Hikaru Nakamura
Hikaru Nakamura is an American chess player. At 15 years and 79 days, he became the youngest American to earn the title of Grandmaster. He is a five-time United States champion. He has represented the United States at five Chess Olympiads, winning a team gold medal and two team bronze medals.
About Hikaru Nakamura in brief
Hikaru Nakamura is an American chess player. At age 15 years and 79 days, he became the youngest American to earn the title of Grandmaster. He is a five-time United States champion. He has represented the United States at five Chess Olympiads, winning a team gold medal and two team bronze medals. His peak USCF rating was 2900 in August 2015. In October 2015, he reached his peak FIDE rating of 2816, which ranked him second in the world. Nakamura was born in Hirakata, Osaka Prefecture, Japan, to an American mother, Carolyn Merrow Nakamura, a classically trained musician and former public school teacher, and a Japanese father, Shuichi Nakamura. When he was two years old, his family moved to the U.S., and, a year later in 1990, his parents divorced. He began playing chess at the age of seven and was coached by his Sri Lankan stepfather, FIDE Master and chess author Sunil Weeramantry. In 1999 Nakamura won the Laura Aspis Prize, given annually to the top USCF-rated player under age 13. In 2007, he shared second place at the GibTelecom Masters in Gibraltar. In 2008, he won the Barcelona Finz960 tournament in Germany. In 2010, he placed joint first in the tournament with five straight wins to tie Chinese GM Buzhi Buzi. The same year, he helped U. S. win the bronze medal on the third board in the Chess OlympIad at Turin, Italy, playing behind Gata Kamsky and Alexander Onischuk.
In 2012, he was ranked No. 1 on the FIDE rapid and blitz chess ratings. In May 2014, when FIDE began publishing official Rapid and Blitz chess ratings, Nakamura ranked number one on both lists. He was surpassed by Magnus Carlsen in the second publication of the rankings. In 2014, he announced that he would resume playing chess, and later that year he announced he would take a break from chess in order to focus on other sports. In 2006, he began playing competitively again. In 2009, he played a match against Ukrainian grandmaster Sergey Karjakin and defeated his fellow prodigy by 4½–1½. In 2011, he beat him in the rapidplay playoff games to claim the title and become the youngest national champion since Bobby Fischer. He won the 2011 edition of Tata Steel Chess Tournament Group A and won the American Open in Las Vegas in the same year. In November and December 2005, he competed in the Fide World Cup in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, seeded 28th but failed to advance beyond the first round. He reached the fourth round, defeating grandmasters Sergey Volkov, Aleksej Aleksandrov, and Alexander Lastin before falling to England’s Michael Adams, the tournament’s third-seeded participant and eventual runner-up. In April 2004, Nakimura achieved a fourth-place finish in the Corus tournament at Wijk aan Zee, the Netherlands.
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