Garry Kasparov
From Chesspedia, the Free Chess Encyclopedia.
Garry Kimovich Kasparov (Га́рри Ки́мович Каспа́ров, pronounced with stress falling on the second syllable: kas-PA-rov) (born April 13, 1963) is a chess grandmaster and is arguably the strongest chess player in history. His 2851 ELO rating in the July 1999 FIDE rating list is the highest rating ever achieved. As of October 2005, Kasparov's 2812 ELO rating places him highest on the FIDE listing [1]. Ranked first in the world for nearly all of the 20 years from 1985 to 2005, 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 four times, in 1995, 1996, 2001 and 2002.
Kasparov announced his retirement from professional chess on March 10, 2005, instead devoting time to politics and to do "everything in my power to resist Vladimir Putin's dictatorship." He is a leading member of the Committee 2008: Free Choice, a group of liberal opposition leaders. According to the 2005 December edition of Atlantic Monthly, Kasparov will run against Putin in the 2008 election for the Russian Presidency [2].
He is also a supporter of history revision, and of Fomenko's new chronology.
Garry Kasparov was born as Garry Vajnshtejn (the surname analogous to "Weinstein" in English) in Baku, Azerbaijan (at that time republic of Soviet Union) to Armenian-Jewish parentage. He first began the serious study of chess after he came across a chess problem set up by his parents and proposed a solution to it. When he was 7, his father died, and he adopted his mother's surname as soon as was legally possible, at the age of 12. His mother Klara is an Armenian woman whose surname is "Kasparian", and "Kasparov" is the Russianised version of this name.
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Early career
Kasparov trained at Mikhail Botvinnik's chess school. He won the Soviet Junior Championship at 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 at 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.
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.
1984 World Championship
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 within a dozen 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 1970, 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. A few games later Kasparov won another two games 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 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.
As National Master Dan Heisman of Philadelphia humorously commented on this confusing situation: "Kasparov was losing the match to Karpov 5-3 but found it stopped by FIDE, Kasparov said he was winning because Karpov was only ahead 5-3. Karpov, from his hospital bed, protested that he felt fine and wanted to continue, but the doctors were not letting him."
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.
World Champion
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 (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 (he was 23 when he beat Botvinnik in 1960).
Kasparov cemented his authority at the top of the international rating ladder with a series of fine tournament performances as well as defending his title three times against his arch-opponent Karpov.
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.
Ejection from FIDE
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 world champion and his challenger (Nigel Short) 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 on 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. FIDE organized a World Championship match between the loser of the Candidates final, Jan Timman, and previous World Champion Karpov, which Karpov won. (It should be noted that 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 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.
Losing the title
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-color 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.
Retirement
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.
Sample games
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| In this position after move 23 in the 1999 Corus tournament game between Kasparov and Topalov, Kasparov (white) appears to be in a weaker position, but a stunning rook sacrifice followed by precise endgame play secures Kasparov a victory. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The game Kasparov-Topalov, played at the Corus tournament in Wijk aan Zee in 1999, features one of his best combinations (moves given in algebraic chess notation):
1.e4 d6 2.d4 Nf6 3.Nc3 g6 4.Be3 Bg7 5.Qd2 c6 6.f3 b5 7.Nge2 Nbd7 8.Bh6 Bxh6 9.Qxh6 Bb7 10.a3 e5 11.0-0-0 Qe7 12.Kb1 a6 13.Nc1 0-0-0 14.Nb3 exd4 15.Rxd4 c5 16.Rd1 Nb6 17.g3 Kb8 18.Na5 Ba8 19.Bh3 d5 20.Qf4+ Ka7 21.Rhe1 d4 22.Nd5 Nbxd5 23.exd5 Qd6
(see diagram at right for this position)
24.Rxd4!! cxd4 25.Re7+! Kb6 [25...Qxe7 26.Qxd4+ Kb8 27.Qb6+ Bb7 28.Nc6+ Ka8 29.Qa7#] 26.Qxd4+ Kxa5 27.b4+ Ka4 28.Qc3 Qxd5 29.Ra7 Bb7 30.Rxb7 Qc4 31.Qxf6 Kxa3? [31...Rd1+ 32.Kb2 Ra8±] 32.Qxa6+ Kxb4 33.c3+! Kxc3 34.Qa1+ Kd2 35.Qb2+ Kd1 36.Bf1! Rd2 37.Rd7! Rxd7 38.Bxc4 bxc4 39.Qxh8 Rd3 40.Qa8 c3 41.Qa4+ Ke1 42.f4 f5 43.Kc1 Rd2 44.Qa7 1-0
When announcing his retirement, Kasparov commented that this was possibly the best of all his games. It is of some interest that his final professional game was a loss to the same Topalov he had defeated in this game.
Before Kasparov played the above game, he considered the following his "supreme creative achievement." The readers of Chess Informant voted it the best game in the first 64 issues of that periodical:
Karpov-Kasparov, 16th match game, World Championship 1985. 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nc6 5.Nb5 d6 6.c4 Nf6 7.N1c3 a6 8.Na3 d5 9.cxd5 exd5 10.exd5 Nb4 11.Be2 Bc5 12.O-O O-O 13.Bf3 Bf5 14.Bg5 Re8 15.Qd2 b5 16.Rad1 Nd3 17.Nab1 h6 18.Bh4 b4 19.Na4 Bd6 20.Bg3 Rc8 21.b3 g5 22.Bxd6 Qxd6 23.g3 Nd7 24.Bg2 Qf6 25.a3 a5 26.axb4 axb4 27.Qa2 Bg6 28.d6 g4 29.Qd2 Kg7 30.f3 Qxd6 31.fxg4 Qd4+ 32.Kh1 Nf6 33.Rf4 Ne4 34.Qxd3 Nf2+ 35.Rxf2 Bxd3 36.Rfd2 Qe3 37.Rxd3 Rc1 38.Nb2 Qf2 39.Nd2 Rxd1+ 40.Nxd1 Re1+ 0-1
Books
Kasparov has written a number of books on chess. In 2003, the first volume of his projected five volume work Garry Kasparov on My Great Predecessors was published. This volume, which deals with the world chess champions Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, José Raúl Capablanca and Alexander Alekhine, and some of their strong contemporaries, has received lavish praise from some reviewers (including Nigel Short), while attracting criticism from others for historical inaccuracies and analysis of games directly copied from unattributed sources. 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 which will focus mainly on Anatoly Karpov is scheduled to appear by the end of 2005.
Chess against computers
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 retorted with 3 wins and 2 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. Yet he also suggested that humans may have helped the machine during the match. In a way, Kasparov's allegations were correct. The rules provided for the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they used to shore up weaknesses in the computer's play revealed during the course of the match. 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."
See also
External links
- FIDE rating card for Garry Kasparov
- Kasparov's games at chessgames.com
- 100 crucial positions from his games
- On Fischer's Challenge to Topalov
- 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
- Kasparov is also a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal:
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- 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
| Preceded by: Anatoly Karpov |
World Chess Champion 1985–1993 |
Succeeded by: disputed |
| Preceded by: Anatoly Karpov |
FIDE world champion 1985–1993 |
Succeeded by: Anatoly Karpov |
| Preceded by: (none) |
PCA World Chess Champion 1993–2000 |
Succeeded by: Vladimir Kramnik |
