Garry Kasparov

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 9th of November 1985, in Moscow, Garry Kasparov needed only to hold his own against Anatoly Karpov to take the world chess crown. Karpov, playing White in the 24th game, had to win to keep the title. Kasparov answered with the Sicilian Defence and took the game, and the championship, by a score of 13-11. He was 22 years old, the youngest undisputed world champion the game had ever seen, a record that would stand until 2024.

  He was born Garik Kimovich Weinstein in Baku in 1963, and he would hold the world's No. 1 ranking for 255 months. His peak rating of 2851 in 1999 went unbeaten for over thirteen years. Yet the numbers only begin to describe him. How does a boy named after an American president end up shattering chess records, breaking openly with the sport's governing body, losing to a machine, and then walking away to fight Vladimir Putin? Those are the questions the rest of this story answers.

• 2. A Baku Childhood

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  Garik Kimovich Weinstein was born in Baku, in the Azerbaijan SSR of the Soviet Union, to a Jewish father, Kim Moiseyevich Weinstein, and an Armenian mother, Klara Shagenovna Kasparova. Both of his mother's parents were Armenians from Karabakh. By his own account he was named after United States President Harry S. Truman, whom his father admired for taking a strong stand against communism. He once joked it was a rare name in Russia until Harry Potter came along.

  When he was seven years old, his father died of leukemia. At the age of twelve, with his mother Klara's request and the family's consent, he took her surname, Kasparov. Identity stayed complicated for him throughout his life. He has called himself a self-appointed Christian, though very indifferent, and despite being half-Armenian and half-Jewish he considers himself Russian because Russian is his native tongue and the culture he grew up in.

  The wider world intruded on that household. In January 1990, Kasparov and his family had to flee anti-Armenian pogroms in Baku, leaving behind the city where his chess life had begun.

• 3. The Botvinnik School

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  Kasparov took chess seriously after he came across a problem his parents had set up and offered a solution. From age seven he attended the Young Pioneer Palace in Baku, and at ten he began training at Mikhail Botvinnik's chess school under coach Vladimir Makogonov. When Kasparov was 11, Botvinnik wrote that the future of chess lay in the hands of this young man.

  Makogonov shaped the boy's positional understanding and taught him the Caro-Kann Defence and the Tartakower System of the Queen's Gambit Declined. The results came fast. Kasparov won the Soviet Junior Championship in Tbilisi in 1976 at age 13, scoring 7/9, and repeated it the next year with 8.5/9, coached then by Alexander Shakarov.

  Another teacher, Alexander Nikitin, joined his early circle, and Shakarov became the keeper of what Kasparov called his information bank. That meticulous storing and systematising of analysis would later make him a pioneer in feeding games to computer programs.

• 4. Rising Through The Ranks

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  In early 1978, a special invitation brought the teenage Kasparov to the Sokolsky Memorial in Minsk, a tournament normally reserved for established masters, and he took first place. He said afterward that he thought he had a very good shot at the world championship. Later that year, at age 15, he qualified for the USSR Chess Championship by winning a 64-player Swiss tournament at Daugavpils, the youngest ever to reach that level.

  Banja Luka, Yugoslavia, in April 1979 was his first international tournament, entered while still unrated. He won by two points and emerged with a provisional rating of 2545, equal 40th in the world. In 1980 he won the World Junior Championship in Dortmund, debuted for the Soviet Union at the Chess Olympiad in Valletta, and became a Grandmaster.

  In January 1984, Kasparov reached the world's No. 1 ranking with a FIDE rating of 2710, the youngest ever to do so, a mark that lasted twelve years until Vladimir Kramnik broke it in 1996. That same year he won the Candidates' final against former champion Vasily Smyslov at Vilnius, 8 and a half to 4 and a half, earning his shot at Karpov.

• 5. The Two Ks

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  The 1984-85 world championship against Karpov began as a near-disaster. After nine games Kasparov trailed 4-0 in a match to six wins, then ground out 17 straight draws. He lost game 27 to fall behind 5-0, clawed back, and won game 32 for his first victory over the champion. By the time he won games 47 and 48, the match had run far past the previous record length of 34 games, set by Capablanca against Alekhine in 1927.

