Garri Kasparov during a press conference in New York on Tuesday. (AP)

New York: Grandmaster Garri Kasparov drew the final game of his Man-versus-Machine showdown with virtual reality supercomputer X3d Fritz, leaving the match and honours shared at two points apiece.

Kasparov had entered the game under intense pressure with X3d Fritz having the advantage of the white pieces and looking to secure a famous victory over the chess legend.

However, Kasparov played with relaxed determination to force a draw on the 27th move of the game on Tuesday.

It was the 40-year-old Russian Grandmaster’s third series against a computer. He lost to IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997 and tied with Deep Junior in February this year.

After the match, a smiling Kasparov said he had been happy with his performances against both X3d Fritz and Deep Junior, which resulted in only two losses out of a total 10 games.

“I think the human player was dominant,” Kasparov said.

“Both losses resulted from terrible, terrible blunders that were due to tremendous pressure. I was not outplayed by the computers and I kept a steady initiative throughout both matches,” he said.

“It is still up to me to make the difference. If I don’t make a terrible blunder, I should win or at least definitely not lose.”

Kasparov tied his first game against x3d Fritz, lost the second after what he described as a “horrible lapse” in concentration and then came back to win the third.

The Russian played wearing 3-d glasses, gazing at a chess board that appears to float in the air. He dictated piece movements with voice commands, and rotated the board with a joystick.

Kasparov is considered the world’s best chess player, even though he lost the world champion title to Vladimir Kramnik in 2000. X3d Fritz is an upgraded version of “Fritz,” the machine which took on Kramnik in Bahrain in 2002, tying him four to four.

Kasparov has long resented his loss to Deep Blue, and continues to point a finger of suspicion at the decision to dismantle the computer immediately after their one-off series.

The size of a fridge, Deep Blue was pure mathematical muscle, capable of calculating 200 million moves per second.

Deep Junior and X3d Fritz are far more compact and claim a more “human” ability to focus on strategy rather than just capturing the opponent’s chess pieces quickly.