In 2008, he announced an intention to run as a candidate in that year's Russian presidential race, but after encountering logistical problems in his campaign, for which he blamed "official obstruction", he withdrew.

[30] From age seven, Kasparov attended the Young Pioneer Palace in Baku and, at ten, began training at Mikhail Botvinnik's chess school under coach Vladimir Makogonov.

Kasparov has stressed that this event was a turning point in his life and that it convinced him to choose chess as his career: "I will remember the Sokolsky Memorial as long as I live", he wrote.

Due to an oversight by the USSR Chess Federation, which believed that a grandmaster tournament in Banja Luka, Yugoslavia, was for juniors, he participated in that event in 1979 while still unrated.

[35] Kasparov won this high-class tournament, emerging with a provisional rating of 2595, enough to catapult him to the top group of chess players (at the time, number 15 in the world).

In its place, there were plans for a match against Rustam Kasimdzhanov, winner of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2004, to be held in January 2005 in the United Arab Emirates.

Commentators GM Maurice Ashley and Alejandro Ramírez remarked how Kasparov was an 'initiative hog' throughout the match, consistently not allowing Short to gain any foothold in the games.

At the post-tournament interview, Kasparov announced that he would donate his winnings from playing the next top-level blitz exhibition match to assist funding of the American Olympic Team.

[125] He finished eighth in a strong field of ten, including Nakamura, Caruana, former world champion Anand and the eventual winner, Levon Aronian.

[130] He launched Kasparovchess, a subscription-based online chess community featuring documentaries, lessons, puzzles, podcasts, articles, interviews and playing zones, in 2021.

[134] For the 1994 Moscow Olympiad, he had a significant organisational role in helping to put together the event on short notice, after Thessaloniki cancelled its offer to host only a few weeks before the scheduled dates.

Karpov was considered a representative of the Soviet nomenklatura, while Kasparov was young and popular, positioned himself as a "child of change", willingly gave candid interviews and (especially in the West) had an aura of a rebel, although he was never a dissident.

[155][156] Sergey Shipov considered Kasparov's moral and volitional qualities (impulsiveness and psychological instability) and excessive reliance on options, which can lead to overwork and mistakes, as amongst his few shortcomings.

On the 14th move, in a well-known position of the open variation of the Spanish Game (Ruy Lopez), Kasparov discovered a new idea with a rook sacrifice, which brought a decisive attack.

In April 1994, Intel acted as a sponsor for the first Professional Chess Association Grand Prix event in Moscow, played at a time control of twenty-five minutes per game.

[185] In 1995, during Kasparov's world title match with Anand, he unveiled an opening novelty that had been checked with a chess engine, an approach that would become increasingly common in subsequent years.

[190] After the loss, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, suggesting that during the second game chess players had intervened in contravention of the rules.

[17] After his retirement from chess in 2005, Kasparov turned to politics and created the United Civil Front, a social movement whose main goal is to "work to preserve electoral democracy in Russia".

"I was unable to respond immediately because I was in such a state of shock that such an incredibly inaccurate statement, the likes of which is constantly distributed by the Kremlin's propagandists, came this time from Ilya Yashin, a fellow member of the Opposition Coordination Council (KSO) and my former colleague from the Solidarity movement.

[238] Further, at the 2013 Women in the World conference, Kasparov told The Daily Beast's Michael Moynihan that democracy no longer existed in what he called Russia's "dictatorship".

He explained shortly thereafter in an article for The Daily Beast that this had not been intended as "a declaration of leaving my home country, permanently or otherwise", but merely an expression of "the dark reality of the situation in Russia today, where nearly half the members of the opposition's Coordinating Council are under criminal investigation on concocted charges".

[239] Kasparov further wrote in his June 2013 Daily Beast article that the mass protests in Moscow 18 months earlier against fraudulent Russian elections had been "a proud moment for me".

"[241] Kasparov wrote in July 2013 about the trial in Kirov of fellow opposition leader Navalny, who had been convicted "on concocted embezzlement charges", only to see the prosecutor, surprisingly, ask for his release the next day pending appeal.

"[242] Kasparov has been outspoken regarding Putin's antigay laws, describing them as "only the most recent encroachment on the freedom of speech and association of Russia's citizens", which the international community had largely ignored.

[261] In a 12 May 2013 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Kasparov questioned reports that the Russian security agency, the FSB, had fully cooperated with the FBI in the matter of the Boston bombers.

Given this history, he wrote, "it is impossible to overlook that the Boston bombing took place just days after the U.S. Magnitsky List was published, creating the first serious external threat to the Putin power structure by penalising Russian officials complicit in human-rights crimes."

[265] In the 2016 United States presidential election, Kasparov described Republican Donald Trump as "a celebrity showman with racist leanings and authoritarian tendencies"[266] and criticised him for calling for closer ties with Putin.

[290] Further, in September 2013, Kasparov wrote in Time magazine that in Syria, Putin and Bashar al-Assad "won by forfeit when President Obama, Prime Minister Cameron and the rest of the so-called leaders of the free world walked away from the table."

In December 2004, Kasparov released volume four, which covers Samuel Reshevsky, Miguel Najdorf and Bent Larsen (none of whom was world champion), but focuses on Fischer.

[330][331] Kasparov collaborated with Max Levchin and Peter Thiel on The Blueprint, a book calling for a revival of world innovation, planned for release in March 2013 but cancelled after the authors disagreed on its contents.