Veselin Topalov - Bulgaria
Elo rating: 2796
World ranking: 1
Date of Birth: March 15, 1975
Amber highlights: Overall winner (shared with Kramnik) in 2001, shared second 2008.

The training schedule of Veselin Topalov for 2008 was aimed to have him in perfect shape when he was to play Gata Kamsky at the end of the year to decide who would challenge Vishy Anand in a match for the World Championship. As we know now that challengers match was postponed by a few months, but the ‘side-effects’ of Topalov’s training program were quite staggering. Getting close to his best form he won the Grand Slam Final in Bilbao and continuing on the same rollercoaster he also claimed the Pearl Spring tournament in Nanjing in great style. In the process the Bulgarian grandmaster reclaimed top position in the world rankings and if FIDE had managed to calculate his performance in Nanjing his rating would have been over 2800 on the January list. Last month Topalov also won the match against Kamsky, but the 4,5-2,5 score doesn’t realistically reveal how hard he had to fight to defeat the American.
Topalov’s recent successes bring back memories of his most successful year so far, 2005, when he shared first place in Linares, won Sofia for the first time and then wrote history in the World Championship Tournament in San Luis. With a dashing 6,5 out of 7 in the first half he tore the field apart and coasted home in the second half. Often World Champions find it hard to show their excellence when they first appear in their new capacity. Therefore many pundits feared that Topalov would not live up to expectations in Wijk aan Zee in 2007. However, once again he showed his uncompromising fighting chess and after a fascinating duel with Vishy Anand he shared tournament victory with the Indian.

When in the mid-1990s Topalov burst into the world’s top twenty few people had ever heard of him. The Bulgarian had amassed his Elo-points on the Spanish circuit of open tournaments where he was incredibly successful and left the experts shaking their heads in incredulity. Was he really that strong? He was and he soon grew even stronger and secured a steady place among the elite. At the Moscow Olympiad in Moscow Topalov made headlines with his win over Kasparov and he started winning top tournaments. His first annus mirabilis was 1996 when he took first prize in Amsterdam (together with Kasparov), Dos Hermanas, Madrid and Novgorod. The hallmarks of Topalov, who resides in Salamanca, Spain, are his total concentration at the board, his aggressive play and his deep preparation.

Viswanathan Anand - India
Elo rating: 2791
World ranking: 2
Date of birth: December 11, 1969
Amber highlights: Overall winner in 1994, 1997, 2003, 2005 and 2006 (shared with Morozevich).

For Viswanathan Anand everything he did in the past year revolved around his World Championship match against Vladimir Kramnik in Germany last autumn. Although he started 2008 with a fine victory in the Linares 25th anniversary tournament, he was totally dedicated to his preparation for this long-awaited clash with his predecessor.  His efforts were not in vain. Anand came superbly prepared and playing wonderful chess he decided the match in his favour, 6,5-4,5. With this victory the Indian grandmaster became the first chess player to win the World Championship in all the formats we have seen in recent years. In 2000 he won the FIDE knock-out World Championship that started in New Delhi and was decided in the final in Tehran, where Anand trounced Alexey Shirov 3,5-0,5. In 2007 Anand triumphed in the World Championship Tournament in Mexico. On that occasion he finished one point clear of his closest pursuers Gelfand and Kramnik and without losing a single game. And finally he was successful in the traditional match format as well. Whereas in 1995 he still had to bow to Garry Kasparov in New York, there were no doubts about his win over Kramnik in Bonn. 
Briefly recapping Anand’s splendid career is impossible but we might single out his first win in Linares in 1998, his triumphs in the World Cup tournaments in Shenyang 2000 and Hyderabad 2002 and his win in Dortmund in 2004. His achievements in Wijk aan Zee are unparalleled. With five wins between 1989(!) and 2006 he is the most successful player in the rich history of this classic event.
In rapid chess Anand is in a class of his own and listing his victories there would come close to giving an overview of the events held in the past years. But we might single out the Chess Classic, originally held in Frankfurt before it moved to Mainz, and the Amber tournaments. On the banks of the Rhine he won an amazing eleven times, leaving him with a wardrobe of eleven black jackets, the traditional Chess Classic trophy. In Amber his list of victories is also impressive. In 1994, 1997, 2003 and 2005 he claimed first prize, while in 2006 he shared top honours with Morozevich.
Hailing from Chennai, India, ‘Vishy’ Anand spends most of the time in Spain, where he lives close to Madrid. However, that has not stopped him from being a superstar in his own country where he was voted Indian sportsman of the year on various occasions.

