Garry Kasparov
April 13, 1963 — Baku, Azerbaijan, Soviet Union
Garry Kimovich Kasparov is a Russian chess grandmaster and former World Chess Champion who dominated competitive chess for two decades, held the world number one ranking for a record 255 months, and whose 1997 defeat to IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer became one of the defining cultural moments of the digital age.
Prodigy from Baku
Born on April 13, 1963 in Baku, Azerbaijan — then part of the Soviet Union — Kasparov showed extraordinary aptitude for chess by age five. He trained through the Soviet chess system and became an International Grandmaster at 17. The Soviet chess establishment, recognising that they had a potential world champion on their hands, began grooming him aggressively while simultaneously trying to control him. He was combative, individualistic, and entirely unwilling to be managed.
World Champion at 22
In 1985, at age 22, Kasparov defeated Anatoly Karpov to become the youngest World Chess Champion in history — a record that still stands. The match itself was one of sport's great rivalries: Kasparov and Karpov played five grueling championship matches between 1984 and 1990, a confrontation that took on geopolitical overtones during the dying years of the Cold War. Kasparov won four of the five matches. His peak FIDE rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, remained the highest ever recorded until Magnus Carlsen surpassed it in 2013.
In 1997, he played a six-game match against IBM's Deep Blue computer — at the time the most powerful chess-playing machine ever built. Kasparov won the first match. Deep Blue won the rematch in six games. The result — a human chess champion defeated by a machine — was front-page news worldwide and a landmark moment in artificial intelligence history.
Did You Know?
Kasparov has claimed — and many chess analysts have agreed — that IBM's Deep Blue computer may have received human assistance during certain key games in their 1997 match, pointing to moves that no chess engine of the era should logically have made. IBM denied this, but declined to release Deep Blue's move logs. The controversy lingered for years and remains a point of heated debate among chess historians.
Political Activist and Author
Kasparov retired from professional chess in 2005 and became an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin's Russian government, co-founding the pro-democracy United Civil Front and serving as a leader of The Other Russia opposition coalition. He was arrested multiple times during protests. He now lives in exile in New York and is a prolific author — his book Deep Thinking examines chess, artificial intelligence, and humanity's future, while Winter Is Coming is a political argument for confronting authoritarian regimes before they grow beyond challenge.