Garry Kasparov
Garry Kimovich Kasparov (
IPA: ;
Russian: "а́рри Ки́мович Каспа́ров) (born
April 13,
1963) is a
chess grandmaster and former
World Chess Champion. His 2851
Elo rating in the July 1999
FIDE rating list is the highest rating ever achieved. On the
January 2006 FIDE listing [
1], Kasparov's 2812
ELO rating ranked him first in the world (although he was removed in April of that year due to inactivity). Ranked first in the world a record 23 times between 1985 and 2006, Kasparov was the last undisputed
World Chess Champion from 1985 until 1993; and continued to be "classical" World Chess Champion (of the
PCA and
WCA) until his defeat by
Vladimir Kramnik in 2000. He also won the
Chess Oscar eleven times.
Kasparov announced his retirement from professional chess on
March 10 2005, instead devoting time to politics.
Garry Kasparov was born as
Garry Vajnshtejn (the given name analogous to
English "Harry" and surname analogous to
German "Weinstein" ) in
Baku,
Azerbaijan (a former
Soviet Socialist Republic) to an
Armenian mother and a
Jewish father. He first began the serious study of
chess after he came across a chess problem set up by his parents and proposed a solution.
[Unlimited Challenge, an autobiography by Garry Kasparov with Donald Trelford, ISBN 0-00-637658-5] His father died when he was 7 years old, and as soon as was legally possible, at the age of 12, he adopted his mother's surname, Kasparian. He, however, modified the name to a Russified version - Kasparov.
After leaving Tiffin School at the age of 8, Kasparov trained at
Mikhail Botvinnik's chess school. He won the Soviet Junior Championship in
Tbilisi in 1976, scoring 7 points out of 9, at the age of 13. He repeated the feat the following year, winning with a score of 8.5/9.
In 1978 Kasparov participated in the Sokolsky Memorial tournament in
Minsk. He had been invited as an exception but took the first place and became a
master. Kasparov has repeatedly said that this event was a turning point in his life, and that it convinced him to choose chess as his career. "I will remember the Sokolsky Memorial as long as I live", he wrote. He has also said that after the victory, he thought he had a very good shot at the World Championship.[
2]
Kasparov rose quickly through the
FIDE rankings. Starting with an oversight by the
Russian Chess Federation, Garry Kasparov participated in a
Grandmaster tournament in
Banja Luka while still unrated (the federation thought it was a junior tournament). He emerged from this top-class encounter with a provisional rating of 2595, enough to catapult him into the top group of chess players.
The next year, 1980, he won the
World Junior Chess Championship in
Dortmund,
West Germany.
Kasparov sought to challenge world champion
Anatoly Karpov — a firm favourite of the Russian Chess Federation. But first Kasparov had to pass the test of the
Candidates Tournament to qualify.
His first Candidates match was against
Alexander Beliavsky, from which Kasparov emerged surprisingly victorious (Beliavsky was an exceptionally tough opponent). Politics threatened Kasparov's next match against
Viktor Korchnoi, which was scheduled to be played in Pasadena, California. Korchnoi defected from Russia in the late 1970s, and was at that time the strongest non-Soviet player. Various political manoeuvres prevented Kasparov from playing Korchnoi, and Kasparov forfeited the match.
This was resolved by Korchnoi's allowing the match to be replayed in
London. Kasparov won.
Kasparov's final Candidates match was against the resurgent
Vassily Smyslov (who was randomly selected to advance after a 7-7 tie against
Huebner by the spin of a roulette wheel at the quarterfinals, but soundly defeated Hungarian GM Zoltan Ribli at the semifinals). Smyslov was the seventh world champion in 1957, but later years saw his willingness to fight for wins greatly diminished. Kasparov won with 4 wins and 9 draws.
The
1984 World Championship match between
Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov had its fair share of ups and downs, as well as the most controversial finish to a competitive match ever. Karpov started off in very good form, and after nine games Kasparov found himself 4-0 down in a "first to six wins" match. Fellow players predicted a 6-0 whitewash of Kasparov within 18 games.
