Grandmaster (GM) is a title awarded to chess players by the world chess organization FIDE. Apart from World Champion, Grandmaster is the highest title a chess player can attain.
Milan Vidmar was a Slovene electrical engineer, chess Grandmaster, chess theorist, chess arbiter, philosopher, and writer. He was among the top dozen chess players in the world from 1910 to 1930. He was a specialist in power transformers and transmission of electric current.
Viswanathan "Vishy" Anand is an Indian chess grandmaster and a former World Chess Champion.
Johann "Hans" Joseph Kmoch was an Austrian-Dutch-American chess International Master (1950), International Arbiter (1951), and a chess journalist and author, for which he is best known.
Reuben Fine was an American chess grandmaster, psychologist, university professor, and author of many books on both chess and psychology. He was one of the strongest chess players in the world from the mid 1930s until his retirement from chess in 1951.
Sven Magnus Øen Carlsen is a Norwegian chess grandmaster and the current World Chess Champion. He is a two-time World Rapid Chess Champion and four-time World Blitz Chess Champion. Carlsen first reached the top of the FIDE world rankings in 2010, and trails only Garry Kasparov at time spent as world number one. His peak classical rating of 2882, achieved in 2014, is the highest in history.
Akiba Kiwelowicz Rubinstein was a Polish chess grandmaster who is considered to have been one of the strongest players never to have become World Chess Champion.
Efim Dmitriyevich Bogoljubov was a Russian-born German chess grandmaster who won numerous events and played two matches against Alexander Alekhine for the world championship.
Ksawery Tartakower was a leading Polish and French chess grandmaster. He was also a leading chess journalist and author of the 1920s and 1930s whose books remain popular even today. Tartakower is remembered for his sharp wit and aphorisms.
Vera Frantsevna Menchik was a British-Czechoslovak-Russian chess player who became the world's first women's chess champion. She also competed in chess tournaments with some of the world's leading male chess masters, with occasional successes including two wins over future world champion Max Euwe.
Jeremy Gaige was an American chess archivist and journalist. He was best known for his work collecting and publishing tournament results and basic biographical data on chess players. Hooper and Whyld called his works "scrupulously written" and "a source of reference for chess journalists and writers all over the world". Gaige's 1969 book, A Catalog of Chess Players and Problemists, contained about 3000 names with dates and places of birth and death. Chess writers soon began sending him information, and Chess Personalia (1987), his greatly expanded follow up, listed about 14,000 names with dates and places of birth and death, along with references to sources of biographical information. He died of emphysema on 19 February 2011, at his home in Philadelphia.
The first Swedish Champion was Gustaf Nyholm who won two matches against winners of national tournaments: Berndtsson in Göteborg and Löwenborg in Stockholm in 1917. Until 1931 Swedish Chess Championships decided by match play. In the 1930s, Gideon Ståhlberg held the title in spite of results of the national tournaments. Since 1939, only the tournament is played as an official Swedish Championship.
The Leningrad City Chess Championship is a chess tournament held officially in the city of Leningrad, Russia starting from 1920. The city was called Petrograd from 1914 to 1924, then Leningrad until 1991, and Saint Petersburg afterwards. Only players born or living in or around the city were allowed to participate in this event.
The Hastings International Chess Congress is an annual chess tournament which takes place in Hastings, England, around the turn of the year. The main event is the Hastings Premier tournament, which was traditionally a 10 to 16 player round-robin tournament. In 2004/05 the tournament was played in the knock out format; while in 2005/06 and 2006/07 it was played using the Swiss system. Alongside the main event there is the challengers section, which is open to all players. The winner of the challengers event earns an invitation in the following year's Premier.
Bled 1931 chess tournament was a major chess tournament proposed by Milan Vidmar and held in 1931 in Bled and Ljubljana, Slovenia, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. His idea was well received in both Ljubljana and the nearby health resort of Bled. An organizing committee was set up, and at the end of July 1931, following the 4th Chess Olympiad in Prague, this committee commissioned Hans Kmoch to conduct the negotiations with the competitors for a double round tournament to be held at Lake Bled.
Wolfgang Hasenfuss was a Latvian chess master of Baltic German ethnicity.
