"Did Kasparov Resign a Drawn Game? I Checked With Modern Engines

4 May 1997, New York. Garry Kasparov resigns against Deep Blue in Game 2. That night, the chess world found something in the final position — a perpetual check he had missed. The story became one of the most repeated in chess: the greatest player alive, so shaken by the machine that he resigned a drawn game. His own team waited until lunch the next day to tell him. He sat in silence for five minutes before accepting it. This video goes through the whole game with engine evaluation on screen, then tests that famous claim with Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero — engines far beyond anything available in 1997. The game first: how Deep Blue played nine moves out of book, ground out a positional squeeze that machines were not supposed to understand, and then played 37.Be4 — a quiet move declining material by force. Kasparov could not believe a computer had found it, and publicly accused the IBM team of human intervention. The accusation followed the match for years. Then the collapse. Move 38, where the evaluation jumps from +1.51 to +3.13 and never comes back. By the resignation it is +5.29. And then the test. 45...Qe3, the move he did not play, drops the position from +5.29 to about +1. That is a real resource. But is it a draw? Both engines decline the perpetual and play 47.Qd7+ instead. Forcing the checks onto them, Leela shows White escaping with a quiet pawn move to g3. Four moves later, the check that is supposed to draw loses outright — +1.62 becomes +4.43. The line is played out 39 moves past the resignation. The evaluation never touches zero. It ends theoretically won for White, two pawns up, though the kind of position humans defend successfully all the time. The verdict: Kasparov did not resign a drawn game. He resigned a lost one, having missed a move that would have left him fighting. All analysis run for this video with Lc0 v0.32.1 and Stockfish. More human versus machine games coming. Subscribe. #chess #kasparov #deepblue #chessanalysis #stockfish