Nick De Firmian
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Nick De Firmian
Nicholas Ernest de Firmian (born July 26, 1957) is an American chess player who received the FIDE title of Grandmaster (GM) in 1985. He is a three-time U.S. chess champion, winning in 1987 (with Joel Benjamin), 1995, and 1998. He also tied for first in 2002, but Larry Christiansen won the playoff. He is also a chess writer, most famous for his work in writing the 13th, 14th, and 15th editions of the important chess opening treatise ''Modern Chess Openings''. He was born in Fresno, California. He has represented the United States at several Interzonals and played on the United States Olympiad teams of 1980, 1984, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1996, 1998, and 2000. De Firmian earned the International Master title in 1979 and the GM title in 1985. Beginning in the 1990s, he lived for many years in Denmark. He currently resides in California. He won the 1983 Canadian Open Chess Championship. In 1986, he won the World Open and the first prize of $21,000, at that time a record for a Swiss sy ...
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27th Chess Olympiad
The 27th Chess Olympiad ( ar, أولمبياد الشطرنج ال27, ''uwlimbiad al-shatranj al-27''), organized by FIDE and comprising an openAlthough commonly referred to as the ''men's division'', this section is open to both male and female players. and a women's tournament, as well as several other events designed to promote the game of chess, took place between November 14 and December 2, 1986, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Once again, the Olympiad was marred by politics. With the event being held in an Arab nation, Israel couldn't participate, being in an official state of war with several Arab countries. In protest, Western European nations like Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands didn't come to Dubai. Strong individual players like Viktor Korchnoi, Robert Hübner, and Eric Lobron also stayed away. With no championship match in progress at the time, the Soviet Union was again able to field the strongest possible team, led by reigning world champion Kasparov an ...
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Swiss System Tournament
A Swiss-system tournament is a non-eliminating tournament format that features a fixed number of rounds of competition, but considerably fewer than for a round-robin tournament; thus each competitor (team or individual) does not play all the other competitors. Competitors meet one-on-one in each round and are paired using a set of rules designed to ensure that each competitor plays opponents with a similar running score, but does not play the same opponent more than once. The winner is the competitor with the highest aggregate points earned in all rounds. With an even number of participants, all competitors play in each round. The Swiss system is used for competitions in which there are too many entrants for a full round-robin (all-play-all) to be feasible, and eliminating any competitors before the end of the tournament is undesirable. In contrast, all-play-all is suitable if there are a small number of competitors; whereas a single-elimination (knockout) tournament rapidly reduces ...
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Boris Gulko
Boris Franzevich Gulko ( rus, Борис Францевич Гулько, p=bɐˈrʲis ɡʊlʲˈko; born February 9, 1947) is a Soviet-American Grandmaster in chess. Gulko is noted to be the only person to win both the Soviet Chess Championship and the U.S. Chess Championship, and for having a positive score against Garry Kasparov. Life and career Boris Gulko was born in 1947 to a Jewish family. His father was a soldier of the Red Army and was stationed in East Germany. His family returned to the Soviet Union after a few years. Gulko became an International Master in 1975, and a Grandmaster in 1976. He won the USSR Chess Championship at Leningrad in 1977 along with Iosif Dorfman. The Soviets usually would break ties for the title of Soviet Champion with a multi-game match, and 1977 was no exception. However, Gulko and Dorfman were even after the six game playoff, so they shared the title and prestige of Soviet Champion. They finished half a point ahead of a field that includ ...
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Michael Wilder
Michael Wilder (born August 17, 1962) is an American chess grandmaster and a J.D graduate of the University of Michigan. FIDE awarded him the grandmaster title in 1988. He won the 1988 U.S. Chess Championship. He also tied for third in the 1987 U.S. Championship and tied for first at the 1987 London Open. Mr. Wilder retired from chess in the late 1980s and is now a practicing attorney. As of March 2007, his FIDE Elo rating The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor. The Elo system was invented as an improved ch ... was 2540. His current USCF rating, which has not changed since December 1994, is 2601. Michael Wilder lives in the U.S. with his wife and two daughters. He is a practicing tax attorney at McDermott Will & Emery in Washington, D.C. External links * * * * 1962 births Living people 20th-century Am ...
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United States Chess Championship
The U.S. Chess Championship is an invitational tournament held to determine the United States chess champion. Begun as a challenge match in 1845, the U.S. Championship has been decided by tournament play for most of its long history. Since 1936, it has been held under the auspices of the U.S. Chess Federation. Until 1999, the event consisted of a round-robin tournament of varying size. From 1999 to 2006, the Championship was sponsored and organized by the Seattle Chess Foundation (later renamed America's Foundation for Chess F4C as a large Swiss system tournament. AF4C withdrew its sponsorship in 2007. The 2007 and 2008 events were held (again under the Swiss system) in Stillwater, Oklahoma, under the direction of Frank K. Berry. The Saint Louis Chess Club in St. Louis has hosted the annual event since 2009. As of the 2022 US Chess Championship, twelve players are invited to the event; the reigning champion, the US Open Champion, the US Junior Champion, the US Senior Open Champi ...