Vasily Ivanchuk - Ukraine
Elo rating: 2779
World ranking: 3
Date of birth: March 18, 1969
Amber highlights: Overall winner in 1992, 2nd in 1996, 1997, 2000 (shared) and 2002. 

What would the Amber tournament be without Vasily Ivanchuk? In any case something quite different, as the Ukrainian grandmaster is the only player who has taken part in all Amber tournaments. In 1992 he was the overall winner and on various occasions he was the runner-up. Ivanchuk is one of the greatest players of modern time, both adored by chess lovers and admired by his colleagues, who have been regularly heard whispering: ‘Chuky, you’re a genius’. They also speak of ‘Planet Chuky’, to indicate that sometimes he is moving in different spheres.
Ivanchuk is also one of the most active players on the circuit, travelling the globe and taking part in one tournament after the other. At 39 (he will celebrate his 40th birthday in Nice!) he is also living proof that ‘older’ players can still play a prominent role at the top of the chess Olympus. Less than a week before he came to Nice he tied for first in the tournament in Linares, exactly twenty years after he had first won this traditional event.
Ivanchuk’s international career took off after he’d won the Junior World Championship in 1988. As mentioned, already the next year he won Linares for the first time, a win he would repeat in 1991 and 1995. He also won the Tilburg tournament in 1990 and took first prize in London in 1995 and Amsterdam in 1996. For the past twenty years he has been among the world elite and continuously achieved memorable results. In 2004 he won the European Championship in Turkey and in that same year his stellar performance at the Calvia Olympiad helped the Ukrainian team to take the gold medals.
Following a period of lesser results, Ivanchuk staged a remarkable comeback in 2007. Playing almost incessantly he won the Capablanca Memorial in Havana with a record performance rating of 2877, the Aerosvit tournament in Foros with a TPR of 2823, the Montreal International with a TPR of 2857 and the traditional tournament in Merida, Mexico. In Moscow he won the Blitz World Championship. Ivanchuk continued to have good results in 2008, taking first place in the MTel Masters in Sofia and winning the Tal Memorial Blitz. In the past months mediocre results in Nanjing and Wijk aan Zee cost him precious Elo points, but with his play in Linares he demonstrated that these were only temporary setbacks. 
Apart from chess Ivanchuk has a passion for languages. In the past years he learned Spanish and Turkish and after his latest visit to China his dream is to learn Chinese.

Magnus Carlsen – Norway
Elo rating: 2776
World ranking: 4
Date of birth: November 30, 1990
Amber highlights: Shared second in the rapid in his 2007 debut, shared second in 2008.

