Tal Shaked

Tal Shaked (* 5. February 1978 ) is an American grandmaster in chess and the junior world champion in 1997.

Shaken's career began in 1997: after winning the US Junior Championships in June, he surprisingly won the Junior World Championships for under 20s in Żagań (Poland) a month later . As an international champion with an Elo rating of 2500, he was number 15 on the seeding list with 78 participants, but in the end he won with 9.5 points from 13 games and was then grandmaster. He left players like Alexander Morosewitsch (12th place) and the 2004 FIDE World Champion , Rustam Kasimjanov (9th place) behind.

Due to this success Shaked was appointed in the same year established tournament of Tilburg invited (Netherlands), which later co-champion Garry Kasparov before the tournament - unsuccessfully - tried to prevent: Kasparov - at that time with an Elo of 2820 - was afraid because of the low rating section of the Tournament, which was lowered by the participation of Shakeds, by loss of points of its Elo number. Shaked played below his possibilities, scored only 3 draws in 11 games and finished last, losing his game against Kasparov with the white pieces in just 20 moves. In an interview after the tournament, Kasparov said he could play chess simultaneously against players like van Wely , Piket and especially Tal Shaked without any problems .

The following year Shaked was qualified as a junior world champion for the 1997/98 FIDE World Championship . The tournament was played in knockout mode , it failed in the second round to the Russian Sergei Rublevsky . Since then, Shaked has hardly been active internationally. Shaken's Elo rating is 2468 (as of December 2014), but he is listed as inactive because he has not played a rated game after 1999. He reached his highest rating of 2535 in January 1998.

In 2004, he earned a master's degree in computer science from the University of Washington . He works for the Google company .

Web links

• Tal Shaked at the World Chess Federation FIDE (English)
• Playable chess games by Tal Shaked on chessgames.com (English)
• Homepage

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Article in the New York Times
2. ↑ Zeitschrift Schach , 11/1997, pp. 8–29.
3. ↑ Elo history up to 2001 at olimpbase.org (English)