Our web reporter is spending the week with the Kasparov team, bringing back an exclusive look at the mood and the moments inside the world champion's camp.

The late, great American poet Robert Frost would have sympathized with Garry Kasparov's situation in Game 3 on Tuesday. There was the champion at move nine, facing two choices: to move a pawn to b4 or knight to g5. Frost wrote of the road not taken, and that's the road Kasparov pondered after the game was long over.

Kasparov "came to a fork in the road, and he decided to move his knight," said his technical advisor Frederic Friedel. "Last night he said if he had moved the pawn he would have crushed Deep Blue. But in chess, you often have to make these decisions where you have to go one way or the other, and in this case, he later realized he should have gone the other way."

Kasparov also wasn't above joking about his uncharacteristically timid play that has found few of his pieces venturing beyond the fourth rank. "I had my light pieces over the rank. Then I sniffed the air over there with my rook before I moved it back. Maybe tomorrow we'll have more pieces over there."

Kasparov also said that, because of his own mistakes, the computer nearly had him during the game. And while he felt the computer didn't play nearly as well as it had in Game 2, he was fortunate to come out of it with a draw.

After the game, the champion accompanied a large group over to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. "It was a group of friends and associates that normally Garry would blossom in, but he just sat there in pain, his head in his hands."

The champion still appears to be obsessed with Deep Blue's remarkable play in Game 2. "He is thinking about it much more than I would like," said Friedel. International Master Mike Valvo, one of the commentators, suggested on Tuesday that the computer was getting to Kasparov. To some extent, Friedel agreed. "It's just a very unpleasant opponent," he said. "It doesn't play like a computer. It's forcing Garry to play in a way he's not trained to do. Also, when Garry plays badly he doesn't sleep well. The computer sleeps very well whether it plays badly or not."

Still, one gets the feeling the champion is relishing the match. While the prize money is motivation enough for anyone, Friedel, for one, believes Kasparov's interests lie much deeper than that. "I think his main interest in the match is curiosity. Garry is a very modern grandmaster. He uses computers to enhace his own game, and he wants to see how (Deep Blue) plays and if it can beat him."

Kasparov believes that one day computers will beat the world champion regularly. He used to say it would happen in 2010. Then he revised it to 2005, says Friedel. What if it happens in, say, May 1997?

"You will see Garry working with single-minded purpose to see how we can beat it."

Bits and Pieces Ironically, in his battle with Deep Blue, Kasparov is being helped with a state-of-the-art IBM ThinkPad computer, one of three machines he has in his hotel room... Kasparov is not the only elite performer in his camp. His agent, Owen Williams, was one of the top-rated tennis players in the world in the 1950s... One member of the Kasparov team not present is his young wife, Julia, a university student, who is home in Russia still nursing their nine-month-old son, Vadim.

--Jeff Kisseloff