In the last few days, Garry Kasparov has made a lot of noises worldwide. He recently wrote an article in the NY Times and Financial Times criticizing President George Bush, other European leaders and of course Russian President Vladimir Putin. He also calls for Russia to be expelled from the G8 summit and has organized an alternate summit.
There have been a lot of discussion about Garry on other Internet forums. Many people have pointed out that Garry was responsible for the collapse of the FIDE World Championship and Kasparov Chess (costing investors tens of millions) and he basically alienated many major companies that sponsored chess such as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, etc. Others have pointed out that he has never succeeded in any business project and his only success was on the chess board.
I personally like many things Garry has done but I also dislike many of his actions. But no matter what anyone says, he is the second most colorful person in chess after only Bobby Fischer. Everything that they do makes headline news, good or bad.
What is your opinion? Has Garry gone mad or do you agree with him?
Garry is an egomaniac
Kasparov needs to be careful or he will be sharing a jail cell with Mikhail Khordovsky.
You don’t open critique the President of a country where democracy and free speech are really only theories. Especially not when the president is former KGB.
While Kasparov has many chess related accomplishments he has not done anything that will further the sport.
This photo is very nice, you seem to be happy.
I like it !!!
Some times things are best left unsaid !! But Garry believes otherwise … Politics is his new baby and he is on his first honeymoon !! So it is only natural that he is exuberant…. Nothing unnatural juss being Garry.
Remember Putin was a Judo champ so Garry being a Chess champ has enough chances.
I think Kasparov has been very destructive to chess. He messed up chess in many ways that are taking many years to recover from. I do not regard him as a great chess player like so many do.
However, I think he is telling the truth about the world leadership. we need someone to tell the truth.
but I think the situation is much worse than what Gary is fighting for. I see the loss of freedom in america also. everywhere we have more violence by governments under the umbrella of the new word “terrorist”. this has been the cornerstone of the Bush administration. and the ill effects of this policy of violence is to allow other countries to do similar violence under its umbrella. Israel is now displaying violence under this same umbrella against Lebanon.
we must conclude that the policy of the Bush administration is spreading violence around the world.
the common man is taking the brunt of this violence by governments all over the world. the leaders of these governments are lieing to everyone.
the united states needs to stop all its wars around the world including its war against its own people. the united states today is at peace with no one and at war with everyone. we need to change ourself instead of using violence to try to change other people.
changing other people has never worked in the past and will never work in the future.
we go into iraq and bomb and kill and maime and rape and murder and torture its people and we expect them to love us for that. what a laugh.
instead of taking our tax money to spend it on bombs and killing people we should use it for educating our own people and helping them to live a happy and productive life.
I support Gary in telling the truth. the truth shall set you free.
But we americans can stop worrying about Russia and we should start worrying about America. We are sliding toward a dictatorship. We need to fix the problems we have right here in America. We need to restore Freedom and Democracy right here at home.
It is dangerous to speak out in Russia. but it is also getting dangerous to speak out right here in America. Wake up America before it is too late.
Though I am just a mere USCF Class A player, I think that Kasparov is the greatest chess player ever.
I do not know what is going on in Russia, so I will say nothing about his attacks on President Putin, but I must say I strongly admire Kasparov for wanting to do something more with his life than just play chess.
prdd
To say that Kasparov is second after Fisher (in anything) is a blasphemy of unparalleled proportions.
With regard to Kasparov’s non-chess activities, I would describe them as following the same methodology he used to become history’s most powerful chess player: pursue the goal with little or no regard for the cost. Of course, at the end of a chess game, one is still able to move on to the next game. In life, the price paid for burning all of one’s bridges is much higher.
I’m only interested in Garry the chessplayer. Anything else he wants to do is cool, but frankly, I don’t care enough to read Chessbase’s frequent updates on Kasparov-Putin Moscow 2006.
Chessplayers unite! Bring him back to chess! Do we have to hit him over the head with a chessboard again to knock some sense into him?!
