Tactic Arena

  The World Chess Championship had been dominated by Europeans and Americans since its very first match in 1886. Then came a boy from Chennai who played so fast the other players used to joke: "Has Anand finished yet?" He didn't just win the World Championship. He permanently ended chess's old world order. Born in Madras — The Lightning Kid Viswanathan Anand was born on December 11, 1969, in Mayiladuthurai, Tamil Nadu, India, into a Tamil Brahmin family. His father Krishnamurthy was a retired General Manager of Southern Railways. His mother Sushila — herself a chess enthusiast — taught him the game at the age of six. He had an older brother and sister, both more than a decade his senior. The youngest child, the quiet one, the one who had chess sets where other children had toys. As Paul van der Sterren writes in Kings of the Chessboard: "At the time, India had no chess culture to speak of. Fifty years on it is a great chess nation with many tournaments and top pl...

He was Kasparov's student, then Kasparov's second, then Kasparov's nemesis. He ended the longest reign in modern chess history with a weapon nobody saw coming — and did it so cleanly that Kasparov never won a single game. Vladimir Kramnik was not the most spectacular World Champion. He may have been the most complete. Born at the Right Time Vladimir Borisovich Kramnik was born on June 25, 1975, in Tuapse — a port city on the Black Sea coast of Russia. As Paul van der Sterren wrote in Kings of the Chessboard: "Kramnik was born at exactly the right time to both take full advantage of the unique Soviet coaching system for young chess players and then to profit from the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Borders opened and there was no one to stop him from playing as much as he liked." This combination — the rigorous Soviet training system of his childhood, followed by the freedom to compete everywhere as the USSR collapsed — gave Kramnik something no previous genera...

  He was the youngest World Champion in history. He held the number one ranking for twenty consecutive years — longer than any other player in the history of the official Elo rating system. He fought five matches against Karpov, took on IBM's supercomputer, and then walked away from chess to fight for democracy in Russia. Garry Kasparov was not just the greatest chess player of his era. He may be the greatest who ever lived. Born in Baku — Two Cultures, One Fire Garry Kasparov was born Garik Kimovich Weinstein on April 13, 1963, in Baku — the capital of the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. His father, Kim Weinstein, was Jewish. His mother, Clara Kasparova, was Armenian. In a city dominated by ethnic Azerbaijanis and Russians, he was a double minority from birth. As Kasparov describes in How Life Imitates Chess, the book he wrote after retiring from professional chess, his earliest memory of ambition was not chess — it was maps. On his sixth birthday, he woke to find an enormous globe...