Garry Kasparov

Garry Kimovich Kasparov was born on April 13, 1963, in Baku, Azerbaijan, then part of the Soviet Union. He showed a remarkable aptitude for chess from an early age and became a Soviet chess master while still a teenager. He earned the grandmaster title from FIDE in 1980 at the age of seventeen, one of the youngest players to achieve that distinction at the time.

Kasparov became World Chess Champion in 1985 when he defeated Anatoly Karpov in a legendary match that spanned more than five months and 48 games. He successfully defended the title in rematches against Karpov in 1986, 1987, and 1990, cementing his position as the dominant force in world chess. He held the undisputed or widely recognized world championship title from 1985 until 2000, when he lost a match to Vladimir Kramnik.

In 1997, Kasparov played a celebrated six-game match against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, losing the series two wins to one with three draws. The match attracted enormous global attention and became a landmark moment in discussions about artificial intelligence and human cognition. He had previously defeated an earlier version of Deep Blue in 1996.

Kasparov retired from professional chess in 2005. Following his retirement, he became an outspoken critic of the Russian government under Vladimir Putin and co-founded the United Civil Front in Russia. He subsequently moved to the United States and continued to be active in political commentary, writing several books including "How Life Imitates Chess" and "Winter Is Coming," which examined authoritarianism in contemporary geopolitics.

Kasparov's peak rating of 2851 on the FIDE Elo scale, achieved in 1999, remained the highest ever recorded for many years. He is widely cited by chess historians and analysts as the most dominant player in the history of the game.