Garry Kasparov

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2018

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Garry Kasparov is a Russian chess grandmaster, who became the youngest ever world champion at the age of 22. He is also a writer and a political activist. He grew up in the Soviet Union, the only child of engineer parents. He learned chess by watching his parents play as they worked out chess problems in the newspaper. As a five year old he was fascinated by the mysterious little pieces and the board with its 64 squares. Garry Kasparov's father died when he was seven and it was his mother who guided him on his chess career. As a player, he was nicknamed the Beast of Baku, because of his dynamic style at the chessboard. He became a grandmaster on his 17th birthday and went on to become the World Champion after beating Anatoly Karpov in a now-legendary series of games in the mid-1980s. He played high-profile matches against the IBM computer Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997. Since his retirement from competitive chess, he has written numerous books and become a high-profile political activist. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.5	Hello, I'm Kristi Young.
0:05.1	Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks,
0:10.4	the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.
0:16.4	For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.
0:22.8	You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.
0:30.4	...
0:49.2	My castaway this week is the Russian chess champion, writer and political activist,
0:53.9	Gary Kasparov.
0:55.1	Wildly acknowledged as the finest player of all time, his attacking Maverick style,
1:00.8	saw him christened the beast of Baku.
1:03.1	It's been a dozen years since he quit the professional game, but the depth of his strategic brilliance
1:08.4	has ensured his ongoing legendary status.
1:10.9	There may mathematically speaking be as many possible chess games as there are atoms in the visible universe,
1:17.3	but even as a six-year-old that didn't seem to put him off.
1:20.1	That was when he began playing, feeling immediately that chess was the ideal game for him.
1:26.1	By 17, he was a grandmaster, going on just five years later to become the youngest ever world champion.
1:32.8	He maintained that position for the next 20 years.
1:37.0	Not content, however, with beating humans, he also took on man's fight against the machine,
1:41.1	going head-to-head with the supercomputer Deep Blue.
1:44.4	He won the first encounter, but lost the rematch.
1:48.0	More recently, his energies have been occupied with an altogether less cerebral and a good deal
	...

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