Within the space of a couple of years Magnus Carlsen has turned from a wonderfully talented promise into an elite player who competes for first place in any tournament he plays in. Currently he is ranked fourth in the world rankings, but in the course of 2008 the young Norwegian already tasted the pleasure of being in the number one spot in the Live Ratings. Indeed, 2008 was a good year for Carlsen. He shared first place in Wijk aan Zee (the youngest to do so in history), was runner-up in Linares, tied for first in the first Grand Prix tournament in Baku, swept the field in Foros to claim the Aerosvit tournament and beat Peter Leko in a rapid match in Miskolc, 5-3.
Carlsen has been making headlines worldwide ever since he began his race for the grandmaster title. In the first month of 2004 he took the Corus C Group by storm and only three months later he made his third and final GM norm in Dubai. At the age of 13 years, 4 months and 26 days he was (at that time) the youngest grandmaster in the world. In the years that followed this historic moment Carlsen didn’t disappoint his followers. In rapid and blitz tournaments he drew with Kasparov and even beat Karpov and Anand, and also in ‘classical’ chess he began collecting outstanding results. At the 2005 World Cup tournament in Khanty-Mansiysk, Siberia, he became the youngest chess player in history to qualify for the Candidates’ matches for the world championship. Unfortunately for him the pairings were based on old Elo-lists and he was paired against top-seed Levon Aronian. In Elista, in the summer of 2006, Carlsen put up a captivating fight against the Armenian, but ultimately had to bow for him in the tie-break games.
His Amber debut he made in 2007 when he finished eighth in the overall rankings, but one year on he already tied for second place. There can be no doubt that after he ‘failed’ to win Corus and Linares (he had to settle for fourth and third place), he will be highly ambitious to fight for first place in Nice.
It goes without saying that Carlsen continues to be closely followed by the press. Thousands of articles have been written about him, a film has been made about his spectacular rise (The Prince of Chess) and a book has appeared (originally published as Wonderboy). Still, anyone who believes that he’s only obsessed with chess is wrong. He’s just as passionate about football, tennis or skiing.

Alexander Morozevich - Russia
Elo rating: 2771
World ranking: 5
Date of birth: July 18, 1977
Amber highlights: Overall winner in 2002, 2004 (shared with Kramnik) and 2006 (shared with Anand), second in 2005.

With Alexander Morozevich you never know which ‘Moroz’ will arrive at your tournament. The ‘Moroz’ who wins six games on the trot, as he did at the Russian Super Final in 2007, an event he duly won to become Russian champion for the second time, or the ‘Moroz’ that loses his first five games as Black, as he did at the recent Corus tournament in Wijk aan Zee. Morozevich is unpredictability personified and it is this capriciousness that has become his hallmark. He also has his clear preferences. The tournament in Pamplona he won three times (in 1994, 1998 and 2006) and the same feat he pulled off in Biel, where he won in 2003, 2004 and 2006. His best results in the past year, which for a brief moment even took him to first place in the Live Ratings, were his win in Sarajevo and his second place in the Tal Memorial in Moscow.
Seven years ago Morozevich made the most sensational debut in the history of the Amber tournaments. Although he had virtually no experience in blindfold chess the Russian overcame this small handicap with astounding ease. Not only did he win the blindfold with an unbelievable score of 9 from 11, he also claimed overall victory.
By now we know that this astounding debut was not a one-off show. In his next appearance he tied for second and in 2004 he repeated his success by again winning the blindfold and sharing overall first with Kramnik. Four years ago he finished unshared second in the overall standings and in 2006 he was back on top again. In the overall standings he shared first place with Vishy Anand, a feat that depended for a large part on his stellar performance in the blindfold. Breaking his and Kramnik’s old record he scored 9,5 points from 11 games, an unheard of achievement at this level.
Morozevich has become a brand-name for mind-boggling chess ever since he made his international break-through at Lloyds Bank in 1994, where at the age of seventeen he took first prize with a staggering 9,5 out of 10 score. Much to the delight of his fans, Morozevich is the living proof that chess is not only about computers and extreme preparation, but that the game still leaves ample room for unorthodox and daring experiments, even if in recent years he’s been mainly playing mainstream openings, postponing his unusual ideas till later phases of the game. As a tribute to his less orthodox days he’s written a book, co-authored by his friend Vladimir Barsky, called The Chigorin Defence according to Morozevich, on what used to be one of his favourite openings.

Teimour Radjabov - Azerbaijan
Elo rating: 2761
World ranking: 6
Date of birth: March 12, 1987
Amber highlights: In his Amber debut in 2007 he finished in 10th place.

