Kasparov was born to a Jewish father and an Armenian mother. He began playing chess at age 6, by age 13 was the Soviet youth champion, and won his first international tournament at age 16 in 1979. Kasparov became an international grandmaster in 1980. From 1973 to 1978 he studied under former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik (Botvinnik, Mikhail Moiseyevich).

Kasparov first challenged the reigning world champion Anatoly Karpov (Karpov, Anatoly Yevgenyevich) in a 1984–85 match, after he survived the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE (chess); the international chess federation) series of elimination matches. Kasparov lost four out of the first nine games but then adopted a careful defensive stance, taking an extraordinarily long series of drawn games with the champion. With Kasparov finally having won three games from the exhausted Karpov, FIDE halted the series after 48 games, a decision protested by Kasparov. In the two players' rematch in 1985, Kasparov narrowly defeated Karpov in a 24-game series and thereby became the youngest official champion in the history of the game.

In 1993 Kasparov and the English grandmaster Nigel Short left FIDE and formed a rival organization, the Professional Chess Association (PCA). In response, FIDE stripped the title of world champion from Kasparov, who defeated Short that same year to become the PCA world champion. In 1995 he successfully defended his PCA title against Viswanathan Anand (Anand, Viswanathan) of India.

Kasparov retired from competitive chess in 2005, though not from involvement in chess. In particular, he produced an acclaimed series of books, Kasparov on My Great Predecessors (2003–06), that covered all the world chess champions from Wilhelm Steinitz (Steinitz, Wilhelm) through Karpov, as well as many other great players. He also kept in the public eye with his decision in 2005 to start a political organization, the United Civil Front, to oppose Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin (Putin, Vladimir). In 2006 Kasparov was one of the prime movers behind a broad coalition of political parties that formed the Other Russia, a group held together by only one goal: ousting Putin from power. In 2007, following several protest marches organized by the coalition in which Kasparov and other participants were arrested, the Other Russia chose Kasparov as its candidate for the 2008 presidential election but was unable to nominate him by the deadline.