Sergey Karjakin

Infobox chess player
playername = Sergey Karjakin


caption=
birthname = Sergey Karjakin
country = UKR
datebirth = birth date and age|1990|1|12
placebirth = Simferopol, Ukrainian SSR
datedeath =
placedeath =
title = Grandmaster
worldchampion =
womensworldchampion =
rating = 2727
(No. 15 on the July 2008 FIDE ratings list)
peakrating = 2732 (January 2008)

Sergey Karjakin ( _uk. Сергій Карякін; _ru. Сергей Карякин; born January 12, 1990 in Simferopol) is a Ukrainian chess player. At the age of twelve years and seven months he became the youngest grandmaster in history. On the FIDE ranking list of April 2008, he has a rating of 2727, making him number 15 in the world, number 2 in the category of boys up to 20 years old and number 2 in Ukraine.

Prodigy

Karjakin learned to play chess when he was five years old and became an IM at age eleven. He first attracted attention in January 2002, when he was the official second of fellow Ukrainian Ruslan Ponomariov during the final of the 2002 FIDE World championship, though Karjakin had only just turned twelve at the time. By scoring GM norms at the Aeroflot tournament in Moscow later that month, the Alushta tournament in May 2002 and the international tournament in Sudak in August 2002, he surpassed Bu Xiangzhi to become the youngest grandmaster in the history of chess at the age of twelve years and exactly seven months—a record that still stands.

At age fourteen he defeated the reigning world champion, Vladimir Kramnik, during the 2004 Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting, in a blitz game (ten minutes for the entire game, plus five seconds per move). Also in 2004, Karjakin was the only human to win against a computer in the Man vs Machine World Team Championship in Bilbao, Spain, where he was the youngest and lowest rated player. He won against the computer program Deep Junior. Later that year Karjakin finished second to Boris Gelfand at the Pamplona, Navarra tournament, held from December 20 to December 29.

Karjakin entered the world's top 100 in the April 2005 FIDE list, where he was number 64 in the world with an Elo rating of 2635. He scored 8.5 (7-3-1) to win the Young Stars of the World 2005 tournament held in Kirishi, Russia from 14 May to 26 May. Practicing before the tournament with Nigel Short in Greece, Karjakin was involved in a car accident on the way to the Athens airport and suffered minor injuries. Afterwards, Short remarked that he had "almost changed the path of chess history by allowing the future World Champion to be killed while in my care". [Nigel Short, [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?view=CHESSCONTENT&grid=P8&RangeStartValue=1&master=nigel_short The Sunday chess column 10/07/2005] , The Telegraph]

Rise to the top

During the Chess World Cup 2007, which served as a qualification tournament for the World Chess Championship 2009, Karjakin reached the semi-finals, in which he lost to Alexei Shirov. On the January 2008 FIDE rating list, published just before Karjakin's eighteenth birthday, he passed for the first time the 2700 mark, often seen as the line that separates "elite" players from other grandmasters, with a new rating of 2732 and a world rank of 13.

In July of 2008 Sergey played a ten game match against GM Nigel Short and won convincingly with a score of 7.5-2.5. [Chessvine Article, [http://chessvine.com/archives/17-Karjakin-Short-Kiev-Life-Match-Decided.html "Karjakin-Short Kiev Life Match Decided"] ]

As of July 2008 he holds a rating of 2727.

References

External links

*fide|id=14109603
*chessgames player|id=54535
* [http://chess.vrsac.com/search/player_e.asp?FC=14109603 Rating data]