Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov Relives His Four Most Memorable Games

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Many con­sid­er Gar­ry Kas­parov one of the great­est chess play­ers of all time. And for good rea­son. In 1985, at the age of 22, Kas­parov defeat­ed the reign­ing cham­pi­on Ana­toly Kar­pov. From that moment, until his retire­ment in 2005, he dom­i­nat­ed. For the next 225 out of 228 months, he was the #1 ranked play­er in the game. Above, in a video cre­at­ed by The New York­er, Kas­parov “replays some of his most unfor­get­table games,” and “relives the hap­pi­est and the most painful moments of his career,” includ­ing:

• Gar­ry Kas­parov vs. Ana­toly Kar­pov: World Cham­pi­onship Match 1985
• Gar­ry Kas­parov vs. Ana­toly Kar­pov: World Cham­pi­onship Match 1987
• Gar­ry Kas­parov vs. Viswanathan Anand: PCA-GP Cred­it Suisse Rapid Final Blitz Play­off 1996
• Gar­ry Kas­parov vs. Deep Blue: I.B.M. Man vs. Machine 1997

In recent months, Kas­parov has also cre­at­ed an online course for Mas­ter­class, Gar­ry Kas­parov Teach­es Chess, which–in 29 video lessons–offers a deep­er explo­ration of his chess the­o­ry, tac­tics, and strat­e­gy.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Free 700-Page Chess Man­u­al Explains 1,000 Chess Tac­tics in Plain Eng­lish

Clay­ma­tion Film Recre­ates His­toric Chess Match Immor­tal­ized in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

A Human Chess Match Gets Played in Leningrad, 1924

Man Ray Designs a Supreme­ly Ele­gant, Geo­met­ric Chess Set in 1920 (and It’s Now Re-Issued for the Rest of Us)

Play Chess Against the Ghost of Mar­cel Duchamp: A Free Online Chess Game

Watch Bill Gates Lose a Chess Match in 79 Sec­onds to the New World Chess Cham­pi­on Mag­nus Carlsen