Word: champion
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...week ago the human world champion was bulldozing the computer, but now Deep Fritz, after today's victory, has evened the score at three points apiece. There are two games left and $1-million is at stake - not to mention the restoration of human dignity. Vladimir Kramnik's fellow grand masters hope that he will win the competition and avenge the loss of the previous world champion, Garry Kasparov, to an IBM supercomputer five years ago. "If he wins, we'll have something to be proud of again," said Alexander Baburin, editor of the Internet chess daily www.chesstoday.net...
...Kramnik's supporters who watched Game 6 unfold over nearly four hours were in for an emotional roller-coaster ride. Before any moves were played, the champion was all smiles and his handlers suggested that he would easily win the $1-million match by milking his then one-game advantage and simply drawing the last three games. The Fritz team insisted that it would not be so easy for the world champion to play the calculating monster to a draw. "We are going to go down fighting," said Frederic Friedel, "he'll be nervous after [his loss in] game...
...with his bodyguard Aziz to the bathroom in his boudoir. (Evidently the restroom is a fine place for chess inspiration; one sequence of opening moves is known in the chess literature as the Toilet Variation because that is where its creator came up with it.) When the relaxed-looking champion returned to the board, he immediately centralized his knight and then two moves later, to the astonishment of the spectators, quickly sacrificed the knight to open lines for a direct attack on Fritz's king...
...because it was the swapping of ladies that led to Kramnik's victory in two prior games. But in this position, the royal exchange ended Kramnik's attack and left the computer with a decisive material advantage. One move later, with Fritz threatening to queen a pawn, the world champion resigned. "I am not so depressed," Kramnik said afterward. "The result is not positive, but the game was a pleasure. I enjoyed the game. It was so beautiful." Other grand masters were dejected; they fear that the world champion has gone mad, as Kasparov did when facing Deep Blue...
...began by advancing its queen pawn two squares. This normally leads to quieter positions than the advance of the king pawn, which the machine had preferred in the earlier games. In the resulting opening, called the Queen's Gambit Declined, Fritz emerged with a slight advantage and kept the champion under pressure. Kramnik tried to exchange queens to simplify the position, a strategy that had previously served him well. But the machine slyly avoided the exchange and headed toward an endgame where it would have had one more pawn than Kramnik, who would be relegated to a long, tortuous defense...