Garry Kasparov's Blog, page 33

Avlon: Tucker Carlson is flirting with authoritarian leader | CNN’s New Day | August 4, 2021

In which I quote @Kasparov63 and @HC_Richardson on Tucker’s Authoritarian-Curious Summer Vacation. https://t.co/2amTzBJ1p3

— John Avlon (@JohnAvlon) August 4, 2021

Watch John Avlon’s original segment at CNN

Biden wants Putin to behave. So why not go after his money? | Politico | July 27, 2021

RDI Chairman @Kasparov63 has a message for @POTUS: if President Biden really wants to stand up to Russia, it’s time to target Putin and the Kremlin-installed oligarchs who finance his authoritarian rule.https://t.co/Ims49ozyRh

— Renew Democracy Initiative (@Renew_Democracy) July 30, 2021

READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT POLITICO

By Nahal Toosi

If the United States really wants Russia to stop ransomware attacks and other hostile activities, Garry Kasparov has a solution ripped from his days as a chess grandmaster: Go after the king.

Russia President Vladimir Putin is thought to be worth tens of billions of dollars, Kasparov notes. Researchers have pieced together his alleged assets by examining everything from Putin’s luxury watches to a palace he’s said to frequent to unusual money trails that lead to his inner circle.

That secret wealth makes Putin uniquely vulnerable to U.S. sanctions, Kasparov argues. It’s time, he says, for the Biden administration to crack down on the billionaire loyalists who keep the Russian dictator in power and help hide his riches. The famed chess champ and Kremlin critic is not the only one pushing the idea: Activists working with imprisoned Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny have been circulating in Washington a list of 35 people linked to Putin whose assets they say America should freeze.

“It’s not an extreme measure. It’s the only effective one,” Kasparov told POLITICO. “Putin doesn’t care about Russia or Russians. There are no national interests, just his.

But to the chagrin of Kasparov, his fellow Russian dissidents and even some former U.S. officials, President Joe Biden is resisting such appeals for now.

“We’re not really trying hard enough,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former top Pentagon official under then-President Barack Obama. “[Putin] is not taking the message from the new United States president seriously enough.”

Instead, Biden has turned to more traditional sanctions and diplomatic moves in the face-off with Russia. Some Biden aides are not convinced that going after Putin’s wealth will chasten him to the point critics predict. Instead, after a vigorous internal debate, White House officials decided on a less aggressive approach: They’ll put Russia on notice without escalating tensions or jeopardizing potential cooperation on shared challenges like climate change.

The result is a cautious strategy for how best to manage Russia while simultaneously shifting the bulk of U.S. efforts toward the perceived greater threat — China. What the United States seeks from Russia, administration officials say, is a “stable and predictable” relationship, not endless friction.

Russian dissidents and others say this approach won’t solve the root problem in Russia: rule by Putin and a clutch of loyal kleptocrats. (Putin‘s official income declarations cast him as a man of far more modest means than critics claim, with an annual income of under $200,000.) Nor will it deter Putin from causing trouble for America in the long run, they say.

“If you want to change Putin’s behavior, then the one thing you can do is focus on the thing he values most, which is the money that he’s stolen from the Russian people and he holds through these oligarchs,” said financier Bill Browder, a leading Putin critic and anti-corruption campaigner. “It’s truly a silver bullet in terms of dealing with Putin.”

Prefer to deter

Kremlin critics are somewhat surprised that Biden hasn’t already heeded their call to target Putin’s wealthy friends. After all, the president has promised to make fighting global corruption a national security priority, and he’s long been troubled by corruption in Russia and other former Soviet states.

Since taking office in January, Biden and his team have used visa bans and other measures to put the squeeze on allegedly corrupt figures — as well as their spouses and children — from Honduras to Ukraine. Biden also has ordered U.S. agencies to come up with new ways to battle corruption, arguing it is a threat to democracy around the world.

Russia offers no shortage of potential targets. The list of 35 people being circulated by Navalny’s crew includes: Roman Abramovich, a billionaire businessman who owns Britain’s Chelsea soccer club; Dmitry Patrushev, a banker from an influential family now serving as Russia’s agriculture minister; and Nikolay Tokarev, president of the Russian pipeline company Transneft.

But when it comes to these names and others in Russia, Biden is treading warily.

In April, the administration unveiled a package of measures to penalize Moscow for a range of anti-U.S. activity, including interference in the 2020 U.S. election and malicious cyber activities. The package included economic sanctions on dozens of non-oligarch individuals and entities, the expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats, and some restrictions on U.S. financial institutions’ purchase of Russian government debt.

Biden and Putin met in Geneva in mid-June, a summit in which the U.S. president warned his Russian counterpart that the United States would respond to Russian provocations. Biden also has told Putin that the U.S. would hold the Russian leader responsible for cracking down on groups that engage in cyberattacks from Russian soil, even if those organizations weren’t directed by the Kremlin.

Still, in the weeks both before and after the summit, ransomware attacks by groups believed to be based in Russia targeted many U.S companies. One even forced the shutdown of Colonial Pipeline, causing gas shortages in parts of the country. The Commerce Department recently announced new restrictions on U.S. companies’ dealings with a handful of Russian technology firms. Amid the uproar, REvil, the group that was behind some recent ransomware strikes, went offline for unclear reasons.

It’s possible that Biden has green-lighted classified actions in the cyber sphere and beyond to undercut the Kremlin. His top aides have said the U.S. strategy toward Russia will evolve as needed and that not all of it will be visible. But critics say these moves won’t be enough to deter Putin, who has found ways to adjust to incremental U.S. maneuvers.

Farkas said Biden needs to take bold steps that amount to a deterrent against Putin, not simply to play defense. She recommended restrictions that would affect Russian sovereign debt, but also agreed that going after the assets of Putin and his oligarch friends could be an important part of that deterrent.

“They’re in our nuclear power grid, they’re in our water grid, they’re in our electric grid — because that’s how they intend to fight a potential war with us,” Farkas said of the Kremlin. “I think it’s dangerous to roll over. We’re just tempting Putin. He doesn’t understand anything but firmness.”

Biden and Putin arrive to meet at the Villa la Grange in Geneva, Switzerland. | Saul Loeb/Pool via AP

Biden administration officials argue that past U.S. sanctions on Russia’s oligarchs haven’t succeeded the way Washington hoped and that there’s no guarantee that future ones will.

In 2014, Obama unveiled economic sanctions on several Russian oligarchs and aides close to Putin, aiming to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine. Targets included Gennady Timchenko, a founder of a major commodity trading company in the oil and energy markets, and Yuri Kovalchuk, Putin’s personal banker.

Former President Donald Trump’s administration announced similar steps in April 2018, targeting several more Russian tycoons and government officials. The Trump administration cited an array of Russian activities, including interference in U.S. elections, as a reason for the move.

The people sanctioned included aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska as well as companies linked to him. The Trump administration later lifted sanctions on the companies after facing a lobbying campaign that pointed out how the sanctions had roiled global metals markets. In the years since, questions have arisen about whether Deripaska violated an agreement that led to the sanctions being taken off the companies.

Overall, though, neither the Obama nor the Trump sanctions on Russian oligarchs seemed to deter Putin from moves that undermine U.S. interests, administration officials and others said. In fact, because U.S. sanctions made it harder for these tycoons and their families to access American and other financial systems, they may have led to more loyalty to Putin.

“In many cases, we’ve seen that the oligarchs have then become more dependent on patronage and state contracts from the Russian state,” a senior Biden administration official said.

The official added that it’s overly simplistic to characterize the Russian government as a kleptocracy or say that Putin’s only interest is money. “Clearly he has other ambitions on the geopolitical stage beyond just money and enriching himself and his cronies,” the official said.

Analysts point out that developing sanctions is a complex process that requires meeting certain evidentiary thresholds. The mere fact that a person is rich and friends with Putin isn’t enough.

Some also say that anti-Putin crusaders are overestimating America’s knowledge of and access to where Putin and his friends have stashed their funds around the world. Besides, even if the U.S. manages to freeze a portion of a Putin crony’s assets, that person will likely still live quite comfortably.

“We don’t really know where all the money is,” one former U.S. official familiar with the issue said. “It’s hidden so deeply that you don’t know where it’s going to crop up.”

There are plenty of other reasons to avoid the kleptocrat crackdown for now, administration officials and outside analysts say.

For one thing, the president may want to retain some leverage for use later. Biden has signaled that he wants to give Putin time to prove whether he can be a constructive partner, including on issues like battling ransomware. After the June summit, U.S. officials were heartened by a senior Russian security official’s remark that Russia was willing to work with the United States to take on cyber criminals.

There’s also the possibility that, instead of acting as a deterrent, slamming sanctions on Putin’s wealthy friends could lead to an escalating cycle of retaliation. Even actions that only somewhat undercut Putin’s control — say, by weakening his power base when his associates realize they can’t access their money — could damage Russia’s economy to the point where it hurts Europe’s economy and, eventually, the American economy.

Taken to the extreme, moves that could lead to the fall of Putin might prove even more destabilizing in unpredictable ways. U.S. officials, remembering the chaos of the post-Cold War era, are mindful that Russia’s massive arsenal of nuclear weapons could fall into the wrong hands.

>Biden, who has decades of foreign policy experience, has never trusted Putin, a former KGB officer. But the president also understands the bigger geostrategic calculations involved, analysts and former officials said.

“There’s no way President Biden is going to seek to personalize this with Putin,” a former senior U.S. official said. “To the extent you’ll see gloves coming off, it will be in a narrow and targeted way.”

For many Putin critics, that’s not sufficient.

The United States has not sanctioned enough of Putin’s cronies, nor even the right ones, they argue. They also dismiss the notion that past sanctions on the oligarchs made no difference, saying that without those penalties Putin might have done even more to frustrate the West.

“He hasn’t pulled out of Ukraine,” Browder said of Putin, “but how much more territory would have taken if we hadn’t sanctioned the oligarchs?”

Russian dissidents linked to Navalny — whose poisoning and detention has spurred its own U.S. sanctions on Moscow, with more still expected –—have given the Biden administration the list of 35 people to target. The list includes oligarchs as well as alleged human rights abusers. Several of the people listed already face some U.S. sanctions.

U.S. officials seem willing to consider the list, said Leonid Volkov, a top Navalny aide, who met with an array of leading figures while in Washington earlier this year.

owever, “they very clearly indicated they don’t have any appetite to move on with the sanctions alone, so they want to do it with partners,” he said.

Volkov agreed that a coordinated sanctions effort would be more powerful than the United States acting alone, especially considering how many Russian tycoons keep their money in real estate or other holdings in Europe. But he also noted that such coordination takes time and could run into roadblocks from Putin-friendly world leaders.

In the meantime, Navalny’s foundation intends to keep pursuing its investigations, compiling evidence packs that the Biden team and others can turn to if and when they decide to go after Russia’s kleptocrats and their friend atop the Kremlin.

“Our point is that this has to be a priority,” Volkov said.

Browder said Biden’s team reminded him of the Obama years, when many of the same officials over-analyzed situations so much that they came across as timid if not outright frozen. That included Obama, who was keen to avoid escalation with Moscow.

“These people are all great policy wonks. They’re not gunslingers, they’re policy wonks,” Browder said. “In many respects, that’s a good thing, but sometimes you need some gunslingers.”

Chess great Kasparov urges US to end nuke talks with ‘terrorist’ Iran | The Jerusalem Post | July 27, 2021

“Terrorist regimes should be isolated, and their leaders treated like the criminals they are,” said Kasparov. “This is how we can support the people, the victims of these regimes. The U.S. is repeating a terrible mistake by negotiating with the leaders of Iran in Vienna.” (2/4)

— Renew Democracy Initiative (@Renew_Democracy) July 27, 2021

 

READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE JERUSALEM POST

By Benjamin Weinthal

 
Legendary chess player Garry Kasparov, one of the greats of the game, has urged the US government to pull the plug on nuclear negotiations with Iran’s hardline Islamist regime because it is a dictatorship.

“Terror regimes should be isolated and their leaders should be treated like the criminals they are,” Kasparov said. “That is how can you support the people and the victims of these regimes. Instead, the United States is repeating a terrible mistake by negotiating with Iran’s leaders in Vienna. These negotiations are a waste of time except for Iran’s leaders.”

The former chess world champion said the talks in Vienna “only benefit Iran. They [Iranian leaders] are also buying time to pursue the world’s deadliest weapons.”

Israel and some Western countries have accused Iran’s regime of seeking to build, as well as secure technology for, a nuclear weapon.

The US and other world powers are negotiating with Islamic Republic to bring it back to the 2015 nuclear deal. The atomic pact, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), offers Iran’s regime sanctions relief in exchange for it abiding by temporary restrictions on is nuclear program.

Kasparov, who is the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, an organization devoted to democracy promotion and combating totalitarian regimes such as Vladimir Putin’s Russian administration, called Iran an “illegitimate regime” that has no “authority from the people.”

He added that the it causes “terror and war” and “no one suffers more than citizens of the regime.”

The chess grandmaster, one of the greatest players in the history of the game, said Iran’s regime is a “dictatorship, it fears its people. It oppresses and tortures them. Iran is its people.”

He also took the regime to task for its 1988 massacre of Iranian dissidents in prisons, noting there “has been no justice for victims and their families and no accountability.”

Kasparov advocated a maximum pressure campaign against the clerical regime.

The Jerusalem Post reported on the alleged role of Ohio-based Oberlin College professor Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, who Amnesty International said carried out crimes against humanity while serving as the Iranian regime’s ambassador to the UN. Amnesty accused him of covering up the mass murder of 1988.

After the Post revealed that Mahallati urged, during his tenure at the UN, the destruction of the Jewish state and launched tirades against the persecuted Baháí religious minority, Oberlin College’s David Hertz said the institution had launched an investigation into the allegations against Mahallati. Hertz announced the investigation in April but the college has not disclosed what emerged from its inquiry.

The Iranian regime’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, was involved in the 1988 massacre, according to the US and Amnesty International. Kasparov said “Raisi was not really elected. The word election is a joke in dictatorships like in Iran and Russia. He was chosen to play a role.”

El gran ajedrecista Kasparov insta a Estados Unidos a poner fin a las conversaciones nucleares con el ‘terrorista’ Irán | Agencia de Noticias | July 26, 2021

 

READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT AGENCIA DE NOTICIAS

By Gisela

Agencia AJN.- El legendario campeón de ajedrez Garry Kasparov ha instado al gobierno de los Estados Unidos a cerrar las negociaciones nucleares con el régimen clerical iraní porque es una dictadura.

“Los regímenes terroristas deben ser aislados y sus líderes deben ser tratados como los criminales que son”, dijo Kasparov. “Así es como se puede apoyar al pueblo ya las víctimas de estos regímenes. En cambio, Estados Unidos está repitiendo un terrible error al negociar con los líderes de Irán en Viena. Estas negociaciones son una pérdida de tiempo excepto para “los líderes de Irán.

El ex campeón mundial de ajedrez dijo que las conversaciones en Viena “solo benefician a Irán. Ellos [los líderes iraníes] también están ganando tiempo para buscar las armas más letales del mundo “.

Israel y algunos países occidentales han acusado al régimen de Irán de buscar construir, además de tecnología segura, un arma nuclear.

Estados Unidos y otras potencias mundiales están negociando con la República Islámica de Irán sobre el reingreso de Teherán al acuerdo nuclear de 2015. El pacto atómico, conocido formalmente como el Plan de Acción Integral Conjunto, promete el alivio de las sanciones del régimen de Irán a cambio de restricciones temporales sobre su programa nuclear.

Kasparov, quien es el presidente de la Fundación de Derechos Humanos, una organización dedicada a la promoción de la democracia y la lucha contra regímenes totalitarios como el régimen ruso de Vladimir Putin, calificó a la República Islámica de Irán como un “régimen ilegítimo” que no tiene “la autoridad del pueblo”.

Añadió que el régimen iraní provoca “terror y guerra” y “nadie sufre más que los ciudadanos del régimen”.
El gran maestro de ajedrez, que es ampliamente considerado el mejor jugador en la historia del juego, dijo que el régimen de Irán es una “dictadura, teme a su pueblo”. Los oprime y tortura. Irán es su pueblo ”.

También criticó al régimen por su masacre de disidentes iraníes en las cárceles en 1988, y señaló que “no ha habido justicia para las víctimas y sus familias ni rendición de cuentas”.

El Jerusalem Post informó sobre el presunto papel del profesor Mohammad Jafar Mahallati del Oberlin College, con sede en Ohio, quien, según Amnistía Internacional, cometió crímenes de lesa humanidad mientras se desempeñaba como embajador del régimen iraní ante la ONU. Amnistía acusó a Mahallat de encubrir el asesinato en masa de 1988.

Después de que el Post reveló que Mahallati instó durante su mandato en la ONU a la destrucción del estado judío y lanzó diatribas contra la minoría religiosa baháʼí perseguida, David Hertz de Oberlin College dijo que la universidad inició una investigación sobre las acusaciones contra Mahallati. Hertz anunció la investigación en abril. La universidad no ha revelado lo que ha surgido de su investigación.

El nuevo presidente del régimen iraní, Ebrahim Raisi, estuvo involucrado en la masacre de 1988, según Estados Unidos y Amnistía Internacional. Kasparov dijo que “Raisi no fue realmente elegido. La palabra elección es una broma en dictaduras como en Irán y Rusia. Fue elegido para desempeñar un papel “.

Hou Yifan and the Wait for Chess’s First Woman World Champion | The New Yorker | July 26, 2021

Growing chess means bringing more girls into the game, and the same is true of finding the first woman world champion. https://t.co/lfcjFwBoGt

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 31, 2021

 

READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORKER

By Louisa Thomas

 

Even by the standards of chess prodigies, Hou Yifan stood out. It wasn’t so much the way she played the game—dynamically but not dazzlingly, with an aggressive but flexible style. It was that she was a girl. Thirteen years after she became a Grandmaster, at the age of fourteen, people still mention the two big barrettes that used to pin back her bobbed hair. “I never felt restrictions or limitations,” she told me recently, from her home in Shenzhen, China, where she is a professor at Shenzhen University’s Faculty of Physical Education. (Last year, at twenty-six, she became the youngest full professor in the university’s history.) “My parents never taught me that as a girl you should do this or that,” she said. “Teachers never shaped my views in that way.” These days, her hair falls to her shoulders, and black cat’s-eye glasses frame her face. She speaks English quickly and precisely; she spent a year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, studying public policy. She is the only woman among the hundred best chess players in the world, at No. 82. The second-ranked woman, Aleksandra Goryachkina, a Russian in her early twenties, is outside the top two hundred.

Chess is not like basketball or soccer. Men and women face one another on equal terms, and no one can tell the gender of a player from the moves on a scorecard. Still, of the seventeen hundred and thirty-two Grandmasters in the world, just thirty-eight are women. Much of this gap stems from how many women compete, versus the number of men who do: around sixteen per cent of tournament players identify as female, and most of them are children. As a purely statistical matter, you would expect few, if any, women at the extremes of the rankings. Still, this appears to be an incomplete explanation of the disparity at the top of the game, about which Hou is blunt. “You cannot deny it, you cannot pretend it doesn’t happen,” she told me, of the absence of women from chess’s highest echelon. For years, she has been the only one who stood a chance.

Hou was born in 1994 in Xinghua, a small city near China’s coast. As a child, she spotted a chess set in a shopwindow, and liked the shapes of the pieces: the sturdy pawns and slender-necked bishops, the castellated rooks and horse-headed knights. When she was five, she started playing the game with other kids at the home of a chess teacher, and showed enough talent that her parents enrolled her a year early in the local school, which had a chess program. She and her classmates would consult a large chess dictionary and write out the first few moves of famous openings—the Scotch, the Ruy Lopez—on a sheet of paper. Then they’d set up their boards, dutifully execute their copied instructions, and launch their wild attacks.

Hou liked calculating how one move would provoke another, and started thinking in terms of sequences. She developed a sense of where to push and when to defend. Her coach at school could take her only so far, but, at a tournament, she met an International Master and former national champion named Tong Yuanming, who taught chess in Shandong Province, a few hours north. Tong said that he would consider taking her on. He sat Hou at a board and had her face his top pupils, all boys. They had studied chess theory; they knew how to checkmate with only, say, a bishop and a knight. Hou did not know endgames, but she beat most of them anyway. She was seven years old.

She moved to Shandong with her mother and attended chess classes. Two years later, she joined the national team, and her family moved to Beijing. Her parents told her that she could “go back to normal life” whenever she wanted, but she was not a normal talent. She won the girls’ under-ten championship in 2003, and, the next year, finished the boys’ under-ten tournament tied for first, placing third after tiebreaks. In 2005, she was the youngest player on the one female squad at the World Team Chess Championship, in Israel. She lost her first two games, and, while sulking, got thrashed in the third, despite starting with the white pieces. (The player with the white pieces always moves first, giving her a slight advantage.) The experience hardened her mind-set, making her more disciplined and professional. She was eleven.

Hou’s competitors started taking note not just of her performances but of her disposition. Irina Bulmaga, a contemporary of Hou’s who lives in Romania, said, “My parents and coaches were always telling me, ‘Look how focussed she is during the games.’ ” Bulmaga, like most young players, struggled to contain her emotions and to concentrate throughout games that could last for five hours and were sometimes played back-to-back. Hou was stoic. “My personality wouldn’t push me to an extreme,” she told me. It is not that she never got emotional or distracted, or didn’t feel pressure. It is that these experiences were so rare that she can cite each time they happened.

In some respects, China was a good place for a girl to pursue chess. The International Chess Federation—known by its French acronym, fide—has overseen a world championship for women since 1927. For years, it was dominated by the Soviets. Then, in 1991, a young Chinese player named Xie Jun qualified for the finals against Maia Chiburdanidze, of Georgia, who had held the title since 1978. China had never had a championship contender, and Xie’s preparation became a collective project. The country’s top male players helped coach her. She won, becoming a source of national pride and establishing a path followed by other women’s chess champions. For a long time, the top Chinese men and women trained together in Beijing—though that has changed since China got two men into the top twenty.

When Hou was fourteen, she shared third place in the open section of the World Junior Chess Championship, in Turkey, and became the fifteenth-youngest person, to that point, to achieve the rank of Grandmaster. Later that year, she reached the finals of the Women’s World Chess Championship, and finished second. She developed a reputation on tour for kindness, and for mental strength. In 2010, she returned to the finals, and came into her fourth game needing just a draw to win—and lost. It was one of the rare occasions when a game got to her. That night, she walked with her mother and her coach around the garden of their hotel until she was calm. The next day, in tiebreaks, she overwhelmed her opponent and compatriot Ruan Lufei. At sixteen, Hou was the youngest-ever women’s world champion, and among the world’s best teen-age players. It was possible to imagine other summits that she might climb. But Hou had her own ambitions.

The most famous female chess player in the world doesn’t exist. Beth Harmon, the protagonist of “The Queen’s Gambit,” is a fictional character, invented by the novelist Walter Tevis, in 1983, and lately given new life in a Netflix miniseries. Harmon conquers the chess world of the nineteen-fifties and sixties and faces only the mildest sexism along the way. The Hollywood version of her story, though fanciful in many respects, evokes the glamour of Lisa Lane, who became a media sensation in the early sixties but quit the game in 1966, unhappy with the focus on her looks and her love life, and unable to make a comfortable living as a pro. Lane became the national women’s champion twice, but never beat the best women in the world, let alone the top men. (Tevis seems also to have been inspired by Bobby Fischer, the eccentric American champion, who was a notorious chauvinist.)

Shortly after Tevis’s novel was published, three women emerged whose stories rivalled Harmon’s. They were sisters, from Hungary: Susan (née Zsuzsa), the oldest; Sofia (née Zsófia); and Judit, the baby of the family. Their father, László Polgár, believed that geniuses are made, not born, and set out to prove it. He kept his daughters on a strict educational schedule that included studying chess for up to six hours a day. There was also a twenty-minute period dedicated to telling jokes.

In 1950, fide had regularized the titles applied to the best chess players, and created one title just for women: Woman International Master. The bar was set two hundred rating points lower than that for a standard International Master, the title below Grandmaster. Twenty-six years later, fide introduced the title of Woman Grandmaster, and placed that title, too, at a threshold lower than not only Grandmaster but also International Master. Polgár wanted to insulate his daughters from the damaging effects of low expectations: the sisters sought titles available to men, and, with a few exceptions, they avoided women’s tournaments.

Some of the men they played wouldn’t shake their hands. One, after losing to Susan, threw pieces in her direction. In 1986, when Susan was seventeen, she should have qualified for a regional tournament for the World Chess Championship, based on her result at the Hungarian national championship, but the Hungarian federation, angry about her insistence on playing men, refused to send her. fide eventually intervened, officially opening future world championships to female competitors. Susan became the third woman to earn the title of Grandmaster. Sofia, who, at the age of fourteen, won a tournament against respected Grandmasters in spectacular fashion, reached the level of International Master. Judit eclipsed them both.

A diminutive girl with long red hair and arresting gray eyes, Judit, by thirteen, had a shot at Bobby Fischer’s record for youngest-ever Grandmaster, and Sports Illustrated ran a story about her. “It’s inevitable that nature will work against her, and very soon,” the world champion Garry Kasparov told the magazine. He added, “She has fantastic chess talent, but she is, after all, a woman.” Polgár beat Fischer’s record; two years later, she beat Boris Spassky, a former world champion. The first time she played Kasparov, in 1994, he changed his mind about moving a piece after lifting his hand, breaking the rules; Polgár looked questioningly at the arbiter, who seemed to see the infraction but did nothing. Kasparov won that match and, for seven years, every other game they played, except for a handful of draws. Then, in 2002, at a tournament in Moscow, she faced him in a game of rapid chess. The format gave each player about half an hour to complete their moves. By then, Polgár was ranked No. 19 in the world. Kasparov was still No. 1. Playing with the black pieces, he deployed a defense that was unusual for him, and Polgár, an aggressive and psychologically astute player, noted that he had opted for a line that his rival Vladimir Kramnik had once used against him. Seeing what was coming, Polgár seized control. With her rooks doubled on the seventh rank and hunting the Russian’s exposed king, Kasparov resigned.

Polgár later said that she would have preferred a more brilliant win, strength against strength. Still, it was a historic occasion: the best woman had defeated the best man. Kasparov now regrets his chauvinism toward female chess players, and Polgár in particular, he told me. “There was no epiphany,” he explained in an e-mail. “I just got older and wiser, and can only apologize that it took as long as it did!” He has since become an outspoken supporter of women in the game. (He served as a consultant on “The Queen’s Gambit.”) Polgár, who retired in 2014, having peaked in the rankings at No. 8, told me that the absence of women at the top has nothing to do with innate ability. It has to do, she said, with how rarely girls dedicate themselves to chess at the expense of everything else. For every Polgár sister, of course, there are countless young players who have burned out, pushed too hard by ambitious parents and coaches. Still, Polgár is firm about what it takes to become a top player—and when one must begin. “You have to be, really, a kid to get involved,” she said, “so that it goes simply under your skin.”

In 2012, Hou Yifan became the first female player to beat Judit Polgár in a classical game in twenty-two years. She did it at a tournament in Gibraltar, in a field that included some of the world’s top Grandmasters. fide ranks players using the so-called Elo system: winners take points from losers, and the discrepancy in their ratings coming into a match determines the number of points won and lost. The Elo system is also used to calculate performance ratings achieved at specific events; Hou’s rating for the tournament in Gibraltar was an astonishing 2872. She tied for first place with the British Grandmaster Nigel Short, once the No. 3 player in the world. Short won the title in tiebreaks, but Hou emerged as the star of the tournament and the heir to Polgár. Suddenly, she carried tremendous symbolic weight every time she sat down at the board.

In some ways, the lack of a female world champion is more troubling to people outside the game than it is to those within it. In the popular imagination, chess is nearly synonymous with intelligence, but professional players know that the game is a highly specialized activity. László Polgár’s attitude toward women’s titles and tournaments is not typical; most female players see these tournaments as opportunities for finding camaraderie in a male-dominated arena. The trans writer Charlotte Clymer, an avid amateur player, described women’s tournaments to me as “a reprieve from worrying about the palpable discomfort that some men have with trans women.” Crucially, the tournaments also provide financial and sponsorship support. “I think it’s really important for women to have their own competitions, their own titles,” Anna Muzychuk, a Ukrainian Grandmaster, told me. “It motivates them to work, to become stronger. We can see that it can be our profession.” Success in women’s and girls’ tournaments, though, can be a “trap,” the chess writer Mig Greengard told me. While Greengard believes that girls-only tournaments are positive social experiences for female players, he worries that the best, like Hou, aren’t routinely challenged in the way that the boys are. “The way you get better is by having your ass kicked hard and often by better players,” he said.

There is something disquieting about a system that uses the word “woman” to devalue a title—and sexism in the chess world unquestionably persists. Jennifer Shahade, a Woman Grandmaster, is the director of U.S. Chess Women, an initiative of the United States Chess Federation that organizes and funds programs for girls and women. (Shahade is also a friend of mine.) A few years ago, she and her husband created an art installation titled “Not Particularly Beautiful,” an interactive chessboard filled with misogynistic insults that she and other female chess players have received. Anna Rudolf, an International Master who has become a popular chess streamer on Twitch and a commentator for matches, told me that when she played on a team in Hungary’s top club league the venues often had no women’s bathrooms, or left them locked. Rudolf was once falsely accused, on no evidence other than her strong performance during a tournament, of hiding a microcomputer in her lip balm.

Some men resent that there are prizes available just to women, and bristle at the idea that women who are rated lower than many men can make a living from chess, while the vast majority of those men can’t. Shahade told me, “In chats online, people will ask, ‘Why are there Woman Grandmaster titles?’ They know the answer, but they want to bring up female inferiority. Then someone will bring up the greater-male-variability hypothesis”—the idea, going back to Darwin, that men exhibit more natural variation than women, and so are more likely to appear at the extremes, both positive and negative, of human ability. “It always goes the same way,” Shahade went on. “It’s not really done in good faith.”

Hou has nothing but good things to say about her interactions with male opponents, but remarks like those which Shahade described aren’t made only on Twitter. Nigel Short, a few years after beating Hou in tiebreaks, claimed that men were “hard-wired” to be better than women at the game. “I don’t have the slightest problem in acknowledging that my wife possesses a much higher degree of emotional intelligence than I do,” he said. “Likewise, she doesn’t feel embarrassed in asking me to maneuver the car out of our narrow garage. One is not better than the other, we just have different skills.” When Short’s remarks were condemned, he claimed that he was speaking in terms of general populations, and that the existence of exceptions proved nothing. “Men and women do have different brains. This is a biological fact,” he responded to one critic on Twitter. Short is now a vice-president of fide.

In truth, the science on the subject is far from settled. There are measurable differences between men’s brains and women’s, on average, but it is not entirely clear what those differences mean, and there is enough variation within the sexes to lessen any explanatory power the differences might have. Several studies have found disparities in men’s and women’s relative ability to rotate 3-D objects in their minds, which might have a bearing on proficiency at chess—but that skill is teachable, and other studies have shown that experience and training can overcome average differences between the sexes. What’s more, emphasizing biological differences may, in itself, discourage women from pursuing certain activities, a possibility that has been explored in research on the gender discrepancies in stem fields.

Talking to women in chess, I found it striking how many seem comfortable with the presumption that men have inherent advantages. Eva Repková, a Woman Grandmaster from Slovakia, is the chair of fide’s Commission for Women’s Chess, which promotes gender equality in the game. Last October, in an interview with a newspaper in India, she was quoted as saying that “it’s more natural for men to pick chess as an interest or women to maybe pick music or arranging flowers,” and that women lacked men’s “physical endurance” and “fighting spirit.” She insisted to me that her remarks were taken out of context: “I totally believe in gender equality,” she said. But Muzychuk, the Ukrainian Grandmaster, made similar points to me about endurance and competitiveness. Even Hou, in an interview a couple of years ago, brought up endurance as a possible male advantage, though she played it down, and pointed out that girls are discouraged from having high ambitions. “Most girls are told at an early age that there’s a kind of gender distinction, and they should just try their best in the girls’ section and be happy with that,” she said. “So, without the motivation to chase higher goals, it’s harder for some girls to improve as fast as boys as they grow up.” Many girls drop away from the more competitive tracks of the game when they reach high school.

In 2012, after Hou beat Polgár, she stunned the chess world again by announcing that she would be attending Peking University as a full-time student. Few of the current top players went to college, and some didn’t finish high school. Polgár told me that, at the time, she thought, “Of course, she can still play great chess, even improve her chess, possibly. But to get in the top ten in the world, compete with the top male players in the world, who are completely dedicated professionals, I don’t think it’s possible.” Hou was at peace with her decision. “I did not want to spend my life wholly on chess,” she told me. She played wonderfully while in college nonetheless, climbing to her peak rating, 2683—just below the 2700 threshold of the so-called super Grandmasters, players who are generally considered possible contenders for the world championship. She thrived at school, too, embracing campus life and taking a wide range of courses outside her international-relations major: geology, anatomy, Japanese art and culture.

Hou won the Women’s World Championship again in 2013 and in 2016, as she was finishing her senior year in college. She had never been particularly outspoken, but, after winning her fourth championship, she declared that she would not play for the title again unless the format was changed to be more like that of the World Chess Championship, which takes place every other year and uses a “challenger” system: candidates compete for the right to face the sitting champion. The women’s title was being held every year, and alternated between the challenger system and a knockout tournament, in which sixty-four competitors, including the defending champion, were placed in a bracket and faced single elimination. Knockouts favor upsets and chaos, which lend them a degree of excitement—and may help attract sponsors—but they undermine the format’s ability to determine who is truly the best. (fide, in 2019, adopted a version of the changes that Hou had proposed.)

It wasn’t the only stand she took. In 2017, in Gibraltar, Hou showed up thirty minutes late to her final round and resigned after five moves. Afterward, she explained that she was protesting being paired against women in seven of her ten matches. (Men far outnumbered women at the event.) Tournament officials said the pairings were an unlikely but statistically possible accident. Hou’s resignation sparked an unusually heated debate in the typically staid chess world. When I asked her about the protest, she described it as a thing of the past, and said she’d rather look forward.

Some of the excitement around Hou’s potential grew from her adaptable style, and from the sense that her abilities were instinctive as much as learned. “This very natural feeling of the game is hard to describe,” Vladimir Kramnik told ESPN the Magazine, in a piece about Hou. “She doesn’t need to calculate, to come logically to a certain good move—she just feels it. That’s a sign of big talent. I experienced something similar when I played Magnus Carlsen for the first time.”

Carlsen, a thirty-year-old from Norway, has been the top player in the world for nearly all of Hou’s career. She has never beaten him in an official game, though she has come close. In the spring of 2017, she faced him at the Grenke Chess Classic, in Baden-Baden, Germany. She was coming off a spectacular win against the No. 3 player in the world, the American Fabiano Caruana. Carlsen, unfazed, chose a riskier opening than he normally selects: he was playing for the win. The game was more or less even through twenty-two moves, then Carlsen carelessly advanced a pawn on the queenside, weakening his center of the board, and Hou found the perfect rook move to punish him. Suddenly, it was a two-outcome game: Hou would almost certainly either win or draw. She looked serene; Carlsen did not. Against someone else, she likely would have kept applying pressure. Facing Carlsen, she traded pieces to simplify the position, and settled for the draw. She knew how many players had seen their fortunes improbably reverse against Carlsen, how many had watched him wring water from what looked like stone.

Carlsen learned how to play chess alongside his sister Ellen. Their father, Henrik, decided to teach them the game when she was six and he was five, but they lost interest after a few months. He tried again the following year, with similar results. A few years later, he tried a third time, and then, some months later, a fourth; finally, it stuck. Both children now liked the game. Magnus liked it more.

I asked Henrik recently what he would have done if it had been Ellen, not Magnus, who showed great promise. He said that he hoped he would have encouraged her the same way, but that it wasn’t really the right question. If anything, Ellen picked up the game more easily. But Magnus had a single-mindedness that his sister didn’t share. “At the age of four, he could sit for six hours, building Lego,” Henrik said. “And when he went to bed his eyes were still swimming with Legos.” When Magnus and Ellen began playing chess, they made the same amount of progress for a while, and then Ellen turned her mind to other things. Magnus, bored with his schoolwork, started carrying a chessboard around and reading chess books. He wanted to go to every tournament he could.

The family spent six months driving around Europe, ferrying Magnus to competitions and sightseeing. Ellen started playing again, and their younger sister Ingrid began playing, too. Ellen became a strong club player, with a peak rating of 1939. “Some of my best friends are girls and boys from the chess world,” she told me. But she tired of the attention that came with being one of the few women in chess, and one with the last name Carlsen. It made her anxious, she said, to see the best players in a hall gathered around her board, studying her moves. She didn’t feel her intelligence was being judged, she noted. “I don’t think I have ever felt intellectually inferior to any of the guys I played against,” she said, adding, “I think to most people it is clear that your chess rating is not identical to your intellectual abilities.” Her brother became a Grandmaster at thirteen, and world champion a decade later. Ellen became a doctor.

In 2017, after Hou beat Caruana and drew Carlsen, the chess world began buzzing again about her prospects. It had been an up-and-down year. There was the match in Gibraltar that she’d thrown in protest; she’d also had a dismal showing at a tournament in Geneva. In August, she won the Biel International Chess Festival, in Switzerland, with a performance rating of 2810. She said that it “showed I could compete at the top.” But she had applied for and was accepted into a master’s program at the University of Chicago. She’d deferred the admission and, instead, while in Geneva, she’d interviewed for the Rhodes Scholarship. In December, she announced that she was headed to Oxford. She got less pushback for this decision, she told me, than she had for going to college.

I’ve spoken to a number of people who are convinced that Hou would have risen higher if she’d made the game her singular focus. “I believe she could have been top twenty,” Irina Bulmaga told me. Bulmaga admitted that a part of her was disappointed that Hou hadn’t done so. “The more you see, the more you believe maybe you could achieve it, too,” she said. Hou, though, speaks without regrets. Enkhtuul Altan-Ulzii, a Woman Grandmaster from Mongolia who is one of Hou’s closest friends, told me, “She is not actually results oriented. She plays for fun and enjoyment.”

Hou remained a popular invite for tournaments, including those featuring the world’s top players. Quiet, fashionably dressed, sometimes with a pot of tea nearby, she was often the only woman in the room. Last year, during the pandemic, Carlsen organized an online chess tour, with five events and a million dollars in total prize money. (He won.) Now called the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour, it expanded in 2021, this time with an accompanying challengers’ competition, designed to encourage gender equality. The challengers include ten of the top girls and women under the age of twenty-four, and ten of their male counterparts. They are divided into two mixed-gender teams, one captained by Vladimir Kramnik and the other by Judit Polgár. Hou is a coach for Kramnik’s team. The point, Polgár told me, isn’t to show that the girls can compete with the boys—for one thing, the ratings of the boys, almost to a person, are higher, and the standings so far have reflected that. “They are not worse than boys because they are girls,” Polgár said. “They are worse because they are not playing the same amount of time, with the same focus and dedication.”

One of the participants is Carissa Yip, who, at ten, became the youngest girl to defeat a Grandmaster, and now, at seventeen, is the highest-rated American woman. She loves chess—“every single game is different,” she told me, like “art”—but she has not made every decision in her life with an eye toward her chess career. A few years ago, when choosing between the public high school near her home, in Andover, Massachusetts, or the prestigious prep school in town, Phillips Academy, which strictly limits the number of classes that students can miss, she chose Phillips Academy, even though it would complicate her participation in chess tournaments. “Obviously, it wasn’t great for my chess life,” she told me. “But I wouldn’t change what I did.”

Hou has been thinking lately about the impact that chess has had on her life—the chances it gave her to travel and to develop her mind. At Shenzhen University, along with helping with the school’s chess team, she is looking for other ways to use the game. She has begun commentating at tournaments, and is advising on a Chinese translation of “The Queen’s Gambit.” There is something to be said for using chess to enrich one’s life instead of using one’s life to master chess. Jennifer Shahade told me, “I think there’s too much emphasis on being the highest rank.” Women have begun to thrive in other parts of the chess world, such as online streaming, which exploded in popularity on Twitch and YouTube during the pandemic. Two charismatic sisters from Canada, Alexandra and Andrea Botez, have nearly a million followers on the former; Alexandra is outside the top twenty-five thousand in the fide rankings, but in an interview with CNBC she estimated that she will make “at least mid six figures” through streaming and sponsorships this year. Shahade said that, in the past couple of years, more girls are playing in schools and local clubs. The U.S. Chess Women initiative has a robust—and growing—girls’ club program on Zoom. The fide Commission for Women’s Chess, led by Repková, is trying to expand the number of female arbiters and tournament officials in addition to female players. Addressing the gender disparity at the top “comes from addressing the disparity at the bottom, at the base of the pyramid,” Kasparov told me. “You can have a similar conversation about why there aren’t more Grandmasters from different parts of the world, or of different races or cultures. Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not.”

In June, Hou competed in her first major tournament of 2021, the Women’s Speed Chess Championship. She hadn’t been training, she said; she made a few uncharacteristic blunders but won the tournament anyway. Simultaneously, she became the first woman to compete in the Meltwater tour. In the third game of the second round, she faced Carlsen. The match was streamed on the Web site Chess24, and Carlsen, in a white shirt emblazoned with the logos of various sponsors, looked sharp, his thick caramel hair swept upward. Hou leaned in as she concentrated, such that her head was often cut off at the chin, and the lighting appeared to blur her face. Carlsen played opening moves that were clearly aimed at stopping Hou from taking the initiative. He guided the match into its endgame, keeping the upper hand. He got his pieces onto active squares, and Hou’s light-squared bishop became stuck in a corner. Carlsen’s passed pawn moved up the board, and Hou knew that the game was lost. She tilted her head to rest it on her hand.

It was an uneven tournament for Hou. She suffered a series of losses against the weaker part of the field, but, against Wesley So, Anish Giri, Levon Aronian, and Ding Liren—four of the best players in the world—she managed draws. Against Ding, her countryman and the world’s third-ranked classical player, she clamped down in a so-called hedgehog structure, the black pawns forming a row of tight little spikes, and waited for her chance to counter. When it came, she took control, until the position simplified into a draw. It was the kind of performance that inspires some chess fans to think about what might have been.

But that’s not what’s on Hou’s mind. “I’m sure that my future life will have a connection with chess, maybe a deep connection,” she said. “This connection is there all the time.” She has been working with a group of psychologists and statisticians on a paper exploring why there are so few women in chess at all levels. The insights she contributes are gleaned from her own career. Whether or not there is an “innate difference” between men and women, she said, what interests her is the way “society shapes you.” 

Appian Chat on the Human-Machine Relationship | July 22, 2021

 

This project is part of my ongoing partnership with Appian. Check out my article for them, mentioned in this #AppianChat, HERE

A1b: It started with conversations with @Appian CEO Matt Calkins about the future of the human-machine relationship. It didn’t hurt that Matt is a board game expert! It struck me that so much talk about AI & tech was theory, and here was a company DOING it for real. #AppianChats

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

A2b: Of course it’s new, and new solutions also have new problems. But that’s how we learn. I’m not talking about silver linings, but real advances based on sudden challenges. Adaptability and agility are the key for countries and individuals, not just companies. #AppianChats

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

A3b: Many founders of modern computer science AI in the 60s & 70s were very philosophical, but partly because machines were so slow their stuff didn’t work! So most of their objectives weren’t real-world. Now everything works and setting priorities is what matters. #AppianChats

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

A4b: Software is everything about human machine because it’s the adaptable interface. It defines how smoothly we work together, or, if not done well, how frustrating it can be to work with even the most powerful machines and AIs. #AppianChats

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

A5: Companies like Appian are filling a vital gap by providing those flexible interfaces, empowering people and companies to access all this power. They can turn AI from sci-fi & scary headlines into practical, accessible tools. #AppianChats https://t.co/tZjYXxQzN0

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

A6b: Don’t be callous. It’s not “disruption” to people losing their jobs; it’s unemployment & real hardship. But we need perspective, too, and creating new things creates new industries & jobs. Then we have UBI, easier tools for training, etc. It’s not dystopia. #AppianChats

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

A7: Can you build ethics and accountability into a knife? Into a an airplane or the internet? AI is a mirror. We need more ethical humans instead of thinking we can build ethical machines! We need accountability in the system, so humans are are always responsible. #AppianChats https://t.co/C5BvHXjP8L

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

A8: I wrote a book called “How Life Imitates Chess” on this, and while there are many parallels about preparation & strategic planning, what matters most is becoming aware of your decision-making process as a player, leader & as a company. Why do you do what you do? #AppianChats https://t.co/Fj9tYWIxvv

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

A9: The history of chess in AI is long, a practical mini-laboratory. It shows us how well machines can master any closed system, if we can define it well. Chess also teaches us that machines don’t have to be perfect to be very good & useful, only better than us. #AppianChats https://t.co/Bf63pkg9pz

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

A10b: What % of your work tasks require human empathy or creativity? What if those rote elements were done for you? For a practical example in health care, see @EricTopol‘s book on how AI can help doctors be better doctors & improve results. #AppianChats

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

A11: Don’t think about AI as a monolithic thing, but as a broad set of tools you can customize to your company’s needs if you know how to ask the right questions. This is the challenge. Don’t be a gorilla with a calculator! What do you need? How does it fit? #AppianChats https://t.co/NgjbTFfol5

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

A12b: Education is a good next frontier for chess and AI to show the way. A program that can figure out your strengths and weaknesses and how best to address them would be incredibly useful. First in chess, then in maths, everything. #AppianChats

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

Thank you @Appian and everyone for joining in today. My blog post they mentioned is here: https://t.co/a4ApqzeoWY https://t.co/jM8QpuirGm

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 22, 2021

A.I. And The Future with the Greatest Chess Player Ever Garry Kasparov + Noodle.AI CEO Steve Pratt | Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different Podcast | July 21, 2021

 

This post is part of my ongoing collaboration with Noodle.ai. You can see the rest of our projects here.

Listen to the original recording at podcast host Christopher Lochhead’s website

In many circles, Chess is viewed as the ultimate display of intellectual might. If you think about it, chess is a fighting game that is purely intellectual and excludes all chance. In this episode of Follow Your Different, we talk to one of Chess’ ultimate combatants, Garry Kasparov.

At age 22, Garry Kasparov became the world’s youngest chess champion, and from 1984 to his retirement in 2005, he was ranked the number one Chess player on the planet for a record 255 months of his career. He is also known as the man who competed against an IBM supercomputer in 1997.

Today, Garry Kasparov is a political activist and an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. He is also the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, and the author of the best-seller called Deep Thinking, Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins.

In addition to all of this, he’s also working with a few advanced technology companies, in which I had the pleasure of meeting him. He has started working with a good friend of mine, Steve Pratt of Noodle.AI. So listen in as the three of us talk about Covid-19, the relationship between humans and machines, and how Garry jokes about being the first knowledge worker to have his job taken by a computer.

Garry Kasparov and Steve Pratt on COVID-19

When asked how they were doing nowadays, Steve comments that it felt strange now that everything is slowly opening up. Nowadays, it seems weird when you see people not wearing masks when you go out, as compared to only a few months ago of masks and lockdowns.

Garry shared that while it is slowly opening up in America and Europe, the rest of the world is going through a very different experience. He laments the current situation in Russia particularly, where his family and friends reside.

“We know from history that the innovative power of undemocratic states is cannot be compared to the power of the free mind. It’s not an accident that the virus came from China, but the response came from the United States.” – Garry Kasparov

Garry also points out the disparity on how people trust the vaccines compared to the Russian-made Sputnik vaccine. He attributes this mostly to having the proper data to prove its efficacy, which the Sputnik vaccine is sorely lacking at the moment. While there are vaccines that have lower efficacy rates compared to those made by Pfizer and Moderna, they’re still widely preferred due to the fact that they have data and tests to back those numbers up.

Working Together and Freeing the Mind

When asked if the low vaccination rates can be attributed to the vaccine or implementation, Garry answered that it was both happening at the same time. While the vaccine hesitancy was expected due to the lack of data on their vaccine, Russian government tried to promote Sputnik as the ultimate cure against COVID. They went as far as donating it to other countries, some of which flat-out refused, which further damaged its credibility.

Moving away from Russia, Garry then compared China and the United States’ response to the virus. He notes that while China had a huge head start in studying the COVID virus, it still took them a while to create a vaccine that had low efficacy ratings. Enter US and the combined effort of the public and private sectors, and you have two working vaccines in just 10 months, both of which boast great efficacy.

“So again, it’s very important to recognize that it’s this the free world, when we lift all the restrictions on risk. It could realize the wildest dreams, and somehow, I think the pandemics served us well, because it proved that we have to go back to the spirit of innovation and become pioneers, to become explorers. What’s important, again, the free world has potential, and now this potential have been exposed in a positive way.” – Garry Kasparov

Human and A.I.

We then talked about technology and A.I., how people are still against it in fears of somehow making an evil sentient A.I. that will rule us all. Garry explains that we shouldn’t be afraid of A.I.; rather, we should use it to its fullest potential and keep it away from the hands of bad humans.

“The problem is not with the machines. The problem was bad humans that can use these machines to harm us. That’s the story of technology.” – Garry Kasperov

Instead, we still blame the machine if someone used it and caused problems. So, we still limit their capabilities, afraid of things we have just fantasized about while ignoring the benefits it could bring.

There’s also the argument of machines and A.I. stealing jobs from people. To which Garry comments that we should not despair if it happens. Rather, we should look forward to what we can do next, and adapt to it. Whether to learn the technology to handle the A.I., or develop something that can be used hand-in-hand with the new technology.

Rather than fighting with machines, we should learn how it could work to our benefit. Because at the end of the day, machines can decide, but it’s a human’s privilege to choose.

If you wish to hear more from Garry Kasperov and Steve Pratt about A.I. and how it can improve our future, download and listen to this episode.

A.I. And The Future with Greatest Chess Player Ever Garry Kasparov + Noodle.AI CEO Steve Pratt | Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different Podcast | July 21, 2021

 

This is part of my ongoing collaboration with Noodle.ai. You can see the rest of our projects here.

Listen to the original recording at podcast host Christopher Lochhead’s website

In many circles, Chess is viewed as the ultimate display of intellectual might. If you think about it, chess is a fighting game that is purely intellectual and excludes all chance. In this episode of Follow Your Different, we talk to one of Chess’ ultimate combatants, Garry Kasparov.

At age 22, Garry Kasparov became the world’s youngest chess champion, and from 1984 to his retirement in 2005, he was ranked the number one Chess player on the planet for a record 255 months of his career. He is also known as the man who competed against an IBM supercomputer in 1997.

Today, Garry Kasparov is a political activist and an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. He is also the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, and the author of the best-seller called Deep Thinking, Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins.

In addition to all of this, he’s also working with a few advanced technology companies, in which I had the pleasure of meeting him. He has started working with a good friend of mine, Steve Pratt of Noodle.AI. So listen in as the three of us talk about Covid-19, the relationship between humans and machines, and how Garry jokes about being the first knowledge worker to have his job taken by a computer.

Garry Kasparov and Steve Pratt on COVID-19

When asked how they were doing nowadays, Steve comments that it felt strange now that everything is slowly opening up. Nowadays, it seems weird when you see people not wearing masks when you go out, as compared to only a few months ago of masks and lockdowns.

