After 20 years of plotting and planning moves on a chessboard, the World’s numero uno chess player Garry Kasparov has decided to hang his boots, or in this case, his pieces. Kasparov, who became the youngest ever world chess champ at an age of 22 years when he beat Anatoly Karpov in 1985, announced his retirement after bagging the Linares Tournament trophy in Spain.
At a press conference after the final game of the tournament, the Russian said, “Before this tournament, I made a conscious decision that Linares 2005 will be my last professional tournament. Today, I played my last professional game.” He called the decision a ‘hard’ one, since his ‘passion and love for chess’ reached him to the pinnacle of the chess world.
Admitting that he felt tremendous pressure to end his career with a win, Kasparov said he now plans to concentrate on writing and ‘Russian politics’ the way every ‘decent person should do who opposes the dictator Vladimir Putin’. Given the fact that Kasparov established Committee 2008: Free Choice, which is a team of liberals up against Russian President Vladimir Putin, his interest in politics comes as no surprise.
Also, the grandmaster cited his frustration with the rivalry between the two world chess federations as another reason for quitting the game. He said that his retirement was a ‘retreat from the battlefield of chess championship politics’. The 41-year-old, however, did not rule out playing at lower level tournaments, bidding adieu only to top-level, ‘lucrative’ chess.
Meanwhile, Shay Bushinsky, the programmer behind Deep Junior, Kasparov’s famous computer rival, while asserting that Kasparov’s retirement was ‘on the cards’ said that he had often wondered if the grandmaster had ‘silicon running in his veins’. “Kasparov has the most incredible foresight and memory I have seen,” he said.
Born in Baku in Azerbaijan, Kasparov is considered the best chess champion of all times. Starting out at the tender age of 10 years, Kasparov attended the Botvinnik Chess School in 1973. The Russian, two years later claimed the USSR Junior Championship, becoming the youngest ever to win the title. At age 16, he bagged the World Junior Championship and at 17, became a grandmaster. The most talked about match in his career, the one against Anatoly Karpov, spanned a period of September 1984 to February 1985 but ended abruptly when it was called off amid controversies. However, after six months, a rematch bagged the world title for Kasparov, who beat Karpov again in 1986, 1987 and 1990.
