For nearly two decades, the question “who is the strongest chess player in the world?” had a single answer. Garry Kasparov sat atop the FIDE rating list from January 1984 to January 2006 — twenty-two years, broken only by Kramnik’s brief overtaking in 1996. He was world champion from 1985 to 2000. He retired from professional chess in 2005 with a rating of 2812, still nearly twenty points ahead of the world No. 2. No player in history has dominated their era more completely.

Early years

Born Garik Kimovich Weinstein in Baku — then the capital of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic — Kasparov was raised by his mother Klara after his father Kim died when he was seven. He took his mother’s surname, Kasparova, in its masculine form. The decision was both family and pragmatic: Soviet anti-Semitism of the period made an Armenian name a softer pass than a Jewish one.

His chess talent was identified at four. By twelve he was studying at the Botvinnik School — the institution that had produced two world champions before him — under the personal supervision of Mikhail Botvinnik himself. He won the Soviet Junior Championship at thirteen, the World Junior Championship at sixteen, and his grandmaster title in 1980 at age seventeen.

The Soviet chess establishment of the period was not a meritocracy. Kasparov’s rise was complicated by his rivalry with Anatoly Karpov — the reigning world champion, twelve years his senior, and the favourite of the Soviet apparatus. The political layer behind their five world-championship matches was as important to chess history as the chess itself.

The Karpov marathons

Kasparov and Karpov played five world-championship matches between 1984 and 1990. Together they produced 144 classical games — the longest sustained head-to-head rivalry at the world-championship level in chess history.

The first match, in Moscow 1984, was the most extraordinary. Karpov led 5–0 after game 9 in a “first to six wins” format. Then Kasparov drew the next 17 games, won one, drew another 14, then won two more. With the score 5–3 in Karpov’s favour after game 48 — five months into the match — FIDE president Florencio Campomanes terminated the match without a result. The controversial decision has been debated for forty years; Kasparov maintains, with some evidence, that the apparat had concluded he would win and called off the match to save Karpov.

A new match was scheduled for 1985 in Moscow under modified rules. Kasparov won 13–11, becoming the youngest world champion in history at 22 years and 210 days. The record stood for 38 years until Ding Liren’s match against Nepomniachtchi reshuffled the historical context (Ding was older; the record technically still stands).

Three more matches followed — London-Leningrad 1986, Seville 1987, Lyon-New York 1990 — each won by Kasparov, two of them narrowly. Their final classical encounter at Linares 1991 ended Karpov’s chance of reclaiming the title.

The classical era

After breaking with FIDE in 1993 — over what he considered organisational mismanagement — Kasparov co-founded the Professional Chess Association (PCA). The 1993 PCA match against Nigel Short in London was the first world championship not sanctioned by FIDE.

His PCA defences against Viswanathan Anand (New York 1995) and Vladimir Kramnik (London 2000) are studied as much for the opening preparation as for the games themselves. Game 10 of the 1995 match — Kasparov’s 14.Nd5!? piece sacrifice in the Najdorf English Attack — introduced a novelty that absorbed years of subsequent analysis. The 2000 match, in which Kramnik used the Berlin Defense as a primary weapon, ended Kasparov’s title reign. He lost without winning a single game.

Kasparov’s tournament dominance during the same period was unmatched. He won Linares — the era’s strongest annual event — eight times. He won the Wijk aan Zee tournament four times. He played and won the 1989 World Cup, the Grand Prix tour of the 1990s, and most rapid and blitz events he entered. His rating peaked at 2851 in July 1999, a record that stood until Magnus Carlsen broke it in 2013.

Deep Blue and after

In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in a six-game match in New York — the first time a reigning world champion had lost a match to a machine under classical time controls. The result was a watershed moment in computer chess. Kasparov requested a rematch; IBM refused and retired Deep Blue. Kasparov has argued, with subsequent supporting evidence, that the match was lost in part to non-chess factors — but the headline result remained.

After his loss to Kramnik in 2000, Kasparov continued to compete at the top level for five more years, winning Linares again in 2005. He retired from professional chess in March 2005 to focus on Russian politics, becoming a leading critic of Vladimir Putin and a chair of the United Civil Front. He has lived in exile since 2013.

He has continued to play exhibition events and occasional rapid/blitz tournaments, returning to St. Louis in 2017 and to several Champions Chess Tour events. The competitive Kasparov era ended in 2005, but his shadow over the game has not.

Legacy

Kasparov’s contributions to chess are usually summarised in three ways. First: he was the strongest player of his time, by a margin few peers would dispute. Second: he transformed opening preparation from craft into industry, building teams of seconds, analytical infrastructure, and computer-aided research that became the modern norm. Third: his five-volume My Great Predecessors — an annotated history of his world-championship lineage — is the most influential chess literature of the past thirty years.

He remains, at the time of writing, the highest-rated player never to have a Carlsen-era engine win-rate above his historical peers. Whether the era was simply weaker or the engines have changed our evaluation criteria is one of those questions chess history will keep relitigating.

References

For original sources and further study:

Cross-links inside Caissly: the Najdorf and King’s Indian Defense articles cite many of his games directly.