World Chess Championship 1985

The 1985 World Chess Championship was played between Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov in Moscow from September 3 to November 9, 1985. Kasparov won, to become the thirteenth and youngest world champion at the age of 22.

It is difficult to view the 1985 World Chess Championship in isolation, following as it did only 7 months after the highly controversial finish of the 1984 championship between the same players. On 8 February 1985, after 48 games had been contested over 5 months, the 1984 championship was abandoned with no result, becoming the first, and thus far only, chess world championship to finish in this way.Politics gave another angle to the Kasparov-Karpov encounters. Due to the changing political climate in Russia at the time, the matches were often depicted as a clash of ideologies, between "new Russia" represented by Kasparov and Mikhail Gorbachev and "old Russia" represented by Karpov and Communists such as Leonid Brezhnev.

At the time of the match, Karpov had a FIDE rating of 2720, while Kasparov was close behind with a rating of 2700. There was a large difference in age between the two players, with Karpov (34) the older by 12 years.

Between the end of the 1984 match and the start of the 1985 match, Kasparov played matches against Robert Hübner in Germany, winning three games and drawing three, and against Ulf Andersson in Sweden, winning two games and drawing four.

Karpov also showed that he was still in good form when he won the 1985 OHRA tournament in Amsterdam with 7/10, not losing a game and winning four.

As in previous World Chess Championships, each of the contestants employed other chess players as "seconds" to help with preparation and analysis of adjourned games. Karpov's seconds were Grandmasters Sergei Makarichev and Igor Zaitsev. Other assistance was provided by Efim Geller and Evgeni Vasiukov. Kasparov's seconds were Grandmaster Josif Dorfman and Alexander Nikitin with Gennadi Timoshchenko and Evgeny Vladimirov also helping.

...
Wikipedia