GMGarry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov was born Garik Weinstein in Baku in 1963. His father died when he was seven, and he later adopted his mother Klara’s surname. He trained at Baku’s Young Pioneer Palace and entered Mikhail Botvinnik’s chess school at ten. Coaches Vladimir Makogonov and Alexander Shakarov helped develop his game. He won successive Soviet junior championships in 1976 and 1977, followed by the World Junior Championship in 1980. FIDE awarded him the Grandmaster title that year.

Kasparov became world champion in 1985 by defeating Anatoly Karpov at twenty-two. He retained the title in three further matches with Karpov, including a drawn contest in 1987. In 1993 he and challenger Nigel Short organised their championship outside FIDE, beginning a division of the world title that lasted thirteen years. Kasparov defeated Short and then Viswanathan Anand in 1995. He lost the classical title to Vladimir Kramnik in London in 2000.

Kasparov’s matches against IBM’s Deep Blue brought computer chess to a worldwide audience: he won in 1996 but lost the rematch in 1997. He continued winning elite tournaments after losing the world title, before retiring from regular professional competition in 2005. His books include the My Great Predecessors series, which examines earlier champions through their games. He later worked with Magnus Carlsen. His Kasparov Chess Foundation, founded in 2002, developed teaching materials and trained schoolteachers to introduce chess in classrooms. Outside chess, he became an opposition activist in Russia and a writer and speaker on politics and technology. He left Russia in 2013 and obtained Croatian citizenship in 2014.