Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov’s first marriage was to Masha with whom he has a daughter. This marriage ended in divorce.

He tied the knot for the second time with Yulia. They had a son before divorcing in 2005.

He is currently married to Daria with whom he has two children.

Garry Kasparov was born as Garik Kimovich Weinstein, in Russia, on 13 April 1963, to Jewish father, Kim Moiseyevich Weinstein, and Armenian mother, Klara Shagenovna Gasparian.

He was introduced to chess as a little boy and started playing the game in earnest when he was six. He lost his father when he was seven.

At the age of 12, he adopted his mother's Armenian surname, Gasparian, and modified it to a more Russified version, Kasparov.

He received his training at Mikhail Botvinnik's chess school under noted coach Vladimir Makogonov who helped him develop his game. He blossomed into a formidable player under his mentor’s guidance and won the Soviet Junior Championship in Tbilisi in 1976, aged 13.

He then went on to train under Alexander Shakarov and won the Soviet Junior Championship in 1977 as well.

A significant event happened in 1978. He was invited to the Sokolsky Memorial tournament in Minsk where he reached the first place and became a chess master. This incident convinced the young man to become a professional chess player.

As a 15 year old, he qualified for the Soviet Chess Championship in 1978, the youngest ever player at that level and went on to win the 64-player Swiss system tournament at Daugavpils.

More successes followed and he won the World Junior Chess Championship in Dortmund, West Germany, in 1980. By this time he had gained the reputation of being one of the world’s best chess players and became a Grandmaster by the end of the same year.

He touched new career heights in the 1980s. He scored his first win in a superclass-level international tournament at Bugojno, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1982. By early 1983, he was already the No. 2 player in the world, trailing behind only World Chess Champion Anatoly Karpov.

He first challenged Karpov in 1984 for the World Chess Championship title. After five months and 48 games, the match between the two was abandoned in controversial circumstances. The men met again in a rematch in 1985 where Kasparov narrowly defeated Karpov in a 24-game series to become the youngest world champion at the age of 22.

In 1991, Garry Kasparov received the Keeper of the Flame award from the Center for Security Policy for "propagation of democracy and the respect for individual rights throughout the world".

The first volume of his five-volume work ‘Garry Kasparov on My Great Predecessors’ won the British Chess Federation's Book of the Year award in 2003.

In 2013, he was honored with the Morris B. Abram Human Rights Award, UN Watch's annual human-rights prize. The organization praised him as "not only one of the world’s smartest men" but "also among its bravest."