For Karpov, the result so far would go some way toward exorcising the ghost of
Bobby Fischer's Candidates results in 1971, and would further cement Karpov as a true World Champion.
Kasparov dug in, with inspiration from a Russian poet before each game, and battled with Karpov into seventeen successive draws. Karpov duly won the next decisive game before Kasparov fought back with another series of draws until game 32, Kasparov's first win against the World Champion.
At this point Karpov, twelve years older than Kasparov, was close to exhaustion, and not looking like the player who started this match. Kasparov won games 47 and 48 to bring the scores to 5-3 in Karpov's favour. Then the match was ended without result by
Florencio Campomanes, the President of FIDE, and a new match was announced to start a few months later.
The termination of the match was a matter of some controversy. At the press conference at which he announced his decision, Campomanes cited the health of the two players, which had been put under strain by the length of the match, despite the fact that both Karpov and Kasparov stated that they would prefer the match to continue. Karpov had lost 10
kg (22
lb) over the course of the match and had been hospitalized several times. Kasparov, however, was in excellent health and extremely resentful of Campomanes' decision, asking him why he was abandoning the match if both players wanted to continue. It would appear that Kasparov, who had won the last two games before the suspension, felt the same way as some commentators — that he was now the favourite to win the match despite his 5-3 deficit. He appeared to be physically stronger than his opponent, and in the later games seemed to have been playing the better chess.
The match became the first, and so far only, world championship match to be abandoned without result. Kasparov's relations with Campomanes and FIDE were greatly strained, and the feud between the two would eventually come to a head in 1993 with Kasparov's complete break-away from FIDE.
The second Karpov-Kasparov match in 1985 was organized as the best of 24 games, where first player to 12.5 points would claim the title. However, in the event of a 12-12 draw, the title would go to Karpov as the reigning champion. Kasparov showed he had learned some valuable lessons in the previous match, and although the score was quite even down to the final wire, a few spectacular games involving the
Sicilian defence secured the World Championship for Kasparov at the age of 22 by a score of 13-11. This broke the existing record of youngest winner held for over twenty years by
Mikhail Tal, who was 23 when he beat Botvinnik in 1960.
At the time, the FIDE rules granted a defeated champion an automatic right of rematch. Another match between Kasparov and Karpov duly took place in 1986, hosted jointly in the cities of
London and
Leningrad. At one point, Kasparov opened a three-point lead in the match, and looked to be well on his way to a decisive win. However, Karpov battled back by winning three consecutive games to level the score late in the match. At this point, Kasparov dismissed one of his seconds,
Evgeny Vladimirov, accusing him of selling his opening preparation to the Karpov team. In any event, Kasparov scored one further win in the match and kept his title by a final score of 12.5-11.5.
A fourth match for the world title took place between Kasparov and Karpov 1987 in
Seville, as Karpov qualified through the Candidates' Matches to once again become the official challenger. This match was very close, with neither player holding more than a one-point lead at any point in the match. The finish was dramatic, as Kasparov was down one point in the final game, needing a win to hold his title. He proved to be up to the task and won the final game, retaining his title as the match was drawn by a score of 12-12.
A fifth match between Kasparov and Karpov was held in
Lyon and
New York in 1990. Once again, the result was a close one with Kasparov winning narrowly by a margin of 12.5-11.5.
With the World Champion title in his grasp, Kasparov switched to battling against FIDE — as
Bobby Fischer had done twenty years earlier — but this time from within FIDE. He created an organisation to represent chess players, the
GrandMaster's Association (GMA) to give players more of a say in FIDE's activities.
This stand-off lasted until 1993, by which time a new challenger had qualified through the Candidates cycle for Kasparov's next World Championship defense. The new challenger was
Nigel Short, a British Grandmaster who had defeated Karpov in a qualifying match. The world champion and his challenger decided to play their match outside of FIDE's jurisdiction, under another organisation created by Garry Kasparov called the
Professional Chess Association (PCA). This is where the great fracture in the lineage of World Champions began.
