Etienne Bacrot - Super Grandmaster

Etienne Bacrot was born 23rd of January 1983 in Lille and is a french Super-Grandmaster. He started to learn chess when he was 4 years old. Just 10 years of age he won his first international youth championships.

In 1993 he won the U10-World Championship (U10 = under 10 years) in Szombathely and the U10-Europe Championship 1993 in Bratislava. In 1994 and 1995 he won the U12-Europe Championship in Paris in Rapidchess. and he came second in Szeged in the U12-World Championship.
A year later he won the U12-World Championship in 1995 in São Lourenço.
One of his first chess trainer were the former UdSSR-Chessmaster Josif Dorfman and later on world champion Garry Kasparov.

1996 He won a match against Ex-World Champion Wassili Smyslow 5-1, (4 wins, 0 losses and 2 draws) in Albert.
1998 wins Match 3,5-2,5 (+1, 0, =5) against the german grandmaster Robert Hübner in Albert and Berlin.
2002 wins match scoring 3,5-2,5 against grandmaster Boris Gelfand in Albert.
2001 Match 3-3 (+1, 1, =4) against Emil Sutovsky in Albert.

Etienne Bacrot made the three GM-Norms, necessary to achieve the title of a chess grandmaster within just six months. The first GM-Norm in October 1996 in Eriwan, the second in January 1997 at the Corus-Tournament in Wijk aan Zee, and the last norm in March 1997 in the tournament in Enghien-les-Bains.

In 1997 he became grandmaster aged just 14 years and 2 months and the youngest grandmaster ever in history at this time to receive the title.

From 1999 to 2003 Bacrot won the French Championship five times in a row.
In 2002 he won the tournament in Val-d'Isère.
In 2005 he won (with Bologan) the Karpov-Poikovsky tournament in Poikowski and in the same year he came third at the Dortmund-Sparkassen tournament.
At the 2005 FIDE world cup in Chanty-Mansijsk he came third beating Alexander Grischuk and qualified for the Candidates tournament of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2007 but was qualified already because of his high rating.
But here he was eliminated as he lost in the first round 0,5-3,5, playing Gata Kamsky.
In 2008 he won the French Championship again.

His ELO Rating is above 2700. This makes him a Super-Grandmaster.