Garry Kasparov and his long-time rival Anatoly Karpov—two of the greatest chess players of all time—took their respective seats around the chessboard. The 1990 World Chess Championship was about to begin. The two men would play 24 games to decide the champion with the highest-scoring player being declared the World Chess Champion. In total, the match would stretch for three months with the first 12 games taking place in New York and the final 12 games being played in Lyon, France. Kasparov started off well but soon began to make mistakes. He lost the seventh game and let multiple victories slip away during the first half of the tournament. After the first 12 games, the two men left New York with the match tied at 6-6. The New York Times reported that “Mr. Kasparov had lost confidence and grown nervous in New York.” If Kasparov was going to retain his title as the best in the world, it was going to take everything he had.