MOSCOW (AP) – Garry Kasparov, the chess world’s youngest-ever champion and undisputed king the last two decades, made a stunning move Friday shortly after winning a prestigious tournament in Spain: He retired from professional play.

The announcement by the Russian grandmaster – the world’s No. 1 ranked chess player since 1984 who is considered by some the best in the history of the game – came shortly after he won the 14-match Linares tournament in Spain on Thursday, despite losing the final game.

“Before this tournament I made a conscious decision that Linares 2005 will be my last professional (tournament), and today I played my last professional game,” Kasparov said at a news conference, according to a video posted on the online chess magazine www.chessbase.com.

He said his last games were “very difficult for me to play under such pressure, because I knew it was the end of the career which I could be proud of.”

Kasparov, 41, became the youngest world champion ever at age 22, and quickly cut a swath through the chess world with an aggressive style that shunned settling for a draw. He said part of the reason he was retiring was because he saw no real goals left to accomplish in professional chess.

He said Friday he wanted to concentrate more on politics in Russia. He has emerged as an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin and is playing a leading role in the Committee 2008: Free Choice, a group formed by prominent liberal opposition leaders.

“As a chess player, I did everything I could, even more. Now I want to use my intellect and strategic thinking in Russian politics,” Kasparov said Friday in a statement cited by the Interfax news agency.

“I will do everything in my power to resist Putin’s dictatorship. It is very difficult to play for a country whose authorities are antidemocratic,” he said.

Alexander Roshal, chief editor of a popular Russian chess magazine called 64, said Kasparov had no peers in the chess world.

“There’s no one else of his caliber. No one comes close. He saw that, and said ‘you go on without me,”‘ Roshal said.

Kasparov has expressed increasing exasperation over the professional chess world, which has been bitterly divided since 1993 into two rival federations with rival champions. He reiterated Thursday that he was disappointed with a failed campaign to reunify the title.

Kasparov had evidently been coming to the decision for a long time after it became clear the reunification match would come no time soon, Roshal said.

“He won more than 40 super-tournaments, and in a month he’ll be 42,” Roshal said. “For chess, that’s not young, and he has no reason to waste time preparing for another tournament. He’s not going to be greater than he was or is.”

Kasparov said he would continue to play chess, write books about it and take part in tournaments, such as so-called knockout events in which he plays many opponents at once, or in speed-chess games. But he is saying goodbye to top-level professional play.

Earlier this year, Kasparov withdrew from an International Chess Federation championship, saying he had suffered financial and psychological damage from the match’s repeated postponement.

His withdrawal announcement then, in which he said “it breaks my heart” to watch great tournaments from the sidelines, gave no hint he was considering leaving professional chess. If anything, it suggested he was determined to remain.

“I will continue to serve chess and those who love our game,” Kasparov wrote in January. “I have now held the No. 1 ranking for 20 years and I will defend my position against any opponent. My only retreat is from the battlefield of chess championship politics.”

Born in Baku in the then-Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, Kasparov is thought by many to be the best chess player in history. But he will be remembered in part for one of his few losses, a 1997 match against IBM supercomputer Deep Blue that was seen by some as a watershed moment in technological advancement.

In 2003, Kasparov averted a similar defeat when he agreed to a draw in the last game of his series against Deep Junior, which could process 3 million chess moves per second. The six-game series, dubbed Man vs. Machine, finished in a 3-3 tie.

Shay Bushinsky, one of two Israeli programmers behind Deep Junior, said Kasparov’s resignation had been “on the cards.”

Bushinsky, who met with Kasparov last month, said the chess champion told him he had been frustrated for a number of years because he did not have a real framework to compete in a world championship.

Bushinsky told The Associated Press that as a chess player, Kasparov was “the closest thing to a computer that I know as a man. Sometimes I think he has silicon running in his veins.”

“Kasparov has the most incredible look-ahead and memory capabilities I have ever seen,” he said.

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