Garry Kasparov was born Garik Weinstein in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1963, named after Harry Truman. His father died of leukemia when he was seven, and at 12 he took the Armenian surname of his mother, Klara, a move that helped him avoid the antisemitism of the Soviet system. He solved a chess puzzle his parents had left on a board, trained at Mikhail Botvinnik’s school from age 10, won the Soviet junior championship at 13 and 14, and at 15 became the youngest qualifier for the USSR championship. In the 1984 world championship against Anatoly Karpov, played first to six wins, he fell behind 4 to 0, then 5 to 0, before a string of 17 straight draws and a slow climb to 5 to 3. After five months and 48 games FIDE halted the match with no winner, over both players’ protests. In the 1985 rematch he won 13 to 11 and became the youngest undisputed world champion at 22.
In 1993 Kasparov and challenger Nigel Short broke from FIDE to form the Professional Chess Association, a split he called in 2007 the worst mistake of his career. In 1997 he became the first sitting world champion to lose a match to a computer, IBM’s Deep Blue, which evaluated 200 million positions per second. He lost the classical title to Vladimir Kramnik in 2000 and retired in 2005 after 255 months as world number one. He then opposed Vladimir Putin, announced a 2008 presidential bid and was forced to withdraw. He left Russia in 2013 for New York, later took Croatian citizenship, and in 2022 Russia designated him a foreign agent.
- Botvinnik declared the future of chess was in his hands when Kasparov was 11.
- The 48 games of the 1984 match far exceeded the previous world title record of 34.
- A humanlike positional move by Deep Blue in the first game led him to suspect human intervention.
- His 2008 campaign saw chartered planes blocked, venue bookings canceled and a blackout on state television.
- In 1990 his family fled Baku at night to escape anti-Armenian pogroms, and in 2015 he published Winter Is Coming.
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