A nd that was the end of chess,” says Viktor Kislyi, CEO of Wargaming, describing the day his boyhood pastime died when IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer defeated Garry Kasparov in 1996.
Kislyi had been playing chess for seven years. He had competed in regional championships in his home city of Minsk while trying to master “the mother, father, grandfather, grandmother of all games”, as he describes it.
“And then the world champion Kasparov lost, to pretty much a calculator the size of your cellphone,” he says. “It’s a beautiful game, don’t get me wrong, but the world of civilisation had to move on.”
My cellphone is currently recording our conversation on the top floor of a tall office tower in Minsk. Several hundred Wargaming employees occupy six floors of…
