Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov — chess (grandmaster) with roots in the USSR

Garry Kimovich Kasparov was born Garik Kimovich Weinstein on 13 April 1963 in Baku, then the capital of the Azerbaijan SSR of the Soviet Union. His father was Kim Weinstein; he later took the surname Kasparov. He became the Soviet under-18 champion at twelve and the world under-20 champion at seventeen, and from 1984 until his retirement he was ranked the world's No. 1.

In 1984 he challenged the world champion Anatoly Karpov in a marathon match that ended controversially without a result, and in a rematch in 1985 he won the title at twenty-two, becoming the youngest undisputed world champion, a record he held until 2024. He defended it against Karpov in 1986, 1987 and 1990. In 1993 a dispute with FIDE, the world chess federation, led him to found a rival body, the Professional Chess Association; he held its title, later known as the classical world championship, until he lost it to Vladimir Kramnik in 2000. His peak rating of 2851, set in 1999, remained the highest until 2013.

In 1996 he defeated IBM's Deep Blue computer in a six-game match, and in the 1997 rematch became the first world champion to lose a match to a computer under standard time controls, a contest that brought artificial intelligence and chess to a global audience. In 1990 he and his family had left Baku amid ethnic violence in the last years of the USSR.

He retired from professional chess in 2005, still the world's highest-rated player, and turned to politics and writing. He took part in opposition politics in Russia, stood unsuccessfully for the presidency of FIDE in 2013–14, and obtained Croatian citizenship in 2014; he lives in New York. He chaired the New York-based Human Rights Foundation from 2011 or 2012 until 2024. His books include the series My Great Predecessors (from 2003), on the world champions before him, How Life Imitates Chess and Deep Thinking (2017), on his matches with Deep Blue and the future of machine intelligence. He has been a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal since 1991, and in 2009–10 he coached the young Magnus Carlsen.

Tracing the roots — Baku, Azerbaijan SSR (now Azerbaijan)

Born Garik Weinstein in Baku, in the Azerbaijan SSR, in 1963, he became USSR under-18 champion at twelve, world under-20 champion at seventeen and Soviet and world champion before leaving Baku in 1990.

Historical context

Soviet Union (USSR) · 1922–1991

Baku, Azerbaijan SSR (now Azerbaijan). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition