ST. LOUIS, USA: Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov owned the game for 15 years, gaining superstar status among fans before retiring and throwing himself into politics — but he just can’t seem to stay away from the chessboard.
The 54-year-old former world champion is coming out of retirement Monday to play in an official tournament in St. Louis, Missouri against nine top-notch players.
Kasparov, known for an aggressive, high-energy attacking style, is widely considered one of the game’s greatest.
And the so-called “Beast of Baku” — nicknamed after the capital of his native Azerbaijan — has nothing left to prove.
Still, here he comes, taking on much younger players in a return seen as reflecting a drive to enhance the cult-like status he earned through years of masterful play — and make up for a few setbacks he suffered along the way.
Kasparov was given a wild card entry in the tournament dubbed Rapid and Blitz, and will be the oldest among the field of 10 players when play starts Monday.
“Ready to see if I remember how to move the pieces! Will I be able to announce my re-retirement afterward if not?!,” Kasparov tweeted last month when it was announced that he was coming out of retirement.
Born Garik Weinstein in Azerbaijan to an Armenian mother and Jewish father, Kasparov has been described as “a monster with 100 eyes, who sees all.”
At age 12, he took on his mother’s surname and launched what became one of the longest and most grueling rivalries in the history of chess, against Soviet grandmaster Anatoli Karpov.
The icy, stone-faced Karpov was a symbol of the once mighty but then crumbling Soviet Union, while Kasparov was just a young pup from little Azerbaijan.
In 1985, Kasparov beat Karpov and, at just 22, became the youngest world champion ever, kicking off an era of unprecedented dominance.
Kasparov held that crown for 15 years and set about breaking molds in the world of chess.
He was a show unto himself — a theatrical bundle of nerves who wanted to win at all costs, shunning draws in games and sometimes even speaking of himself in the third person. Other players feared him. His bigger-than-life style earned him critics, too.
Kasparov took the chess world into a new modern era, with endorsement deals, televised games and high technology.
He pioneered using computer databases as a tool for practicing — a venture that would come back to sting him.
Kasparov had declared haughtily that no machine could ever beat him at chess.
He took on the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, beating it in 1996 but then losing to the machine a year later. He and the computer were tied at five games each in a match in which the first to reach six won. When Kasparov lost, he cried foul.
Three years later, Kasparov lost his world title to his former student, Vladimir Kramnik, and retired from competitive chess in 2005.
Kasparov never managed to cut ties with the game, even attempting in 2014 to become president of the World Chess Federation by dethroning its wealthy and well-connected leader, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov.
But Kasparov’s outspoken personality dogged his campaign and he lost after only securing 61 federation delegates votes out of 175. Ilyumzhinov, who was close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, prevailed.
The young chess retiree took to politics, becoming fixated on a bid to checkmate Putin.
After leaving the game in 2005, Kasparov founded the anti-Putin opposition movement Other Russia, accusing the president of returning the country to its dictatorial past.
He became a powerful political voice and even tried to win the Kremlin in the 2008 Russian presidential election.
Kasparov took part in unprecedented anti-Putin demonstrations in 2011 and was arrested in 2012 after a rally in favor of the punk rock feminist group Pussy Riot.
In 2013, he opted for life in exile, moving to New York to calculate his political moves at a distance.
Now, after 12 years of jousting with the Kremlin, Kasparov has found the allure of his first love too great to resist — and his return to the board could grant him the chance to regain the crown.
Kasparov, the retired champ who can not give up chess
Kasparov, the retired champ who can not give up chess
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