Kasparov and Short were ejected from FIDE, and they played their well-sponsored match in London, which Kasparov won convincingly by a score of 12.5-7.5. FIDE organized a World Championship match between the loser of the Candidates final,
Jan Timman, and previous World Champion Karpov, which Karpov won. (Nigel Short beat both of these players in the Candidates matches before facing Kasparov.) So Kasparov held the PCA World Chess Championship, and Karpov held the FIDE World Chess Championship.
Kasparov defended his title in 1995 against the
Indian superstar
Viswanathan Anand, which was held at the World Trade Center in New York City, before the PCA collapsed when
Intel, one of the major backers, withdrew its sponsorship. Kasparov won the match by 4 wins to 1 with 13 draws. The match had 3 clear phases: a cautious beginning with 8 draws, mostly short; a violent middle phase with a win by Anand being responded to by a crushing sequence of 4 wins in 5 games by Kasparov; and a quiet finish with 4 quick draws after the match was beyond doubt.
Kasparov tried to organise another World Championship match, under yet another organisation, the
World Chess Association (WCA) with
Linares organiser
Rentero.
Alexei Shirov and
Vladimir Kramnik played a candidates match to decide the challenger, which Shirov won in a surprising upset. The WCA collapsed, however, when Rentero admitted that the funds required and promised had never materialised.
This left Kasparov stranded, and yet another organisation stepped in —
BrainGames.com, headed by
Raymond Keene (who was also involved in bringing Kasparov to London for his replayed Candidates match against Korchnoi, half of the first Kasparov-Karpov match, and the Kasparov-Short PCA match). No match against Shirov was arranged, and talks with Anand collapsed, so a match was instead arranged against Kramnik...
This match, Kasparov-Kramnik, took place in London during the latter half of 2000. A well-prepared Kramnik surprised Kasparov and won a crucial game 2 against Kasparov's
Grünfeld Defence after the champion missed several drawing chances in an opposite-colour bishop ending. Kasparov made a critical error in game 10 with the
Nimzo-Indian Defence, which Kramnik exploited to win in 25 moves. As white, Kasparov could not crack the passive but solid Berlin Defence in the
Ruy Lopez, and Kramnik successfully drew all his games as black. Kramnik won the match 8.5-6.5, and for the first time in fifteen years Kasparov had no world championship title. He became the first player to lose a world championship match without winning a game since
Lasker lost to
Capablanca in 1921.
As part of the so-called "Prague Agreement", masterminded by
Yasser Seirawan and intended to reunite the two World Championships, Kasparov was to play a match against the FIDE World Champion
Ruslan Ponomariov in September 2003. However, this match was called off after Ponomariov refused to sign his contract for it without reservation. In its place, there were plans for a match against
Rustam Kasimdzhanov, winner of the
FIDE World Chess Championship 2004, to be held in January 2005 in the
United Arab Emirates. These also fell through due to lack of funding. Plans to hold the match in Turkey instead came too late. Kasparov announced in January 2005 that he was tired of waiting for FIDE to organise a match and that therefore he had decided to stop all efforts to regain the World Championship title.
After winning the prestigious
Linares tournament for the ninth time, Kasparov announced on
March 10,
2005, that he would be retiring from serious competitive chess. He cited as the reason a lack of personal goals in the chess world (he commented when winning the Russian championship in 2004 that it had been the last major title he had never won outright) and expressed frustration at the failure to reunify the world championship.
Kasparov said he may play in some rapid events for fun, but intends to spend more time on his books (both the
My Great Predecessors series (see
below) and a book on the links between decision-making in chess and other areas of life), and will continue to involve himself in
Russian politics, which he says is "headed down the wrong path." He is an outspoken critic of
President Vladimir Putin. [
3]
On
April 10, 2005, Kasparov was in Moscow at a promotional event when he was struck over the head with a chessboard he had just signed. The assailant was reported to have said "I admired you as a chess player, but you gave that up for politics," immediately before the attack.
