategy, which seems illogical, but son it becomes clear, that in fact his play is extremely logical. By his style of play Karpov can be compared with the Cuban genius Capablanca

Many experts consider Karpov to be a rationalist, an uncommonly cold-blooded fighter. To whom emotions are completely alien, and so on. No, the opposite can be affirmed: Karpov is emotional, like many people, but he masters and controls himself well, so that a false impression is created

He is like a tank, which cannot be diverted from his goal. His iron persistence is torture for the faint hearted. Karpov character is the same as his play. Both in life, and at a chess board, he is extremely purposeful

Karpov is a chess genius… as a chess player he is indeed great

His deep, infiltrating style, subtle positional feeling, and extraordinarily persistence, practicality and flexibility rapidly raced him to the very summit of chess. He is a great chess player and the only appropriate opponent for me in a chess World (1990)

I studied him from the childhood, and I played a lot of good games with him. He is a universal chess player: a good tactician, he brilliantly counts variants, he is very strong positionally, but has a distinguishing feature. Speaking part in earnest part in play, he has disproved a postulate of Stenitz which reads: a player who has an advantage is obliged to attack under the threat of loss of this advantage. While Karpov, having advantage, was not moving, but his advantage was increasing! In my opinion, there were no players neither before nor after him, who were able to do this. I don`t know how he made it possible