  Then FIDE President Florencio Campomanes ended the match without result, citing the players' health, even though both said they wanted to continue. It remains the only world championship match ever abandoned without a result. The historians behind the book The KGB Plays Chess later alleged Campomanes had been a KGB agent tasked with preventing Karpov's defeat, while US Grandmaster Andy Soltis called that suggestion absurd but agreed his decisions favored Karpov.

  Kasparov and Karpov met five times in six years, 144 games in all. The tally came to 21 wins, 19 losses and 104 draws for Kasparov. He held the title in 1986 in London and Leningrad, in 1987 in Seville where Karpov blundered a pawn before the first time control in the final game, and in 1990 across New York City and Lyon. Karpov was cast as a figure of the Soviet nomenklatura, while Kasparov positioned himself as a child of change whose 1985 victory coincided with the start of perestroika.

• 6. War With FIDE

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  In October 1986, Kasparov told fellow grandmaster Raymond Keene that Campomanes must go, that it was war to the death as far as he was concerned. The next month he founded the Grandmasters Association to give professional players a voice, and its World Cup tournaments deepened the rift with FIDE.

  The break came in 1993, when British grandmaster Nigel Short qualified as challenger. After a compressed bidding process produced disappointing financial estimates, champion and challenger both rejected FIDE's bid for an August match in Manchester. They played instead under their own Professional Chess Association in London that September, with Kasparov winning 12 and a half to 7 and a half and Channel 4 giving the game heavy coverage. FIDE removed both men from its rating list and ran a rival match that Karpov won, leaving two world champions and a title split that lasted 13 years.

  Kasparov defended his PCA title in 1995 against Viswanathan Anand at the World Trade Center in New York City, winning four games to one with thirteen draws. In a 2007 interview he called the 1993 break with FIDE the worst mistake of his career, saying it hurt the game in the long run.

• 7. Man Against Machine

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  Acorn Computers sponsored Kasparov's 1983 Candidates semi-final against Korchnoi, and the company gave him a BBC Micro that he carried back to Baku, perhaps one of the first Western-made microcomputers to reach the Soviet Union. He embraced the tools early, using Frederic Friedel's Chessbase program in his preparation and beating thirty-two chess computers at once in Hamburg in 1985.

  The reckoning came against IBM's Deep Blue. Kasparov won the first six-game match in Philadelphia in February 1996, 4-2. The rematch in New York City in May 1997 went the other way: Deep Blue won 3 and a half to 2 and a half, the first defeat of a reigning world champion by a computer under tournament conditions. Even after five games, Kasparov lost quickly in Game 6. He said he was not well prepared, and that he had been denied access to Deep Blue's recent games while its team studied hundreds of his.

  After the loss he claimed he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, hinting that players had intervened during the second game. IBM denied cheating and said the only human work happened between games. It was later suggested the behavior came from a glitch in the program. In 2003 he drew a six-game match against Deep Junior, which evaluated three million positions per second, and that year Deep Junior became the first machine to beat him with Black at standard time control.

• 8. The Champion In Exile

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  After winning the Linares tournament for the ninth time, Kasparov announced on the 10th of March 2005 that he would retire from regular competitive chess, citing a lack of personal goals. He was still ranked No. 1 in the world, with a rating of 2812. He said he would spend more time on his books, including the My Great Predecessors series first published in 2003, and on the links between decision-making in chess and other areas of life.

  Politics filled the gap. He formed the United Civil Front and joined The Other Russia, a coalition opposing Vladimir Putin. In 2008 he announced an intention to run for the Russian presidency, then withdrew, blaming what he called official obstruction. After the mass protests beginning in 2011, he announced in June 2013 that he had left Russia out of fear of persecution, living afterward in New York City and obtaining Croatian citizenship in 2014. Russia designated him a foreign agent in 2022.

  He kept teaching the game even after leaving it. He coached Magnus Carlsen for about a year from February 2009, during which Carlsen rose to world No. 1, and in 2013 Carlsen broke Kasparov's old rating record by reaching 2861. Kasparov stood for FIDE president in 2014 and lost to incumbent Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, 110-61, the same governing body he had spent two decades fighting, now choosing someone else over the man who had once vowed war to the death against its leadership.