From psychic mediums to supercomputers, the evolution of chess preparation at elite level
Anatoly Karpov remembers the night one of his aides, Grisha Rozhkovsky, started to eat a broken piece of glass during dinner. It sounds like an urban legend concocted by some nameless KGB agent to try and spook an adversary. But Karpov, the 12th world champion in chess history, swears it happened (in an interview given to Russia’s Sport Express back in 2015). The story goes that Karpov and his team were having a meal together, still trying to digest a tough loss to the upstart Garry Kasparov in the 1985 World Chess Championship, when Rozhkovsky, who was a hypnotist from Odessa, decided the team could do with a bit of cheering up. So he pulled out a piece of glass, and started crunching on it. Grisha Rozhkovsky, an aide of Anatoly Karpov, ate a piece of glass after Karpov lost a game against Garry Kasparov. (Illustrations generated by Gemini/Nano Banana with theme specific prompts) Rozhkovsky was not the only hypnotist helping the world’s best chess players back in those days. At that same battle, after …
