About Garry Kasparov

Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the Soviet Union in 1963, Garry Kasparov became the under-18 chess champion of the USSR at the age of 12 and the world under-20 champion at 17. He came to international fame at the age of 22 as the youngest world chess champion in history in 1985. He defended his title five times, including a legendary series of matches against arch-rival Anatoly Karpov. Kasparov broke Bobby Fischer’s rating record in 1990 and his own peak rating record remained unbroken until 2013. His famous matches against the IBM super-computer Deep Blue in 1996-97 were key to bringing artificial intelligence, and chess, into the mainstream.

Kasparov’s was one of the first prominent Soviets to call for democratic and market reforms and was an early supporter of Boris Yeltsin’s push to break up the Soviet Union. In 1990, he and his family escaped ethnic violence in his native Baku as the USSR collapsed. In 2005, Kasparov, in his 20th year as the world’s top-rated player, retired from professional chess to join the vanguard of the Russian pro-democracy movement. In 2012, Kasparov was named chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, succeeding Vaclav Havel. HRF promotes individual liberty worldwide and organizes the Oslo Freedom Forum. Facing imminent arrest during Putin’s crackdown, Kasparov moved from Moscow to New York City in 2013.

The US-based Kasparov Chess Foundation non-profit promotes the teaching of chess in education systems around the world. Its program already in use in schools across the United States, KCF also has centers in Brussels, Johannesburg, Singapore, and Mexico City. Garry and his wife Daria travel frequently to promote the proven benefits of chess in education and have toured Africa extensively.

Kasparov has been a contributing editor to The Wall Street Journal since 1991 and is a regular commentator on politics and human rights. He speaks frequently to business and political audiences around the world on technology, strategy, politics, and achieving peak mental performance. He is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Oxford-Martin School with a focus on human-machine collaboration. He’s a member of the executive advisory board of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics and a Security Ambassador for Avast Software, where he discusses cyber security and the digital future. Kasparov’s book How Life Imitates Chess on strategy and decision-making is available in over 20 languages. He is the author of two acclaimed series of chess books, My Great Predecessors and Modern Chess. Kasparov’s 2015 book, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped is a blend of history, memoir, and current events analysis.

Kasparov’s next book is Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. (May 2017) It details his matches against Deep Blue, his years of research and lectures on human and machine competition and collaboration, and his cooperation with the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. He says,

“AI will transform everything we do and we must press forward ambitiously in the one area robots cannot compete with humans: in dreaming big dreams. Our machines will help us achieve them. Instead of worrying about what machines can do, we should worry more about what they still cannot do.”

Please feel free to add to this thread any info you find about our author, Garry Kasparov. If you find interviews or YouTube videos please don't be shy about sharing them.

And if this book discussion does well we will invite Garry Kasparov to either a live chat in the BookTalk.org chat room or an email interview.

Hi Chris, great selection. I have bought Winter is Coming and read Kasparov's long wikipedia page, which is an astounding record of application of genius chess logic to politics.

Kasparov and I were born within three weeks of each other. Having recently focussed so much on Russian politics through The Master and Margarita, it is clear to me that Kasparov is like Bulgakov in his presentation of a conservative intellectual perspective that I greatly admire. The problem in Winter is Coming of explaining who lost Russia should be a bit like the American debate over China in the 1950s,

I have got back into chess over the last few years, now playing at chess.com with a 1744 rating. Somehow I lost interest in chess from about 1982, after playing all the time at school, so did not follow Kasparov's career closely, although my original interest in chess arose from following the great Fischer Spassky World Championship in Reykjavik in 1972, and then I also followed the Karpov-Korchnoi games with all the politics there.

Note spelling of Garry for title of this thread.

I like chess a lot, but don't play it very often, mainly because at a certain point it seems memorizing chess openings is required to improve substantially. Many top rated players have memorized dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of complete games. I'm not willing to do that, so I mainly study puzzles and follow current championship and classic games...

I'm embarrassed to say that I don't know how to play chess.

I just bought Winter is Coming in audio book format so I can listen in the car.

I played football in high school (don't worry, the relevance is coming). Our games were on Friday night, and our coach would tell us to go home an take it easy until game time. Several of the team would gather at my house and we would play (you guessed it) chess. I have played off and on ever since; the most recently with my granddaughters (the oldest one beats me almot every time). Looking for some possible opponents here in my apartment complex.

I think I corrected the spelling of his 1st name in all of the threads.

It's the easiest game in the world, Chris..

If your color is red, you try to jump as many of your opponents black pieces as you can.
If your color is black, you try to jump as many of your opponents red pieces as you can.

Ant, I think that's BINGO.

No, it is what Americans call checkers, what we in Australia call draughts.

I was joking. I know it's Checkers. I think Ant knows too. LOL

Noooo, that is TiddlyWinks.

LOL...you guys are too much. I really do not know how to play chess but I can play all the other games you listed!

The world chess championship started last week between the champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway and the challenger Fabiano Caruana of USA/Italy - latest game is at https://www.chess.com/news/view/world-c ... -training-