The Best Kasparov Combinations You've Never Seen

Garry Kasparov is definitely one of the best players in the history of chess. His games have been analyzed over and over in hundreds of books and thousands of articles and videos.

Then how can I be so sure that you somehow missed some of his brilliancies?

I don't want to reveal all my secrets yet, but the title of the article is absolutely correct and I am going to show you some beautiful Kasparov combinations that you've never seen before!

Just as I do it in most of my articles, the combinations are presented as puzzles, so you can compare your tactical abilities with the grandmaster's skills.

Let's start with simple combos:

The next combo is slightly more complicated:

And here goes a real beauty:

So, did you ever see any of these nice combinations? I told you so!

Of course a perceptive reader could notice that all of these games were played in open tournaments and you will be hard pressed to name even one open tournament Garry Kasparov played after he won his world title. Also, some of the games were played after Garry Kasparov officially retired from competitive chess.

What's the secret? 

Well, I came up with the idea for this article when hawk-eyed Chess.com journalist Peter Doggers spotted a mistake in this article. What I thought was a nice little combination by the young future super-GM Sergey Karjakin was in fact played by another player whose name is Sergei Karjakin!

So, all the combinations that you were solving today were indeed played by Grandmaster Kasparov, but it was the other Kasparov!

GM Sergey Kasparov lives in Belarus, and while he is not as strong as his famous namesake, you should be very careful while playing him.  

Just like Garry, he takes no prisoners! In the following game he didn't even spare his own wife!

In the late 1960s, the Russian poet Semion Botvinnik (no relation to the world champion Mikhail Botvinnik) loved to attend chess tournaments. Since he looked like Viktor Korchnoi's doppelgänger, he was frequently asked the same question: "Excuse me, are you Korchnoi?"

And of course he always answered: "No, I am not Korchnoi, I am Botvinnik!"

If looking at the next absolutely crazy game you ask if White was Tal, the answer is no, it was Kasparov!

If you liked this article, be sure to watch FM Mike Klein's video series: The Best Games You've Never Seen.