The cascading failure is an important cause leading to large-scale blackout of power grid. Three relatively serious power system blackouts resulted from cascading failures are reviewed in the worldwide from year 2003 to now. By summarizing their developments, the evaluative laws and general characteristics of cascading failures are drawn and then the mechanism of cascading failures is analyzed. The game theory is applied to prevention of cascading failure with the disturbances in power grid being the attacking side and the adjustments of system being the passive defense. Once disturbances take place, the system's states are adjusted accordingly just like alternant steps during playing chess. These adjustments weaken the correlations among components and change operating point of the system in the direction away from critical state, thus the cascading failures can be prevented effectively.