World chess champion Anatoly Karpov is considered a fighter and maximalist, known for his tough character. Despite the advantages of the opponent and the apparent disadvantage of the situation, he is able to achieve victory - this is what they say about the grandmaster.
Childhood and teens
Anatoly Evgenievich Karpov was born on May 23, 1951 in the family of an engineer, who then lived in the small southern Ural town of Zlatoust. Later, the parents of the future grandmaster moved from the Chelyabinsk region to Tula, where their son brilliantly graduated from high school. In the certificate of young Karpov there were only marks "excellent", and the graduate of the mathematical class received a well-deserved gold medal.
Acquaintance to chess with little Anatoly took place at the age of five. He demonstrated his first successes in this art in a section in the Sportpavilion of the Zlatoust Metallurgical Plant. The mentor of the talented boy was then engineer Dmitry Artemievich Zyulyarkin.
At the age of nine, Karpov was able to get the first category, after two years he easily fulfilled the norm of a candidate for master of sports. He became a master of sports of the USSR at the age of fourteen. As a teenager, Anatoly began to travel to the capital to study at the Moscow Botvinnik School. It is interesting that Mikhail Botvinnik, who was the first Soviet world chess champion, at first did not see the talent of the young man. However, very soon, Karpov managed to become the twelfth world champion.
The path to the chess crown
In 1968, when Karpov did not enter the competition at Moscow State University and was about to submit documents to the Leningrad Military Mechanical Institute (Voenmekh), Botvinnik turned to the head of the country's Ministry of Higher Education Vyacheslav Yelutin. Then it was already clear that Karpov had great prospects in sports and that he should not leave Moscow, where he could achieve significant success. As a result, a chess player was admitted to the mechmath of the country's best university out of competition.
During his studies, Anatoly Karpov had a free schedule of visits. Soon, he decided, despite Botvinnik’s disapproval, to transfer to the Faculty of Economics at Leningrad University. In the Northern capital, Semyon Furman began working with him, who made a real extra-class grandmaster able to win the chess crown out of his young talent.
Karpov received a university diploma only ten years later - due to regularly held tournaments and training camps, constant training. Active social activities, which the chess player was engaged in in those years, also required time. It is worth noting that the topic of the thesis, which he defended in 1978, already becoming the world champion, was the rational use of free time in socialism.
Twelfth World Chess Champion
In the period from 1969 to 1974, Karpov became increasingly successful, winning victories at tournaments of various levels. Having won the world championships among young men and the champion of the RSFSR, he became a grandmaster, and then brilliantly performed at interzonal competitions and matches of applicants for world championship.
Karpov was officially declared the twelfth world champion on April 3, 1975. This was preceded by the refusal of the American chess player Robert Fisher to defend his title. Having become the best chess player on the planet, Karpov retained his title for ten years. It was not until the fall of 1985 that he lost the chess crown to Garry Kasparov.
