Kasparov's Immortal

Wijk aan Zee, on the Dutch coast, hosts the strongest annual tournament in chess. In January 1999 its fourth round paired Garry Kasparov, the world number one for down a decade and a half, against Veselin Topalov — a future world champion and one of the few players alive who attacked as hard as Kasparov himself.

The opening was quiet by their standards; Topalov's Pirc held its own, and by move 23 his king on b8 looked adequately defended. Then Kasparov threw a rook onto d4, into a pawn's mouth, and the board caught fire. Taking the rook let the white queen in with check; the checks drove the black king up the board — a5, a4, then forward, impossibly, to a3 and b4 and c3, deep into White's own camp, eating pawns as it went, always one tempo from either mating White's exposed king or escaping back home.

The point of it all was a move Kasparov had to find at the board with his clock running: 37.Rd7 — no check, no capture, a rook stepping quietly backward. It cut the king's road home and won the queen by a skewer four moves later. Topalov, a rook down in the ending, resigned on move 44.

Analysts spent months verifying what Kasparov had calculated in minutes, and the engines of later decades have largely confirmed it: the sacrifice was sound, the hunt was forced, the quiet move was the only way. Chess players borrowed the name from Anderssen's masterpiece a century and a half older because nothing less would fit. Kasparov himself called it the best game he ever played.