Teimour Radjabov played in the Amber tournament once before and given his recent results we can be sure that he’ll be highly motivated to improve on his debut in 2007. One day before the start of this 18th Amber tournament, Radjabov celebrated his twenty-second birthday. Yet, despite his young age it feels as if the Azerbaijani grandmaster has been around for a long time. An understandable feeling as ever since he won the European U-18 junior championship at the age of 12 he has been hailed as ‘another boy from Baku’, a comparison with Garry Kasparov that his fans like to make till this day. Given this comparison one of the absolute highlights in the early years of Radjabov’s career was his win with the black pieces over that same Kasparov in the Linares tournament of 2003. Radjabov was fifteen years old and it made him the first player born since Kasparov first became World Champion in 1985 to beat him.
In the years that followed Radjabov developed into an all-round world class player and at the 2004 FIDE World Championship in Tripoli he reached the semi-finals. As his strategy in this championship was mainly to draw the regular games and defeat his opponents in the rapid tie-breakers, not everyone was pleased with this result. Perhaps because of this criticism he opted for a completely different approach in the years that followed, playing sharp and uncompromising chess in each and every game both with white and black. His strategy these days is to fight for first place in every tournament that he plays in. Last year, in Wijk aan Zee, he scored his biggest victory to date when he shared first place with Levon Aronian and Veselin Topalov. In the FIDE Grand Prix he had a lacklustre result in the first tournament in his native Baku, but then he came second in Sochi and shared first place with Alexander Grischuk and Dmitry Yakovenko in Elista. In the overall standings of the Grand Prix he is currently in first place.
This year promises to be a busy one as he already played both Corus and Linares. In Wijk aan Zee Radjabov finished in shared second place, while he took fifth place in Spain. As said, he’ll be looking for new chances in Nice.
In his country Radjabov has firm support and it is not only as a chess player that he represents his country. For a couple of years now he has been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF advocating for universal salt iodization across the country to eliminate iodine deficiency in children.

Vladimir Kramnik - Russia
Elo rating: 2759
World ranking: 8
Date of birth: June 25, 1975
Amber highlights: Overall winner in 1996, 1998 (shared with Shirov), 1999, 2001 (shared with Topalov), 2004 (shared with Morozevich) and 2007. Shared second in 2008.

The 18th Amber tournament is Vladimir Kramnik’s first appearance after a break of more than three months. Following his loss in the World Championship match in Bonn, the Russian grandmaster did represent his country at the Olympiad in Dresden (where he scored 5/9, one win and 8 draws), but then he decided it was time for a decent rest. He wanted to recover from the exertions of the match against Vishy Anand and wanted to spend time with his wife after the birth of their daughter. Immediately after the match in Bonn Kramnik declared that he was ambitious to restructure his chess and try to fight for the highest title again. In Nice we may see if he’s already started work to reshape his opening repertoire.
Known for a splendid blend of tactical fireworks and strategic expertise, Kramnik radically changed his style for his match against Kasparov in 2000 and turned himself into a positional player who could exploit the tiniest of advantages. But the flashes of tactical wizardry remained, as witness his brilliant blindfold win in the Amber tournament of 2003 against Topalov.  
The tall Russian has been among the world elite ever since he burst upon the scene at the Manila Olympiad in 1992, where as a 17-year-old youngster he had a baffling 8,5 out of 9 debut on the Russian team. Over the years he’s won practically everything that there is to be won, including the super-tournaments in Wijk aan Zee in 1998 and Linares in 2000 and 2004. In Dortmund he lifted the winner’s trophy no fewer than eight times! His tie for first with Kasparov in Linares in 2000 turned out to be the prologue of the biggest success in his rich career, his World Championship match victory over the same Kasparov later that year in London. Without suffering a single loss he defeated his ‘former boss’ 8,5-6,5. Kramnik successfully defended his world title in Brissago in 2004 against Peter Leko when in a must-win situation he won the last game, and in Elista in 2006 against Topalov, when he struck in the rapid play-off. He lost the title in 2007 in the World Championship Tournament in Mexico where he finished shared second behind the new champion, Anand.
Kramnik can also boast a record number of wins in the Amber tournament, where he’s been a regular guest ever since his debut in 1994. In all, he came out on top an amazing six times. Last year he shared second place.