-Seth Homa
wow! susan, you really bring up interesting topics to discuss.
I agree with you that gary is the second colorful person after fischer.
I will try to restrict my comments to those that I think I can say from experience and my background. I won’t presume to know about things I am not intimately involved with.
I am primarily involved with business and I am an amateur chess player.
I feel too, that Gary has been as destructive as he has been constructive. I think he has popularized chess in many ways by the high profile events but at the same time, by forming his own organization etc. he has also brought about much of the fragmentation within chess. Having two sets of world champions has really been bad for the sport. It has taken a long time to reach the potential unification now that we see happening.
Another point of note is that one of the qualities of a great politician is to compromise. Lee Iococca himself said that he would not go into politics because of his inability to compromise. Chess players just like in business achieve objectives by refusing to compromise, I can’t see Kasparov becoming a successful politician without acquiring this quality.
Second, most politicians succeed after at least 10 or more years of effort. I am not sure Gary has the patience. Most things in chess have come naturally and he was blessed with Botvinnik’s guidance. So I can’t see Gary persisting without definite results.
Of course, some unusual circumstances might be in his favor in russian politics that might lead to him being in power but other than that I can’t see him being successful.
i am not a big fan of kasparov for a number of reasons.
a) He was very fortunate to being coached by botvinnik who taught him everything he knew. Nothing original about Kasparov unlike Alekhine, Fisher and Botvinnik
b) Many of his actions in chess were very selfish (forming own org etc.) instead of looking out for the greater good of chess, his criticism of fischer saying he would lose to Karpov only because he wants to show that he is better because he beat karpov etc.
c) This is related to the last comment. What has he done to chess without it benefiting himself in some way?
i think if Gary wants to do something good instead of looking out for himself, he should work towards spreading the popularity of chess. He is much better suited to this than russian politics.
regards.
One should not blame Kasparov for breaking the FIDE cycle. Given the conditions at the time, it was unavoidable. Many grandmasters followed him, and there was no unified chorus of blame among the top players. FIDE was (and still is) a very problematic institution, and some shakeup was unavoidable.
As for Kasparov’s politics – he acts more as a star than as a politician, so I don’t expect him to be successful. Whatever his achievements in chess, he is “young” in politics, and needs to go past the criticism stage to building alliances, developing a platform, etc. In short, he needs to figure who he wants to be; being anti-Putin is not enough for success in anything.
Given the corruption of FIDE under Campomanes (remember the hijinks surrounding Karpov-Korchnoi and then Karpov-Kasparov?) and now Ilyumzhinov, I don’t blame Kasparaov for splitting FIDE. I’m just sorry no real reform came out of it.
jeje. Paz y amor en el mundo, reglas de juego claras. Que gane el mejor. Pero no por eso el perdedor no tenga libertad, no respete al vencedor y menos se quede sin pan.
Pan para todos. Vida para todos.
I think he is a great person with result. What i mean is that whatever he chose to do will have an impact on other people – either good or bad, success or colapse.
It is difficult to make a good fortune in business; but it is equally difficult to collapse a good business if one does not have full control of the company.
He is not a FIDE president, yet his actions regarding the federation might as well determine whether FIDE will be strong or weak.
His failure to lose gracefully after the Deep Blue match is a stain on the chess world and is exactly the stereotype business people such as myself see when we first considered putting money into chess sponsorship.
Grandmasters that act immaturely may be the exception rather than the rule but the ones that do give chess negative publicity make VERY strong impressions. The reason IBM and Intel both don’t like him is simple, IBM was accused of unethical cheating by him due to his tremendous ego which says he can never lose. Intel is mad because a as the prime sponsor of the PCA he played the IBM match which gave their largest opponent a huge bit of publicity.
On the chess side of things, he seems to be living in the shadow of Bobby Fischer. During a lecture at the London Chess Centre (video on the net if you search) he says things such as “it took more than Fischer to prove the posioned pawn variation sound”.
