Who
is this grandmaster?
Can you guess who the cute young child in the photo is? Once again we provide
you with some clues:
-
He was born in a country which is not that of his parents, i.e. he was
"born abroad".
-
He started playing chess at an early age and showed great talent for the
game, gaining the FM, IM and GM titles earlier than most of his compatriots.
-
In his early career he was often to be seen in the New York City area,
where he was friends with Pal Benko and Susan Polgar.
-
Today he lives in Europe, but does not spent much time in his native country,
although he is part of its chess federation and represents it.
-
He remains a strong GM, rated around 2600, the strongest player in his
native country.
-
In the last weeks or months he played successfully in an international
tournament, proving that age does not matter in chess.
-
To our delight he sends us deeply annotated games that provide valuable
insight into the thought processes of a player of his calibre.
Sampler
To give you an impression of his style of annotation here is a snippet from
a game we recently received. The full version of this and a second beautifully
annotated game will be published here in a few days. In the following position
our grandmaster, who had white, had just played the exchange 14...Nb4xBd3 15.Pc2xNd3.
He writes:
In my preparation before the game I assessed this position as favourable
for White due to Black's insecure king and White's rapid development. I can
only wonder what I was thinking. After Black's next move it is clear he will
have few problems with his king, while White will sorely miss his light-squared
bishop. 15...b6! Now I suddenly realised that only Black could have
an advantage here. I will have very serious problems with my d3-pawn after
...Ba6 and ...Qg6. For whatever reason I had only considered 15...c5?,
which is clearly bad due to 16.b4! b6 (16...cxb4 17.Nb3 b6 18.a3 with
initiative) 17.Nb3 Qg6 18.bxc5 Ba6 19.Rf3 bxc5 20.Bxf4+/-.
So can you guess who this grandmaster is? As you probably know by now we are
quite sneaky with the hints we provide. Naturally they are all true, but sometimes
a wee bit misleading. We will reveal the identity of our GM friend, together
with a biography and the two annotated games, this weekend.
