James Troxel

My project analyzes two remarkably different chess matches played between Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi. The first is game two from their 1974 Candidates Final in Moscow, which has come to be regarded as a modern classic in tactics, strategy, and chess brilliance. The second is the bizarre 1978 World Chess Championship in the Philippines, which quickly earned notoriety as an example of the superstition, paranoia, and scandal commonly observed in chess lore throughout the game’s rich history. The roles of pattern recognition and time pressure are examined across these very different scenarios, with supporting documentation from other historical accounts and written works on chess theory, statistics, and cognitive psychology. The visualizations that accompany the game analysis are designed to help readers see chess in the same way a grandmaster does, and in so doing, help them to identify similarities between a grandmaster’s state of mind and their own. For readers of this bizarre story in today’s exhausting, 24-hour, 280-character media landscape, it is worth asking: Are we under the same kind of pressure as a chess genius? And is this reasonable? In what ways do chess prodigies respond to this pressure, and what are the possible outcomes? jamestroxel.github.io/karpovkorchnoi