Portal:Sports/Selected article/July 2007
Yasser Seirawan (born March 24, 1960) is an American Grandmaster and chess author, best known as a player for having won the 1979 World Junior Chess Championship and four times between 1981 and 2000 the United States Chess Championship and as an activist for having in 2002 negotiated an ultimately-scuttled agreement to unite the world chess championship.
Seirawan was born in Damascus, Syria, to an Arab father and English mother and lived for a short time in Nottingham before immigrating with his family to the United States in 1967. He began playing chess aged twelve years and captured the Washington junior championship soon thereafter, in 1973. Seirawan honed his game over the years following at a Seattle coffeehouse frequented by Latvian chess master Viktors Pupols before winning the world junior championship at the age of nineteen. Seirawan defeated Swiss Grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi, then the world's second-ranked player, in a tournament in 1980 and was invited to train with Korchnoi in Switzerland in preparation for the latter's 1981 world championship rematch with Russian Grandmaster Anatoly Karpov; Seirawan would himself defeat world champion Karpov in 1982. Having won the United States championship jointly with Walter Browne in 1981, Seirawan won the title outright in 1986 and was a member of the bronze medal-winning United States team at the Chess Olympiad contested in Dubai in that year.