Garry Kasparov

World Chess Champion, Author, and Expert on Strategy and Decision-Making

"Every chess move is a decision, and the better we decide, the more we win. Every life is composed of a million decisions, and if we improve Decision Education, kids will have better lives and make a better world. That’s how everybody wins."

Affiliations:

  • Human Rights Foundation: Chairman
  • The Renew Democracy Initiative: Founder
  • Avast Software: Security Ambassador
  • The Foundation for Responsible Robotics: Executive Board Member

Publications:

  • How Life Imitates Chess
  • Modern Chess (series)
  • Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped
  • Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins
  • My Great Predecessors (five-volume series)
  • Garry Kasparov on Garry Kasparov (three-volume series)

Education:

  • Mikhail Botvinnik’s Chess School
  • Saint Louis University, Honorary Doctorate

World-renowned chess champion Garry Kasparov also is a political strategist, artificial-intelligence expert, and author.

Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the former Soviet Union, Garry came to international fame at 22 as the youngest world chess champion in history. His famous matches against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996 were key to bringing artificial intelligence, and chess, into the mainstream. They also sparked his passionate interest in AI and the human relationship with increasingly more intelligent machines.

After retiring from chess in 2005, he joined the Russian pro-democracy movement, becoming one of the first prominent Soviet citizens to call for democratic reforms in what was then the Soviet Union. He was also a 2008 Russian presidential candidate. In 2012, he was named chairman of the Human Rights Foundation in New York City. He also founded and runs the Kasparov Chess Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes the teaching of chess in education systems around the world. He is a frequent contributor to international publications including The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.