Peter Leko - Hungary
Elo rating: 2751
World ranking: 9
Date of birth: September 8, 1979
Amber highlights: Overall 3rd in 2002 and 2005 (shared) and shared 2nd in 2003 and in 2008.

Peter Leko arrives well-rested in Nice as he didn’t participate in Wijk aan Zee or Linares. His emphasis was on the Grand Prix tournament in Elista where he did not achieve his aim and finished in shared fifth place. In the first week of the year he played a rapid match against Ivanchuk in Mukachevo, Ukraine (2,5-3,5) and then it was time for rest and training, the first fruits of which we may see in Nice.
Looking at the career highlights of the Hungarian number one you would easily forget that in fact he is only 29 years old. In 1994, at the age of 14 years, 4 months and 22 days, Leko became the youngest grandmaster in history. In the meantime this record has been broken several times, but one may wonder if many of his successors will be more successful than him in the years to come.
Over the past decade Leko has been developing with great dedication into an all-round player who rarely loses. And although he’s often been criticised for making too many draws, a closer look at his games reveals that he doesn’t shy away from challenges and gladly enters deep tactical complications.
Among his best achievements was his win in the Candidates’ tournament in Dortmund in 2002 where he defeated Topalov in the final to qualify for the World Championship match against Vladimir Kramnik. This match was held in Brissago, in the autumn of 2004. Playing strong chess Leko was on the brink of the biggest success in his career when he was one point up with one round to go. But he succumbed to the pressure and allowed Kramnik to level the score, which was enough for the Russian to keep his title. Leko missed the title by a hair’s breadth, but he had shown that he could play on an equal footing with the champion.
In the years that followed he continued to play a prominent role in the fight for the highest title. In the World Championship tournament in San Luis in 2005 Leko finished in fifth place. He also qualified for the World Championship Tournament in Mexico City in 2007 thanks to impressive match victories over Mikhail Gurevich and Evgeny Bareev at the Candidates’ matches in Elista. In the Mexican capital he finished in fourth place with a fifty per cent score.
After his match against Kramnik, the Hungarian allowed himself little time to be disappointed and had his revenge in the 2005 edition of Wijk aan Zee. There he achieved one of his finest tournament successes ever, although he is no doubt also proud of his victories in Dortmund in 1999 and 2008, in Linares in 2003 and in the Tal Memorial in Moscow in 2006.

Levon Aronian – Armenia
Elo rating: 2750
World ranking: 11
Date of birth: October 6, 1982
Amber highlights: shared 2nd in the rapid in 2006, winner in 2008.

