Mystery grandmasters + grandmasters named Alex

Last night I watched Survivor on television for the first time this year, along with my wife, who watches it religiously. I unexpectedly got a giggle out of the preview of next week’s episode. The biggest loudmouth on the show, a guy named Marty Piombo, is shown making a big “revelation” about himself. “I am a chess grandmaster!” he says. Then someone else is shown saying, “It makes sense.”

Many times these two-second video clips are a little bit misleading, so we will have to see next week how this plays out. But I knew instantly that Marty is no chess grandmaster. My wife asked me, “How can you be so sure? Do you really know every grandmaster in the U.S.?”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “There are only about 25 or 30 grandmasters in the country, and I am pretty sure that I have heard of all of them. Most of them have Russian names, anyway, not names like Marty.”

However, this conversation got me thinking. How many current GMs are there in the United States? Is it really true that I have heard of all of them? And, by the way, who is the strongest USCF player named Marty (assuming there are no GMs with that name)?

I’ll leave the first question unanswered for the moment, in case you want to take a guess.

As for the second question, it turns out that there is one grandmaster in the United States, who is a USCF member, and whom I had never heard of until this morning. His name is Babakuli Annakov. According to his website, he is the first grandmaster from Turkmenistan, and he moved the the United States in 2000. Interestingly, his FIDE rating chart shows that his rating has dropped like a stone since then, from 2600 in January 2000 to 2429 today. Even though I am very familiar with the pain of losing rating points as you get older, this seems like a pretty dramatic drop for someone who was 28 years old in 2000 and is still just 38 years old. Do you think maybe there is a little rating inflation going on in Turkmenistan?

There were a few other unfamiliar names on the list of GMs who are USCF members, but all of them except Annakov are listed on the FIDE website as nationals of other countries. For example, Axel Bachmann turned out to be from Paraguay, and Ioan Cristian Chirila turned out to be from Romania. These are probably people who just came over to the U.S. and joined the USCF so they could play in a few big-money tournaments.

Of course there are no GMs named Marty, and in fact there are no IMs, and not even an FM. However, there is a National Master: Marty Frank from Pennsylvania. His rating history is pretty similar to mine: a peak of 2237 in the late 1990s, and down to 2157 today.

Now back to the first question: How many grandmasters live in the U.S.? This question turns out to be unexpectedly problematic, but I think that the correct answer is 44. When you search for grandmasters on the USCF top players list, you got a list of 64 names. However, we need to delete the women’s grandmasters from this list, which takes the number down to 58. Next we have to delete the people on the list who are not really U.S. players. I went through the list one by one and eliminated all the ones who are shown by FIDE as playing for other countries. So here is, I believe, a complete list of the current grandmasters who are registered with FIDE as U.S. players:

1. Hikaru Nakamura
2. Gata Kamsky
3. Alexander Onischuk
4. Yury Shulman
5. Varuzhan Akobian
6. Yasser Seirawan
7. Jaan Ehlvest
8. Robert Hess
9. Larry Christiansen
10. Alexander Stripunsky
11. Alexander Shabalov
12. Aleksandr Lenderman
13. Gregory Kaidanov
14. Joel Benjamin
15. Julio Becerra
16. Alexander Ivanov
17. Benjamin Finegold
18. Ray Robson
19. Ildar Ibragimov
20. Boris Gulko
21. Sergey Kudrin
22. Alexander Fishbein
23. Alexander Goldin
24. Eugene Perelshteyn
25. Alexandra Kostenyuk
26. Nick De Firmian
27. Melikset Khachiyan
28. Alex Yermolinsky
29. Vinay Bhat
30. Jesse Kraai
31. Joshua Friedel
32. Renier Gonzalez
33. Walter Browne
34. Michael Rohde
35. Gennady Sagalchik
36. John Fedorowicz
37. Miron Sher
38. Dmitry Gurevich
39. Lawrence Kaufman
40. Babakuli Annakov (!)
41. Semion Palatnik
42. Rashid Ziatdinov
43. Anatoly Lein
44. Arthur Bisguier

So my original estimate of 25 or 30 was way too low. By the way, although we have no GMs named Marty, it is interesting to see that there is one name that is appears with unusual frequency on this exclusive list. Nine of America’s 44 grandmasters have names that are some variation of Alexander (including one Alexandra!). I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a tenth “Alex” in the not too distant future, because GM Alejandro Ramirez of Costa Rica is a student in the U.S. and might just want to stay here.