Kiril Georgiev

Kiril Georgiev
at Slivnitsa, Bulgaria, 2011
Country	Bulgaria
Born	(1965-11-28) 28 November 1965 (age 51) Petrich, Bulgaria
Title	Grandmaster
FIDE rating	2633 (April 2017)
Peak rating	2695 (July 2001)

Kiril Dimitrov Georgiev (Bulgarian: Кирил Димитров Георгиев; born 28 November 1965 in Petrich) is a Bulgarian chess grandmaster and six-time national champion.

Kiril Georgiev first caught the eye of the chess world in 1983, when he became the World Junior Champion with an unusually strong score of 11½ out of 13. This result automatically gave him the International Master title. Two years later, FIDE awarded him the International Grandmaster title.

In the process of becoming the Bulgarian Champion of 1984 (shared), 1986 and 1989, he rapidly became recognised as Bulgaria's number one player, taking over from Ivan Radulov and eventually giving way to Veselin Topalov. He has represented his country at the Chess Olympiad many times, playing on either board 1 or 2. Exceptionally, in 2002 he played for Macedonia, while he was temporarily resident there.

His record in international competition has been remarkable, considering that he has never quite reached supergrandmaster status (Elo 2700 or above). He was a winner at Sarajevo 1986 (and would meet board boy Ivan Sokolov there again, some 15 years later), San Bernardino 1988, Elenite (Burgas) 1992 (ahead of Sokolov, Topalov, Josif Dorfman, Yuri Razuvayev and Vassilios Kotronias) and the 1993 Budapest Zonal (ahead of Judit Polgár and Ľubomír Ftáčnik). He repeated his Elenite success in 1995 (with Topalov, ahead of Nigel Short, Boris Gulko and Sergey Dolmatov) and won at Belgrade 2000 (ahead of Alexander Beliavsky and Ulf Andersson).