Garry Kasparov

Early life and chess development

Garry Kimovich Kasparov was born April 13, 1963, in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR. His mother Klara Shagenovna was Armenian; his father Kim Vainshteyn was Jewish. Kim died of leukemia when Garry was 7, after which Klara raised him alone with strong involvement from his maternal grandparents. He adopted his mother's surname (Kasparov) at age 12, an Azerbaijani-Russian transliteration of the Armenian "Kasparyan."

His chess training started at age 5 when he solved a chess problem set up by his father. From age 7 he was enrolled in the Mikhail Botvinnik Chess School - a Soviet program that ran selective training for the strongest young chess players in the country. By age 13 he was the Soviet Junior Champion; by 17 he won the Soviet Junior Championship outright; by 19 he was the strongest player in the world by FIDE rating among players his age.

His Soviet-era chess development was structured around the Botvinnik school's emphasis on systematic study, opening preparation, and the integration of psychological factors into competitive preparation. Kasparov's subsequent World Championship match training under coaches including Aleksandr Nikitin and Mikhail Botvinnik himself extended this approach.

World Championship reign (1985-2000)

In 1984-85 Kasparov played a World Championship match against Anatoly Karpov that became one of the longest matches in chess history (48 games, no winner, eventually halted by FIDE under controversial circumstances). The match was a watershed moment for the politics of chess and the relationship between the FIDE administration and the Soviet chess establishment.

In the 1985 rematch Kasparov defeated Karpov to become World Champion at age 22 - the youngest in history at that point. He defended the title against Karpov in 1986, 1987, and 1990. The Kasparov-Karpov rivalry produced more than 140 individual games across these matches and is among the most-studied competitive rivalries in chess history.

In 1993 Kasparov broke with FIDE over governance disputes and founded the Professional Chess Association (PCA), under which he continued to defend his title. The chess world was split into FIDE and PCA championships through the 1990s. Kasparov continued to hold the PCA title until 2000, when he lost it to Vladimir Kramnik in London. He maintained the world number-one FIDE rating, however, until his retirement in 2005.

The Stern magazine testing (1987)

In 1987 the German weekly Stern magazine commissioned a cover-story feature on Kasparov that included a battery of cognitive tests administered by a panel of German psychologists. The tests covered multiple domains - spatial reasoning, working memory, verbal abstraction - and produced an aggregated score reported in the article as approximately 190.

The Stern testing is the most-cited piece of documentation for Kasparov's IQ figure. It is, however, a magazine commission rather than a clinical-grade administration: the specific instruments used were not disclosed in publication-grade detail, and the psychologist panel was not assembled with the standardization controls that a clinical psychometric study would have used.

Kasparov himself has been measured in talking about the figure. He has neither defended the 190 number as an authoritative measurement nor dismissed his measured ability; his stated view is that the Stern feature was an interesting one-time exercise and that competitive chess performance is its own kind of testing that does not require IQ-score validation.

Deep Blue and the human-machine question

In 1996 Kasparov played a six-game match against IBM's Deep Blue chess computer and won 4-2. In a 1997 rematch he lost 3.5-2.5 - the first World Champion to lose a serious match to a computer. The result was a landmark event for chess and for artificial intelligence generally. Kasparov's subsequent comments about the match included accusations that IBM had cheated by having human grandmasters intervene during the play. IBM denied the claim and retired Deep Blue immediately after the match.

Kasparov's 2017 book Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins is a long retrospective on the Deep Blue matches and on the subsequent decades of chess AI development. The book is notable for Kasparov's evolution from initial bitterness about the Deep Blue rematch toward a more measured view of human-machine collaboration in cognitive work.

He has been an active commentator on artificial intelligence development since the rise of deep learning. His position - that AI systems are tools that can extend rather than replace human cognitive work - has been influential in policy and industry discussions even when his specific predictions have been contested.

Political activism and exile

Kasparov retired from professional chess in 2005 to devote himself to pro-democracy political activity in Russia. He co-founded The Other Russia, an opposition coalition, and ran (unsuccessfully) for the Russian presidency in 2008. His political activity put him at significant personal risk in the Putin-era Russian political environment.

In 2013 he left Russia following increased pressure from the Putin administration; he has lived in exile in New York since. He took Croatian citizenship in 2014. He is chair of the Human Rights Foundation since 2012 and has been a public commentator on Russian politics, the Ukraine war, and global democratic backsliding through this period.

His political writing includes Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped (2015), Deep Thinking (2017), and numerous columns in the Wall Street Journal and other outlets. He has been a consistent critic of Russian foreign policy through the Ukraine invasions of 2014 and 2022.

Timeline

• 1963Born in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR.
• 1970Father Kim dies of leukemia.
• 1976Enters the Mikhail Botvinnik Chess School.
• 1980Wins the Soviet Junior Championship.
• 1984First match for World Championship against Karpov; halted controversially.
• 1985Defeats Karpov to become World Champion at 22.
• 1987Stern magazine commissions cognitive-testing battery; result reported as approximately 190.
• 1993Breaks with FIDE and founds the Professional Chess Association.
• 1997Loses Deep Blue rematch to IBM 3.5-2.5.
• 1999Peak FIDE rating of 2851.
• 2000Loses World Championship to Kramnik.
• 2005Retires from professional chess; begins pro-democracy political activity.
• 2008Runs (unsuccessfully) for Russian presidency.
• 2012Chair of the Human Rights Foundation.
• 2013Leaves Russia for exile in New York.
• 2026Continues political commentary; active chess educator.

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