Garry Kasparov was named after an American president his father admired
Garry Kasparov says his first name honours Harry S. Truman, whom his father respected for standing up to communism. It was an unusual name in the Soviet Union. The boy who carried it became world chess champion at 22 and held the number one ranking for a record 255 months.
He was born Garik Kimovich Weinstein on 13 April 1963 in Baku, in Soviet Azerbaijan, to a Jewish father and an Armenian mother. His father died of leukaemia when Garik was seven, and at twelve he took his mother Klara's surname, Kasparov. Though half Armenian and half Jewish, he calls himself Russian because Russian is his native language and culture.
Chess grabbed him when he offered a solution to a problem his parents had set up. From seven he trained at Baku's Young Pioneer Palace, and at ten he entered Mikhail Botvinnik's chess school under coach Vladimir Makogonov, who sharpened his positional play. When Kasparov was 11, Botvinnik predicted that the future of chess was in his hands. He won the Soviet Junior Championship at 13 in 1976 with 7 out of 9, then again the next year with 8.5.
In 1985 he beat Anatoly Karpov to become the youngest undisputed world champion, a record that lasted until 2024, and fended off Karpov in three further matches. A quarrel with FIDE in 1993 led him to form the rival Professional Chess Association. In 1997 he became the first reigning world champion to lose a match to a computer at standard time controls, beaten by IBM's Deep Blue. Vladimir Kramnik took his classical title in 2000, yet Kasparov remained the top-rated player until he retired from regular play in 2005.
His peak rating of 2851 in 1999 stood as the highest ever until Magnus Carlsen, whom he coached in 2009 and 2010, passed it in 2013. He also holds records for 15 straight tournament wins and 11 Chess Oscars. Since retiring he has written the My Great Predecessors series on earlier champions and turned to political activism, leaving Russia in 2013 and later taking Croatian citizenship.
Source: Garry Kasparov
