Michael Adams (chess player)

Michael Adams
Adams playing in the Chess World Cup 2013
Full name	Michael Adams
Country	England
Born	(1971-11-17) 17 November 1971 (age 45) Truro, Cornwall, England, UK
Title	Grandmaster
FIDE rating	2761 (March 2017) (No. 12 in the September 2013 FIDE World Rankings)
Peak rating	2761 (September 2013)

Michael Adams (born 17 November 1971) is an English chess Grandmaster (1989). His highest ranking is world No. 4, achieved several times from October 2000 to October 2002. His peak Elo rating is 2761.

He has achieved good results in World Chess Championship tournaments. Several times a World Championship Candidate, he reached the semifinals in 1997, 1999 and 2000. At the 2004 FIDE Championship, he reached the final, narrowly losing out to Rustam Kasimdzhanov in the tie-break games.

Adams was born on 17 November 1971 in Truro, Cornwall, UK. By 1980, his chess talent had been recognised by the British Chess Federation and he received high-level coaching from former European Junior Champion Shaun Taulbut along with coaching from local chess champion Michael Prettejohn. In 1981, aged nine, he entered the Cornwall (County) Under-9 Championship and won it. At the same event, he won the Under-13, Under-15 and Under-18 Championships. For one day, the latter two contests clashed and he had to play them simultaneously, commuting cautiously between different rooms, some thirty metres apart.

In 1987, he took the silver medal at the World Under-16 Championship, held in Innsbruck, behind the Icelandic player Hannes Stefansson. Later that year, at the age of fifteen, he became the world's youngest International Master (IM).

Two books co-written with his father, Bill Adams, Development of a Grandmaster (1991) and Chess in the Fast Lane (1996), discuss his early chess career.

Adams' early endeavors were already beginning to pay dividends at the British Championship of 1987, where he gained his final IM norm and took the best junior prize. He proceeded to win the full Championship title in 1989, at just seventeen years old. He won again in 1997, jointly with Matthew Sadler. He won the Championship again in 2010, in 2011 and in 2016.