World's No. 1 chess player retires

Kasparov says there’s nothing left to accomplish

	Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov marks down a move during the final match against chess supercomputer Deep Junior in the the Man vs. Machine chess championship Feb. 7, 2003 in New York City.
Mario Tama / Getty Images file

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updated 9:30 p.m. ET March 11, 2005

LINARES, Spain - Garry Kasparov, the world’s No. 1 ranked chess player since 1984 who some believe is the best player in the history of the game, said on Thursday that he was retiring from professional play.

The announcement came shortly after he lost the final game of the 14-match Linares tournament, which he won.

“But before this tournament I made a conscious decision that Linares 2005 will be my last professional (tournament), and today I played my last professional game,” Kasparov said at a press conference, according to a video posted on the online chess magazine chessbase.com.

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He said his last games were “very difficult for me to play under such pressure, because I knew it was the end of the career which I could be proud of.”

Kasparov, 41, became the youngest world champion ever at age 22. He said part of the reason he was retiring was because he saw no real goals left to accomplish in professional chess.

The Azerbaijan-born Kasparov is thought by many to be the best chess player in history. But he will be remembered in part for one of his losses, a match against IBM supercomputer Deep Blue that was seen by some as a watershed moment in technological advancement.

In 2003, Kasparov averted a similar defeat when he agreed to a draw in the last game of his series against Deep Junior, which could process 3 million chess moves per second. The six-game series, dubbed Man vs. Machine, finished tied 3-3.

Kasparov’s chess talent was apparent at an early age. In 1973 he attended the Botvinnik Chess School and Kasparov continued to make rapid progress. In 1975 at the age of 12 he became the youngest ever player to win the USSR Junior Championship. At 16 he won the World Junior Championship. He achieved the title of Grandmaster on his 17th birthday.