Time & Perspective Quote by Anatoly Karpov

A little sentence that doubles as a diagnosis: modern chess, Karpov implies, has become too fast to be true. “First of all” is the tell. He’s not offering a tweak; he’s naming what he sees as the root cause, the prerequisite for everything else we claim to value about the game. “We have to” turns preference into necessity, and “go back” frames change as recovery, not nostalgia. The subtext is clear: if you want real chess, stop forcing players to perform it like content.

Coming from Karpov, this isn’t generic grumbling. He’s a symbol of an era when elite chess was built around long games, deep preparation, and an almost bureaucratic seriousness. His style - prophylactic, incremental, suffocating - wasn’t designed for dopamine-driven time scrambles. So when he invokes “classical time control,” he’s defending a whole aesthetic: chess as an argument you develop, not a stunt you land.

The context is a sport in a perpetual tug-of-war between purity and platform logic. Faster formats are easier to broadcast, easier to monetize, and friendlier to online audiences. They also reward different skills: intuition, speed, resilience under chaos. Karpov’s line quietly challenges the legitimacy of that shift. It’s not that blitz and rapid aren’t entertaining; it’s that they risk becoming the default definition of excellence. His intent is conservative in the literal sense: conserve the conditions under which the strongest ideas, not the quickest hands, win.