Garry shared that while it is slowly opening up in America and Europe, the rest of the world is going through a very different experience. He laments the current situation in Russia particularly, where his family and friends reside.

“We know from history that the innovative power of undemocratic states is cannot be compared to the power of the free mind. It’s not an accident that the virus came from China, but the response came from the United States.” – Garry Kasparov

Garry also points out the disparity on how people trust the vaccines compared to the Russian-made Sputnik vaccine. He attributes this mostly to having the proper data to prove its efficacy, which the Sputnik vaccine is sorely lacking at the moment. While there are vaccines that have lower efficacy rates compared to those made by Pfizer and Moderna, they’re still widely preferred due to the fact that they have data and tests to back those numbers up.

Working Together and Freeing the Mind

When asked if the low vaccination rates can be attributed to the vaccine or implementation, Garry answered that it was both happening at the same time. While the vaccine hesitancy was expected due to the lack of data on their vaccine, Russian government tried to promote Sputnik as the ultimate cure against COVID. They went as far as donating it to other countries, some of which flat-out refused, which further damaged its credibility.

Moving away from Russia, Garry then compared China and the United States’ response to the virus. He notes that while China had a huge head start in studying the COVID virus, it still took them a while to create a vaccine that had low efficacy ratings. Enter US and the combined effort of the public and private sectors, and you have two working vaccines in just 10 months, both of which boast great efficacy.

“So again, it’s very important to recognize that it’s this the free world, when we lift all the restrictions on risk. It could realize the wildest dreams, and somehow, I think the pandemics served us well, because it proved that we have to go back to the spirit of innovation and become pioneers, to become explorers. What’s important, again, the free world has potential, and now this potential have been exposed in a positive way.” – Garry Kasparov

Human and A.I.

We then talked about technology and A.I., how people are still against it in fears of somehow making an evil sentient A.I. that will rule us all. Garry explains that we shouldn’t be afraid of A.I.; rather, we should use it to its fullest potential and keep it away from the hands of bad humans.

“The problem is not with the machines. The problem was bad humans that can use these machines to harm us. That’s the story of technology.” – Garry Kasperov

Instead, we still blame the machine if someone used it and caused problems. So, we still limit their capabilities, afraid of things we have just fantasized about while ignoring the benefits it could bring.

There’s also the argument of machines and A.I. stealing jobs from people. To which Garry comments that we should not despair if it happens. Rather, we should look forward to what we can do next, and adapt to it. Whether to learn the technology to handle the A.I., or develop something that can be used hand-in-hand with the new technology.

Rather than fighting with machines, we should learn how it could work to our benefit. Because at the end of the day, machines can decide, but it’s a human’s privilege to choose.

If you wish to hear more from Garry Kasperov and Steve Pratt about A.I. and how it can improve our future, download and listen to this episode.

Address to the Free Iran World Summit | July 12, 2021

My video message to the Free Iran 2021 Conference. As with Putin’s Russia, Iran gets attention for sponsoring terror abroad, but its own citizens are the ones who suffer most under dictatorship. https://t.co/TlE2Aqs4x9 #FreeIran2021 and #1988Massacre https://t.co/DVkaXGdB64

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) July 12, 2021

“It is vital to remember that no one suffers more than the citizens” of the “illegitimate Iranian regime.

ICYMI: Our Chairman @Kasparov63 speaking out for democracy and human rights at the #FreeIran world summit yesterday. (1/3)https://t.co/kOu2070dRy

— Renew Democracy Initiative (@Renew_Democracy) July 13, 2021

Yury Dokhoian, Chess Coach Who Guided Kasparov, Dies at 56 | New York Times: Those We’ve Lost | July 9, 2021

 

READ THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

By Dylan Loeb McClain

Athletes are not the only ones who need coaches. All top chess players have them too. They are often experts at particular elements of the game, or openings, that a player feels he or she needs to work on.

But they can fill many other roles. They can be confidants, friends, providers of consolation, psychologists and even, on rare occasions, guardians if there is an actual physical altercation during or after a match.

From the job description, it is clear that not every chess player is suited to be a coach; an unusual skill set is required. By many accounts, Yury Dokhoian, a Russian grandmaster who died on July 1 in Moscow at 56, had the necessary tools.

He became one of the most successful coaches in the world and, for a decade, was the coach of Garry Kasparov, the longtime world champion. After Mr. Kasparov retired as a chess professional, Mr. Dokhoian went on to have a successful career coaching other elite players and Russian national teams.

The International Chess Federation, the game’s governing body, announced Mr. Dokhoian’s death on Twitter. His daughter, Anastasia Dokhoian, said the cause was Covid-19.

In an appreciation on his website, Mr. Kasparov, whose mother, Klara Kasparova, died of Covid-19 on Christmas, explained how important Mr. Dokhoian had become to him as a coach. Mr. Dokhoian took on that role in 1994, when Mr. Kasparov was the world champion.

“Working, walking, eating, talking, it was a true relationship. I spent more time with him than anyone else before my retirement in 2005,” Mr. Kasparov wrote. “He gave me more than chess preparation; he gave me stability and confidence.”

Mr. Dokhoian at the 2012 Chess Olympiad in Istanbul, where he coached the Russian men’s team to a silver medal. The team narrowly lost the gold to Armenia.Credit…David Llada

 

Yury Rafaelovich Dokhoian was born on Oct. 26, 1964, in a small village in Altai Krai, a southern region of Siberia, to Rafael and Raya Dokhoian. He learned to play chess from his father and soon demonstrated so much aptitude for the game that his family relocated near Moscow so that Yury could study at one of the chess schools there.

The genial Mr. Dokhoian became a strong player. From 1986 to 1993, he won or shared first place in eight international tournaments; for a time, he was ranked among the top 35 in the world, according to Chessmetrics, a widely followed ranking system. He was awarded the title grandmaster, the highest in the game, by the International Chess Federation in 1988.

He stopped playing professionally when he began working with Mr. Kasparov.

After Mr. Kasparov retired, Mr. Dokhoian started coaching Nadezhda and Tatiana Kosintseva, Russian sisters who became grandmasters under his tutelage. The sisters are among only 38 women out of more than 1,700 grandmasters worldwide.

Mr. Dokhoian was also the coach of the Russian national women’s team from 2006 to 2011. In 2010, with the Kosintseva sisters leading the way, the team won the gold medal at the Chess Olympiad.

After that, Mr. Dokhoian switched to coaching the men’s team, which had struggled since winning the gold medal at the 2002 Olympiad. In 2012, his first Olympiad as its coach, the men’s team tied for first with Armenia, taking silver when it narrowly lost out on tiebreakers.

Mr. Dokhoian began working with Sergey Karjakin in 2009. Seven years earlier, Mr. Karjakin had become the youngest grandmaster in history — he was 12 years, seven months old at the time — but he was struggling to live up to his early promise. With Mr. Dokhoian as his coach, Mr. Karjakin rose steadily up the ranks, finally qualifying to play a match for the world championship in 2016 against Magnus Carlsen of Norway, the reigning titleholder. Though Mr. Karjakin ultimately lost, he led the match three-quarters of the way through.

In his own tribute to Mr. Dokhoian, Mr. Karjakin called him kind but demanding. “He was ready to work 24/7,” he wrote, “if he believed in his protégé and saw a desire to improve.”

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Dokhoian is survived by his wife, Elena, and his sister, Irina.

Mr. Dokhoian’s most recent charge was Andrey Esipenko, a 19-year-old grandmaster currently ranked No. 27 in the world. Earlier this year, Mr. Esipenko became the youngest player to defeat Mr. Carlsen in a tournament game.