Mikhail Golubev (born 30 May 1970,

Odessa Odesa (also spelled Odessa) is the third most populous city and municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. The city is also the administrativ ...

) is a

Ukrainian Ukrainian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Ukraine * Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe * Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine * So ...

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to disti ...

Grandmaster (1996), journalist and author.

Chess career

Golubev began playing chess at the age of six and played his first tournament a year later in 1977. He played several times in

Ukrainian Chess Championship This is a list of all the winners of the Ukrainian Chess Championship, including those held when Ukraine was a Soviet republic and those held after Ukraine became independent. Players' names listed in parentheses indicate that the player won the to ...

, and shared first place (with Valery Neverov) at

Yalta Yalta (: Я́лта) is a resort city on the south coast of the Crimean Peninsula surrounded by the Black Sea. It serves as the administrative center of Yalta Municipality, one of the regions within Crimea. Yalta, along with the rest of Crimea ...

1996 (declared winner on better tie-breaks). In 2008, he won the

Region Open Championship. Other successful performances include first place at

Karviná Karviná (; pl, Karwina, , german: Karwin) is a city in the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 50,000 inhabitants. It lies on the Olza River in the historical region of Cieszyn Silesia. Karviná is known as an industri ...

1992-93, first at

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2002, and first at

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2002. In recent years, Golubev cut down on his tournament appearances to focus on chess writing and coaching.

Chess strength

According to the website

Chessmetrics Chessmetrics is a system for rating chess players devised by Jeff Sonas. It is intended as an improvement over the Elo rating system. Implementation Chessmetrics is a weighted average of past performance. The score considers a player's win percen ...

, at his peak in January 1995 Golubev's play was equivalent to a rating of 2598, and he was ranked number 151 in the world. His best single performance was at Biel open, 1995, where he scored 4 of 6 possible points (67%) against 2605-rated opposition, for a

performance rating The PR (Performance Rating, P-rating) system was a figure of merit developed by AMD, Cyrix, IBM Microelectronics and SGS-Thomson in the mid-1990s (Cyrix announced it in February 1996) as a method of comparing their x86 processors to those of ri ...

of 2643. According to the database Mega Database 2009, his best performances were Bethune 2002 (6,5 points on 7 possible and a 2768 performance), Karvina 1992–93 (8 points on 9 possible and a 2691 performance), Yalta 1996 (8,5 points on 11 possible and a 2663 performance) and Berlin 1993 (7 points on 9 possible and a 2662 performance). In the November 2009

FIDE The International Chess Federation or World Chess Federation, commonly referred to by its French acronym FIDE ( Fédération Internationale des Échecs), is an international organization based in Switzerland that connects the various national c ...

list, he has an

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 ...

of 2492, making him Ukraine's number 71.

Notable games

Vlatko Bogdanovski vs Mikhail Golubev, Skopje 1991, King's Indian Defense: Orthodox Variation (A46), 0-1Mikhail Golubev vs Renzo Mantovani, Biel Open 1992, Sicilian Defense: Fischer-Sozin Attack (B87), 1-0Mikhail Golubev vs Emil Sutovsky, Groningen GM open 1993, Sicilian Defense: Exchange Variation (B45), 1-0Mikhail Golubev vs Vladimir Podinic, Lasker Autumn GM 2001, Sicilian Defense: Paulsen (B48), 1-0

Photos

File:Mikhail Golubev 1.jpg File:Mikhail Golubev 2.jpg File:Mikhail Golubev 3.jpg

Books

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Journalism

Golubev is as much a chess journalist as an author. In addition to being chess observer for the Ukrainian newspaper

Komanda ''Komanda'' was Ukraine’s influential sport newspaper published daily in Kyiv, the nation's capital. It was founded in 1995, and as of September 2001 it was available on-line. It offered sport analysis, original interviews, and opinions. It w ...

and making contributions to ChessBase.com, Chesspro and Chess-News.ru, he has contributed to over a 1000 editions of the online daily chess newspaper

Chess Today Chess Today was the first, and longest running, Internet-only daily chess newspaper, having continued virtually uninterrupted from 7 November 2000 through to December 2020. It was distributed to subscribers by e-mail. Each e-mail had the PDF of t ...

References

External links

Mikhail Golubev's Chess Page
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Mikhail Golubev at 365Chess.comChessmetrics Player Profile: Mihail Golubev
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LatestChess - Interview with GM Mikhail Golubev
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Golubev, Mikhail 1970 births Living people Sportspeople from Odesa Chess grandmasters Ukrainian chess players Ukrainian chess writers