Commentary for white move 7:

MAURICE ASHLEY: What do you think about this position? It seems a couple of moves so far -- e6 -- just as I speak --

GK MOVE: 7 e4

MAURICE ASHLEY: A very aggressive move by Kasparov, saying he wants a piece of the space, a piece of the center, and he has even gotten up and left the stage to go his dressing room, shows his confidence in the situation. What do you think?

YASSER SEIRAWAN: I share his confidence, let me tell you. Actually I'm a little bit surprised by the early commitment of e2-e4. Personally I, too, like the computer, have a prejudice for bishops. Bishops work well in an open position after lots of pawns have come off the board, so in a sense, in the early part of the game, the knight, in a closed position is oftentimes more valuable. But further you get into the endgame after more and more pawns come off the board, the bishops get better. So from a long-term perspective, I like white, or Kasparov's, chances better, but in the short-term, what Kasparov has to do is take a stand in the center and figure out a way of opening up his diagonal. And the move e2-e4 to my mind was a bit premature but not a bad move by any stretching of the imagination, but a bit premature.

MIKE VALVO: There might be an advantage to this because Kasparov knows that the computer guesses his moves half of the time, 50 percent of the time. So he knows the computer is going to expect him to castle by playing a different move. The computer has to start from scratch rather than having a running start of about three minutes.

MAURICE ASHLEY: And the computer thinks very, very quickly. That I think is an understatement. 200 million positions per second quickly. I had my students try to blink that first, and you should have seen the kids going...

YASSER SEIRAWAN: A question, I think, in the audience, there is a young -- one of the young --

MIKE VALVO: Is there a question over here?

YASSER SEIRAWAN: Yeah, I was sure there was one.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: P I think he was just waving.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: He got shy.

MIKE VALVO: Everybody is hiding their hands all of the sudden.

MAURICE ASHLEY: Well, Kasparov has returned to the board. And, Mike, the opening, again, we know in chess is so, so important. It's where the whole groundwork is laid for what's going to happen, the subsequent events in the middle game and beyond. I know that Deep Blue has some really good analysis -- a really good analysis team, some really good helpers. Joel Benjamin is one but the New York Times even reported that Grandmaster Miguel Illescas from Spain is helping him.

MIKE VALVO: That seems to be the case. There are a lot of other Grandmasters around, and I wonder if they're also part of the team, too.

YASSER SEIRAWAN: Do you think Deep Blue has a lot of secret helpers in the Grandmaster class?

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