Boris Gelfand
- November 12, 2025
Defeated in the 2012 World Championship Match
Highest FIDE Elo Rating: 2777
Ranking: highest world number three
Tournament Career: winner of 19 super-tournaments:
Candidate Matches 2011
Chess World Cup 2009
2x winner of Rubinstein Memorial
winner of Dos Hermanas Chess Tournament 1994, Tata Steel Masters 1992, Tal Memorial 2013
and several others…
Chess Olympiads: For USSR: gold team medal
For Israel: team silver and bronze medals, individual silver medal
Why he deserved it:
Boris Gelfand, who is incidentally still active, was a fixture in top-level chess from the early nineties until around 2015. He was ranked as high as third in the world, won many super-tournaments (Tata Steel, Tilburg, Tal Memorial…) and also had significant successes in chess Olympiads.
He achieved great successes already in the nineties, but the absolute peak of his career came somewhat unexpectedly in the years 2009-2012. In 2009, he won the World Cup, defeating Polgar, Vachier-Lagrave, Jakovenko, Karjakin, and Ponomariov. This triumph qualified him for his fifth of a total of six Candidate Tournaments he participated in during his career. This fifth participation ended with his victory. It was the last edition where the Candidate Tournament was still played in match format, and Gelfand defeated Mamedyarov, Kamsky, and Grischuk in succession.
In 2012, Gelfand played the World Championship match against Anand and was the one who took the lead. However, Anand soon equalized the score by winning the shortest non-draw game in world championship history (17 moves). The match went to a rapid tiebreak, where three games ended in a draw and Anand won one, thus retaining the title.
Gelfand then participated in the 2013 Candidate Tournament, which was one of the last tournaments where he was still a member of the absolute elite.
Best Games:
Boris Gelfand vs Alexey Shirov
Polanica-Zdrój 1998
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Miroslav Janeček graduated in English Philology at Palacký University Olomouc. Currently he works in Prague as a content editor for a large marketing company. His roots are in Opava - the historic and cultural centre of the Czech part of Silesia. That city is also the home of Slezan Opava, the chess club where Miroslav started to play chess, later went on to work as a youth coach and which he to this day proudly represents. As an aspiring chess publicist, he is the main author of articles on ChessDB.cz. In his free time, in addition to chess and writing, he also devotes himself to racket sports, history, and literature.