I’m not sure anyone can truly say if Garry or Bobby are really insane or just angry and egotistical, but I’m stunned at why people such as them believe that being good at chess will automatically translate to success in business, politics or any other endeavor they pursue (and as if often the case many fail miserably at things outside of chess).
Well, Gary is far from perfect, and he is a special man. You need to special to be that good. He is by none comparison the strongest player that ever has been, no matter what the Fischer-cult says. And I admire a man who dares to fight for democracy in the semi-fascist Russia.
Kasparov was and is a great chess player and the chess community loves and needs a dynamic world champion. However, the chess world and fans are so very thirsty for a great chess champion to also be a diplomat and business mind that can represent and support this great sport as an embassador of some sorts. Once one is as good as Kasparov many people expect that one would then be this kind of leader and embassador for chess or at least exemplary in actions ~ this is most likely because we are so thirsty for it.
Once you have proven to be a great champion or leader the expectation is that you are also a leader in other ways and conduct yourself in an exemplary manner. Kasparov should, of course, be free to choose his rout in life after chess or with chess ~ as all people should be free.
However, it would be extraordinary to have a champion that is a visionary and that is also a gifted ambassador for chess ~ when this happens it will be the catalyst for chess.
& then there is the famous quote from Sir Winston Churchill:
“The price of greatness is responsibility”
Sir Winston Churchill
Kasparov had large teams of coaches that lived at his home from the time he was very young provided for him by the Soviets. Fischer had the local library. Both for their time did extremely well. Awfulhangover’s comment shows not being able to understand simple chess metrics that prove if Fischer had the resources that Kasparov had from the time he was very young, his ELO would probably be around 4000.
Wow. Calling for his own country to be expelled from the G8 summit? I give him credit for having a lot of guts. By the way, did you see us nail Great Britain and Canada? Those were nice games. It starts to get boring when we dominate, though (which we did against Great Britain. We won 14-0 in 5 innings).
“but I think the situation is much worse than what Gary is fighting for. I see the loss of freedom in america also. everywhere we have more violence by governments under the umbrella of the new word “terrorist”. this has been the cornerstone of the Bush administration. and the ill effects of this policy of violence is to allow other countries to do similar violence under its umbrella. Israel is now displaying violence under this same umbrella against Lebanon.”
First of all, Israel’s defending itself and I’m pretty sure that their religion REQUIRES them to try to rescue captured Israeli soldiers.
Second of all, in any war, you WILL have some people committing crimes by torturing and/or raping people. That doesn’t mean that those crimes are neccessarily sponsored by the government or even by high-ranking military officials. We went in on bad intelligence (see the 9/11 Commission Report), not off of lies or just by the will to go to war, kill people, etc. Sometimes, war is neccessary and Clinton, Gore, (yes, I’m pretty sure they DID call for it), and Bush thought that it was.
Kasporov is off base on Bush. Putin is the biggest ally of Iran. He even gave them arms and refuses to allow Europe to reign in Iran.
Since Iran sends arms to terrorists in Iraq and Lebannon Bush has no affection for someone helping them destroy the world.
Kasparov makes me ill.
I have been following Kasparov since secondary school. I’m still fascinated by his chess brilliancies today. He is a great sportman and a world champion and will remain so in many people’s memories for the rest of their lives. Politics is not sports. It’s a very ugly business. I can only wish the best of luck to him.
WHats that old saying..I even think its russian.
There are two things men should not see. The Making of Sausages and the Making of Politics.
I Hope GK is not assasinated because of this.
Just to be clear, I DO WANT Kasparov to succeed in replacing Putin. Anyone would be an improvement, and he seems to actually care about the welfare of Russia and its citizens.
Garry without a chessboard is like Hendrix without a guitar. Who cares? Also, if Capablanca and Fisher had databases and teams of gramdmasters coaching them from gradeschool, thier ratings would be about 4500! I think they pretty good with what they had.
All the world’s a stage…you will understand this upon passing through menopause and becoming whole once again.