Matthias Wahls


Matthias Wahls during a lecture in 2020
Association	Germany Germany
Born	January 25, 1968 Hamburg
title	International Master (1988) Grand Master (1989)
Current Elo rating	2543 (August 2020)
Best Elo rating	2609 (January 1999)
Tab at the FIDE (English)

Matthias Wahls (born January 25, 1968 in Hamburg ) is a German chess grandmaster and poker player.

Life

1985 was Wahls German youth champion . In 1988 he was named International Master by FIDE and a year later Grand Master .

In the Berlin summer of 1994 he was second behind Hennadij Kusmin , in 1995 in Berlin behind Dydyschko also second. In 1996 and 1997 he was German champion .

In 1998 he qualified for the FIDE World Championship , which was held in Las Vegas a year later . There he defeated the Albanian Altin Cela with 1½: ½ in the first round , but failed in the second round with 0: 2 against the Ukrainian world-class player Vasyl Ivanchuk .

In the second half of the 1990s, he began to conduct seminars on chess topics, especially openings , and reduced his tournament activities. He also published the two chess books Modern Scandinavian in 1997 ( ISBN 3-932861-00-0 ) and in 2006 (together with Karsten Müller and Hannes Langrock ) Modern Scandinavian, Volume 2 ( ISBN 978-3-935748-13-1 ) and one in 2004 Multimedia course The best opening traps ( ISBN 3-937549-09-9 ). He also published in the magazine Schach and wrote for Rochade Europa and New In Chess .

Since July 2006 his Elo number has remained unchanged at 2543 because he did not play an Elo-rated tournament game after the 2005/06 Chess League. He reached his highest rating of 2609 in January 1999.

Matthias Wahls focused on the game of poker after his chess career after Jan Gustafsson brought him to the game. In 2007, together with Dominik Kofert , he founded the world's largest poker school PokerStrategy.com (based in Gibraltar) with over 8.7 million members (as of 2020 ). His aim was to spread the poker variant Texas Hold'em in Germany. After doing this job for a number of years, it was reported in November 2011 that Wahls moved to southern Spain "after a financially successful foray into the poker business". pokerstrategy.com was bought in 2013 for 38.3 million euros from the British software manufacturer Playtech .

National team

With the German national team, Matthias Wahls took part in the 1990 and 1992 Chess Olympiads and the 1989 European Team Championship. At the European Team Championship in 1989 in Haifa , he reached third place with the team and second place on the fifth board in the individual ranking.

societies

Matthias Wahls had his chess roots at SK Union Eimsbüttel, a chess club in Hamburg with which he played in the 2nd Bundesliga in the 1984/85 season. From 1985 to 2006 he played in the 1st Bundesliga with Hamburger SK , with whom he also took part in the European Club Cup in 1993 and 1995 .