London: As a chess champion, he was the “monster with 100 eyes, who sees all”, whose painful defeat against IBM’s Deep Blue computer heralded the end of human dominance over artificial intelligence.
But 20 years later, Garry Kasparov is still considered the greatest chess player in history, a genius so special he became world champion at 22 and was then almost invincible for two decades. Now, 12 years after he turned his back on the professional game, the king is back. To the delight of fans, the 54-year-old Russian exile has announced he will return to competition next month.
Kasparov will appear at the Saint Louis Rapid & Blitz tournament as one of four wild card picks playing for a total prize fund of $150,000. The event is part of the prestigious Grand Chess Tour, a grand slam set of tournaments that is bankrolled by Rex Sinquefield, a UK billionaire, and seen as a rival to the events organised by Fédération Internationale des Échecs (Fide) or World Chess Federation, the official world governing body.
Kasparov, whose nickname of ‘The Beast’ was earned by his bullish behaviour, has previous form at challenging Fide. In 1993, he led a split after an acrimonious dispute to form the Professional Chess Association (PCA), which collapsed when Intel withdrew its sponsorship, although the body limped on until 2006.
In 2014, Kasparov launched a failed attempt to unseat eccentric Fide president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. But what matters most to fans is the mouth-watering old versus new clashes that Kasparov’s return sets up.
While he will not face the current world’s best, his former protege Magnus Carlsen, Kasparov will take on Carlsen’s Russian challenger Sergey Karjakin and two Americans, Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana. Kasparov has had outings in minor exhibition matches since retiring, but this time he is entering one of chess’s elite level “grand slams”.
“Ready to see if I remember how to move the pieces!” he said.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2017
