🇷🇺 Garry Kasparov

In the autumn of 1985, in Moscow's Central Chess Club, a twenty-two-year-old from Baku sat across from the reigning world champion, Anatoly Karpov, and played a game that changed chess forever. When Garry Kasparov won the 1985 World Championship match, he did not merely unseat a champion — he announced the arrival of a new kind of chess, one that combined ferocious tactical attacks with a deep, almost philosophical understanding of long-term positional planning. The chess world would not be the same for the next twenty years.

Garry Kimovich Kasparov was born on April 13, 1963, in Baku, in what was then the Soviet Azerbaijan SSR. His father, Kim Weinstein, died when Garry was seven; his mother, Klara, raised him and recognized her son's unusual abilities from an early age. At twelve, she enrolled him in Mikhail Botvinnik's renowned chess school in Moscow — the same academy that had produced a generation of Soviet champions. Botvinnik himself recognized immediately that Kasparov was different. "He burns," Botvinnik said. "He has fire inside him that most players never find."

Kasparov earned the Grandmaster title in 1980 at sixteen. By 1984, he was ranked number one in the world at twenty years old — the youngest player ever to hold that distinction at the time. His first world championship match against Karpov in 1984–85 became the longest in history, suspended without conclusion after forty-eight games when Kasparov had clawed back from a seemingly impossible deficit. The rematch in 1985 produced a clean Kasparov victory at twenty-two, making him the youngest World Champion in history up to that point.

He would hold the title through five matches, defending against Karpov three more times and later Nigel Short and Viswanathan Anand. His peak rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, set a world record that stood for fifteen years until Magnus Carlsen broke it. More than the numbers, his dominance was expressed in the texture of his play: aggressive, imaginative, always pushing, always looking for the break that would shatter a position open. He introduced a generation of opening novelties, several of which still bear his name and are studied today.

In 1997 came the match that defined a decade: Kasparov versus Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer. He had beaten a previous version of Deep Blue in 1996. In the 1997 rematch, he won the first game and then lost the match 2.5–3.5 — the first time a reigning world champion had been defeated by a computer under standard tournament conditions. The result became one of the defining cultural events of the late twentieth century, a moment when humanity confronted the possibility that machine intelligence might surpass human genius in the domain where humans had always felt most certain of their supremacy.

Kasparov retired from professional chess in 2005 and entered political life as a leading opposition figure in Russia. He founded the United Civil Front, wrote extensively on politics and the nature of artificial intelligence, and became one of the most prominent critics of Vladimir Putin's government. His memoir "Winter Is Coming" (2015) and his book "Deep Thinking" (2017) on chess and AI reached wide audiences far beyond the chess world. He had always been something larger than a chess player, and after retirement he proved it completely.