Kasparov is also an inventor with two European
patent applications:
*EP1112765A4: METHOD FOR PLAYING A LOTTERY GAME AND SYSTEM FOR REALISING THE SAME from 1998, and
*EP0871132A1: METHOD OF PLAYING A LOTTERY GAME AND SUITABLE SYSTEM from 1995
Despite this, the first volume won the
British Chess Federation's Book of the Year award in 2003. Volume two, covering
Max Euwe,
Mikhail Botvinnik,
Vassily Smyslov and
Mikhail Tal appeared later in 2003. Volume three, covering
Tigran Petrosian and
Boris Spassky appeared in early 2004. In December 2004, Kasparov released volume four, which covers
Samuel Reshevsky,
Miguel Najdorf, and
Bent Larsen, but focuses primarily on
Bobby Fischer. The fifth volume, devoted to the chess careers of
Viktor Korchnoi and
Anatoly Karpov, was published in March 2006. In that book, Kasparov stated that he plans to publish two more volumes in the series: a sixth, on "the openings revolution of the 1970s-1980s," and a seventh, focused on his own career
In February 1996,
IBM's chess computer
Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in one game using normal time controls, in
Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1996, Game 1. However, Kasparov infamously retorted that upon the next games he "would tear Deep Blue to pieces with no question" [
4] and proceeded to gain three wins and two draws, soundly winning the match.
In May 1997, an updated version of
Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in
Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1997, Game 6, in a highly publicised six-game match. This was the first time a computer had ever defeated a world champion in match play. An award-winning
documentary film was made about this famous matchup entitled
Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine. Also,
IBM keeps a web site of the event at http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/. It should be noted that several factors weighed against Kasparov in this match. He was denied access to Deep Blue's recent games, in contrast to the computer's team that could study hundreds of Kasparov's. The relatively fast time control, lack of rest days and other match rules also favored the machine.
After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, suggesting that during the second game, human chess players, in contravention of the rules, intervened. IBM denied they cheated, saying the only human intervention occurred between games. The rules provided for the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they said they used to shore up weaknesses in the computer's play revealed during the course of the match. Kasparov requested printouts of the machine's moves but IBM refused. Kasparov demanded a rematch, but IBM declined and retired Deep Blue.
Kasparov has been credited with the invention of
Advanced Chess in 1998, a new form of chess in which a human and a computer play together.
In November 2003, he engaged in a four game match against chess playing computer program
X3D Fritz (which was said to have an estimated rating of 2807), using a virtual board,
3D glasses and a
speech recognition system. After two draws and two wins respectively, the X3D Man-Machine match ended in draw. Kasparov received $175,000 for the result and took home the golden trophy. Kasparov continued to criticize the blunder in the second game that cost him a crucial point. He felt that he had outplayed the machine overall and played well. "I only made one mistake but unfortunately that one mistake lost the game."
After Garry Kasparov's retirement he turned to politics and created
United Civil Front, a political movement whose main goal is to prevent Russia from returning to totalitarism nowadays.
* During his PCA World Championship encounter with Nigel Short and on the eve of the thirteenth match game, Kasparov revealed on Channel 4 television that 13 was in fact his lucky number. Born on the 13th April, in 1963 (divisible by 13), he was the thirteenth World Champion. The game was however drawn.
* Kasparov is a supporter of the
New Chronology of
Anatoly Fomenko.
*
Kasparov versus The World*
List of people who have beaten Garry Kasparov in chess*
Garry Kasparov download 980 of his games in pgn format.
*
Committee 2008, Political organization headed by Gary Kasparov
*
75 crucial positions from his games*
Kasparov Speaks on Retirement Video clip
*
The World Championship of 1985*
Kasparov's political opinion*More about Kasparov's retirement from
The Week in Chess and
Chessbase*
Interview with the Internet Chess Club, November 22, 1998
*
The Chess Oracle of Kasparov is a game based on the
small world phenomenon, similar to and inspired by the
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon*Kasparov is also a contributing editor of
The Wall Street Journal::*
The Great Game, on retiring to focus on Russian politics,
March 19,
2005:*
Fischer's Price, on Bobby Fischer,
July 19,
2004:*
Stop the Moral Equivalence, on terrorism,
May 19,
2004:*
Putinocracy, on Putin's regime,
March 14,
2004:*
Man vs. Machine, on computer chess,
February 16,
2003:*
The War Is Not Yet Won, on war in the Middle East,
August 5,
2002