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Yasser Seirawan
Yasser Seirawan ( ar, ياسر سيروان; born March 24, 1960) is a Syrian-born American chess grandmaster and four-time United States champion. He won the World Junior Chess Championship in 1979. Seirawan is also a published chess author and commentator. Early life Seirawan was born in Damascus, Syria. His father was Syrian and his mother an English nurse from Nottingham, where he spent some time in his early childhood. When he was seven, his family immigrated to Seattle, Washington, where he attended Queen Anne Elementary School, Meany Middle School, and Garfield High School. He honed his game at a now-defunct coffeehouse, the Last Exit on Brooklyn, playing against the likes of Latvian-born master Viktors Pupols and six-time Washington State Champion James Harley McCormick. Career Seirawan began playing chess at 12; at 13, he became Washington junior champion. At 19, he won the World Junior Chess Championship. He also won a game against Viktor Korchnoi, who had two yea ...
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Walter Korn
Walter Korn (May 22, 1908 in Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic) – July 9, 1997 in San Mateo, California, United States) was an Austro-Hungarian writer of books and magazine articles about chess. Despite his status as a writer, there is no known record of him playing tournament chess, and few chess players ever met him. One of his few known games is a draw against a 13-year-old Gordon Crown, published in the April 1943 issue of ''Chess''. Korn was a FIDE International Judge for chess compositions and contributed the entire topic of chess for the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' (1972). Korn was the writer of ''Modern Chess Openings'' (''MCO'') (revised editions 7 through 12, 13th revised by Nick de Firmian), which was considered an authoritative work on the openings of chess. A new edition of ''MCO'' would come out every five years or so, and it was essential reading for tournament chess players. In later years, Korn enlisted the help of top players, such as Gr ...
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San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of California cities by population, fourth most populous in California and List of United States cities by population, 17th most populous in the United States, with 815,201 residents as of 2021. It covers a land area of , at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City, and the County statistics of the United States, fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 91 U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income (at $160,749) and sixth by aggregate income as of 2021. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include ''SF'', ''San Fran'', ''The '', ''Frisco'', and '' ...
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Edward Winter (chess Historian)
Edward Winter (born 1955) is an English chess journalist, archivist, historian, collector and author. He writes a regular column on chess history, ''Chess Notes.'' ''Chess Notes'' ''Chess Notes'' started as a bimonthly periodical, and was described by its author, in the first issue (January–February 1982), as "A forum for aficionados to discuss all matters relating to the Royal Pastime". At the end of 1989, the periodical ceased publication. In 1993, Winter resumed publication of ''Chess Notes'', which appeared, this time, as a syndicated column, in many languages around the world. From 1998 to 2001, it was published exclusively in '' New In Chess''. Later, it appeared online at the Chess Café website. Since September 2004, ''Chess Notes'' has been located at the website Chesshistory.com. Between 1996 and 2006 four anthologies of ''Chess Notes'' were published in book form. On 15 March 2020, in C.N. 11763, Edward Winter announced that from the end of March 2020, ''Chess Notes' ...
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José Capablanca
José is a predominantly Spanish and Portuguese form of the given name Joseph. While spelled alike, this name is pronounced differently in each language: Spanish ; Portuguese (or ). In French, the name ''José'', pronounced , is an old vernacular form of Joseph, which is also in current usage as a given name. José is also commonly used as part of masculine name composites, such as José Manuel, José Maria or Antonio José, and also in female name composites like Maria José or Marie-José. The feminine written form is ''Josée'' as in French. In Netherlandic Dutch, however, ''José'' is a feminine given name and is pronounced ; it may occur as part of name composites like Marie-José or as a feminine first name in its own right; it can also be short for the name ''Josina'' and even a Dutch hypocorism of the name ''Johanna''. In England, Jose is originally a Romano-Celtic surname, and people with this family name can usually be found in, or traced to, the English county of C ...
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Garry Kasparov
Garry Kimovich Kasparov (born 13 April 1963) is a Russian chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, writer, political activist and commentator. His peak rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, was the highest recorded until being surpassed by Magnus Carlsen in 2013. From 1984 until his retirement in 2005, Kasparov was ranked world No. 1 for a record 255 months overall for his career, the most in history. Kasparov also holds records for the most consecutive professional tournament victories (15) and Chess Oscars (11). Kasparov became the youngest ever undisputed World Chess Champion in 1985 at age 22 by defeating then-champion Anatoly Karpov. He held the official FIDE world title until 1993, when a dispute with FIDE led him to set up a rival organization, the Professional Chess Association. In 1997 he became the first world champion to lose a match to a computer under standard time controls when he lost to the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in a highly publicized match. He co ...
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Deep Blue (chess Computer)
Deep Blue was a chess-playing expert system run on a unique purpose-built IBM supercomputer. It was the first computer to win a game, and the first to win a match, against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. Development began in 1985 at Carnegie Mellon University under the name ChipTest. It then moved to IBM, where it was first renamed Deep Thought, then again in 1989 to Deep Blue. It first played world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1996, where it lost four games to two. It was upgraded in 1997 and in a six-game re-match, it defeated Kasparov by winning three games and drawing one. Deep Blue's victory is considered a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence and has been the subject of several books and films. History While a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, Feng-hsiung Hsu began development of a chess-playing supercomputer under the name ChipTest. The machine won the North American Computer Chess Champ ...
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