Boris Gelfand

Boris Gelfand is a chess grandmaster born in Minsk in 1968 who played for the Soviet Union and Belarus before settling in Israel in 1998, where he became the country's top-ranked player. He earned the grandmaster title in 1989 and stayed among the world's strongest players for decades, holding a place in the FIDE top 30 from January 1990 to October 2017. He won the Chess World Cup in 2009 and the 2011 Candidates Tournament, which made him the challenger for the 2012 World Chess Championship against Viswanathan Anand. That match finished level at 6-6, and Anand took the rapidplay tiebreak. Gelfand also won major tournaments at Wijk aan Zee, Tilburg, Linares and Dos Hermanas, played in eleven Chess Olympiads, and is known as a deep positional player and as the author of books such as My Most Memorable Games.