Last year Levon Aronian was on the rampage in Nice. Playing inspired chess the Armenian number one claimed first place 2,5(!) points ahead of Vladimir Kramnik, Veselin Topalov, Peter Leko and Magnus Carlsen. Obviously, Aronian, who is seen as one of the greatest natural talents in chess, will be one of the favourites in this year’s edition too.
Aronian had his international break-through in 2005 when he celebrated one success after the other and shot up to the fifth place in the world rankings. Of course, these results didn’t come completely unexpected. After all he was already World Junior Champion U-12 as long ago as 1994 and overall World Junior Champion in 2002. His successes in 2005 included a shared first place in Gibraltar, first place in Nagorno-Karabakh, and, to cap it all, first place in the World Cup tournament in Khanty-Mansiysk. That all this had not been a coincidence he proved in the 2006 Morelia-Linares tournament where after three weeks of tense fighting he claimed the one hundred thousand euro first prize with a win over Peter Leko with the black pieces in the last round. Later that year he also tied for first with the same Leko and Ruslan Ponomariov in the Tal Memorial.
In 2007 Aronian shared first place in the Corus tournament and when he arrived in Elista for the Candidates’ matches he was seen as one of the outspoken favourites. Rightly so, as he knocked out Magnus Carlsen and Alexey Shirov to qualify for the World Championship Tournament in Mexico, where he had to settle for shared sixth place.
Last year he won Corus again, this time together with Carlsen, and he also won the Karen Asrian Memorial in Yerevan and the Grand Prix tournament in Sochi. But easily the most important success for him was the victory of the Armenian team at the Dresden Olympiad, unequivocal proof that their win in Turin in 2006 had been no accident.
His debut in the 2006 Amber tournament will not easily be forgotten. Aronian has never claimed to be a great theoretician, but the off-beat and sometimes outright weird openings that he confronted his opponents with caused both amazement and hilarity. Sometimes he was punished for his experiments, but even when he ended up in a totally lost position this did not necessarily mean the end of the game. As he likes to say with visible pleasure, ‘My friends call me a cheap tactician.’ His games in the following two years were slightly less eccentric, but still we may wonder again what he has in store for his opponents this time. On the eve of the tournament he promised that he would play ‘some new openings’.

Wang Yue - China
Elo rating: 2739
World ranking: 13
Date of birth: March 31, 1987
Amber highlights: This is his Amber debut.

Within an amazingly short space of time, Wang Yue has shot up to the highest regions of the world rankings and established his name as the best-known Chinese player. In a way one might say that his sensational rise began at the 2008 NH Chess Tournament in Amsterdam, where the Chinese youngster started with a baffling 5 out of 5 to finish on 8,5 out of 10. Thanks to his 2892(!) rating performance he was invited to the 18th Amber Blindfold and Rapid Tournament, but in the wake of this invitations he was also asked to play in the Corus Tournament in Wijk aan Zee, in Linares and in the MTel Masters in Sofia.
For a long time Wang Yue was overshadowed by his slightly older countryman Bu Xiangzhi, but it was Wang Yue who in 2007 became the first Chinese player to break the magic 2700 barrier. A good part of his sky-high rating he amassed at the 2006 Turin Olympiad, where China claimed the silver medals, behind Armenia but way ahead of Russia. Wang Yue was the absolute star of the team with a score of 10 points from 12 games and a performance rating of 2837.
Although it took some time for the Western press to notice Wang Yue’s special talent he obviously didn’t suddenly appear out of the blue. He was born in Taiyuan, where he learned to play chess at the age of four and soon had his first successes in junior tournaments. These days Wang Yue is a student at the prestigious Nankai University in Tianjin, but if you take a look at the tournaments he played in recent years it’s clear that there is little time left for his studies.
In 2007 he finished shared second in the Aeroflot Open in Moscow and won tournaments in Cappelle-la-Grande and the Philippines. In 2008 he won a gold medal at the Asian Team Championship, finished first in the Reykjavik Open and shared first place in the Baku Grand Prix. In the overall standings of the Grand Prix he currently occupies second place. In the second round in Reykjavik he started a most spectacular run that is testimony of his solid style. For 85 games he went unbeaten till he lost his first game in the third Grand Prix tournament in Elista.
Wang Yue’s first super-tournament experiences in Wijk aan Zee and Linares saw him searching for his position among the elite. It will be most interesting to see how he will fare in Nice.

Gata Kamsky – United States
Elo rating: 2725
World ranking: 17
Date of birth: June 2, 1974
Amber highlights: Overall 4th in 1994 and 1996

