Bacrot Etienne (22.01.1983)

French Grandmaster and former chess prodigy. World Champion and European Champion of U10 (1993) and U12 (1995). Bacrot became eight-times French Champion between 1999 and 2003, in 2008 and in 2017.

After crushing the former World Champion Vassily Smyslov 5-1, he was awarded the title of IM at 12 years old. At 13th, he was already a member of the French team at the Olympiad of Yerevan (1996) when he scored his first IGM norm. In 1997, after scoring his second norm at Wijk aan Zee, he won its first major tournament at Enghien and became, at 14 years and 2 months, making him the youngest person to that date to have held the title. He was invited to the World Championship in 1997 and in 2000 without too much success. In 1999, he beat Ruslan Ponomariov at the Lausanne Youth Masters and Judith Polgar in an exhibition match 3-1. He succeeded in Bermuda in 1999, Linares Anibal 2001, and again at Lausanne Masters in 2003. A participant in the World Championship in 2004 he also won the tournament of Verona. In 2005, he won the Poikovsky KarpovA tournament. In 2009, he succeeded in Aeroflot Open and in 2010 in the Geneva Open. In 2011, he won once more the Poikovsky Karpov tournament and in 2016 the London Classic Open

In match play, he beat Boris Gelfand 3½-2½ and lost to Gata Kamsky 3½-½ in 2007 at the World Championship Candidates’ matches.

Bacrot achieved some interesting performance in rapid chess such as Cannes in 1998, 2001 and in 2003 when he was a quarter-finalist at the 2003 first World Rapid Championship.

Bacrot has worked with Iosif Dorfman, Zurab Azmaiparashvili, Alexander Nikitin the former coach of Garry Kasparov and Yannick Pelletier.

Peak rating: 2749 in 2013.

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