Gata Kamsky makes a most remarkable Amber comeback after an absence of 13 years. Kamsky played in Amber from 1994 to 1996, the years when he astounded the chess world with his results and climbed to fourth place in the world rankings. He successfully took part in the World Championship cycles of FIDE and the rivaling PCA and nearly did the impossible. In the PCA cycle he qualified for the Candidates’ matches, but having defeated Vladimir Kramnik and Nigel Short he lost to Vishy Anand in the final. In the FIDE cycle he did manage to qualify for the World Championship match against Anatoly Karpov thanks to victories in the Candidates’ matches over Paul van der Sterren, Vishy Anand and Valery Salov. In Elista Karpov thwarted his ambitions to become World Champion by winning the 20-game match 10,5-7,5.
Kamsky was born in Russia, where he twice won the U-20 junior championship. Feeling that he was obstructed by the authorities he and his family moved to the United States in 1989. In 1990 he became a grandmaster and in 1991 he won the US championship.
In 1996, after his loss to Karpov, Kamsky once again stunned the world by announcing his retirement from chess. In 1999 he graduated from Brooklyn College and following a year at medical school he went on to study law and graduated at Touro Law Center in New York.
His years of exile lasted from 1996 to 2004. In that period he only played two rated games at the FIDE World Championship in Las Vegas in 1999, where he defeated Alexander Khalifman, the later champion, in their first game, but lost the second one and was eliminated in the rapid tie-break. First signs of a comeback were seen in 2004 when Kamsky began to play in the New York Masters. At first rusty he rapidly improved again and in the past years he managed to return to the world’s top twenty. His biggest success so far in his ‘second career’ was his win in the 2007 World Cup in Khanty-Mansiysk. But he also led the American team to the bronze medals at the Olympiads in Turin (2006) and Dresden (2008). Last month he could have come close to putting the crown on his amazing comeback when he played a match against Veselin Topalov that might have given him another shot at the World Championship. The Bulgarian grandmaster won 4,5-2,5, but Kamsky certainly had his chances. It will be fascinating to see how he’ll do in Nice.

Sergey Karjakin - Ukraine
Elo rating: 2706
World ranking: 27
Date of birth: January 12, 1990
Amber highlights: In his Amber debut in 2008 he finished in 9th place.

Sergey Karjakin arrives in Nice one month after he achieved one of the greatest successes in his career. In Wijk aan Zee the young Ukrainian won his first super-tournament and definitely boosted his confidence as witness the conclusion he drew himself: ‘After this tournament I see myself in the top ten and fighting for first place in every tournament.’ Last year Karjakin made his Amber debut thanks to his best score on the Rising Stars team at the NH Chess Tournament in Amsterdam and finished in 9th place. It is clear that this time he’s set his sights higher.
Although he’s ‘already’ nineteen years old and may call himself by rights a top grandmaster for quite some time already, Sergey Karjakin often continues to be billed as the youngest grandmaster of all time. Which is understandable, as he holds a unique record. The Ukrainian prodigy was only twelve years and seven months when in 2002 he earned the highest chess title.
Karjakin was born in Simferopol in the Crimea on January 12, 1990, and he was five years old when he learned to play chess. He won countless junior championships in his own country and in 2001 he became U-12 Junior World Champion in Oropesa del Mar, Spain. As undeniable proof of his countrymen’s respect for his chess strength, Ruslan Ponomariov invited the 12-year-old prodigy as a second for his World Championship match against Vasily Ivanchuk in the winter of 2002.
Within a few years’ time Karjakin has grown into an experienced grandmaster that need not fear anybody. In 2004 he was one of the pillars of the Ukrainian team that claimed gold at the Calvia Olympiad. His score of 6,5 out of 7 on Board 4 was the best individual performance of the event. Two years later, in Turin, the Ukrainians had to settle for a more modest result, but Karjakin again chalked up one of the highest scores.
In 2007 Karjakin made a huge leap forward and raised his Elo with an impressive 64(!) points thanks to, amongst others, excellent results in Foros (clear second behind Ivanchuk), the European Team Championships in Crete (4,5 out of 7) and the European Club Cup in Turkey (5 out of 7).  
Last year his results were more modest, although he did beat Nigel Short in a rapid match 7,5-2,5. But with his win in Corus he is clearly back on track again and it will be interesting to see how he will turn his words into deeds.