Cover Stories with Chess Life

Today’s guest on Cover Stories with Chess Life is someone you might not have heard of yet, but I’m guessing that you will, and soon.

FM Sandeep Sethuraman is the author of our March cover story on the K-12 Grade Championships, held last December in National Harbor, Maryland. Sandeep scored 6.5/7 to claim clear first in the 11th Grade Championship, and afterwards, he reached out to me to see if he might write something for Chess Life or Chess Life Kids. Perfect timing — I was looking for someone to write about the K-12, and here we are.

At age 15, Sethuraman is rated 2465 USCF, and the 24th rated player under the age of 21. He has earned three IM norms, meaning that once he pushes his FIDE rating over 2400 — he’s 19 points away — he will become an IM.

But Sandeep is more than ‘just’ a chess player. A junior at BASIS Chandler in Chandler, AZ, he is an excellent student, and his non-profit, The Chess Effect, has raised money for foster care children and works to teach children to underprivileged youth.

Today’s guest on "Cover Stories with Chess Life" is one of the authors of our January cover story on the 2022 U.S. Championships, and she is also — breaking news here — starting up a regular column for Chess Life. She is the woman with the purple hair, WGM Tatev Abrahamyan.

Tatev began her chess journey at age eight in Armenia. After winning medals in European youth championships, she moved to America in 2001, and her success continued. She has played in every — or nearly every — U.S. Championship since 2004, with no small amount of success, despite not yet taking home the first place hardware.

Tatev has also been a stalwart member of our international Olympiad teams, including our 2022 team in Chennai, India, which her teammate WGM Gulrukhbegim Tokhirjonova reported on in our December issue. Tatev scored 7/9 to help Team USA finish in fourth place, just off the medal podium.

Tatev is currently a brand Ambassador for Chessup, a chess smartboard startup from Bryght Labs in Kansas. Long a mainstay of West Coast chess, she is now a Midwesterner, “enjoying” our winters as she makes a move from Kansas City to St. Louis. We’ll ask what it’s like to be thousands of miles from the ocean, and to have to keep her chess level while being a working stiff like the rest of us.

This month’s issue of Chess Life also sees Tatev’s first column on “Getting to Work,” where, at least at first, she will offer a number of “how-tos” for chess improvers looking to work on their game. I’m very excited to see how this all turns out, and to use some of her tips in my own chess practice!

Today’s guest on Cover Stories with Chess Life is one of the authors of our December cover story on the 2022 FIDE Olympiad. She is our Women’s top board, WGM Gulrukhbegim Tokhirjonova.

Begim, as she is often called, was born in Uzbekistan, and saw chess success at a young age, winning the U12 bronze at the World Youth in 2011. After earning both her WIM title and WGM title in 2015, her success continued, representing her country at the 2016 and 2018 Olympiads, and winning the Uzbek Women’s Championship in 2018.

After coming to America to study at the University of Missouri and play on their chess team, Begim became a fixture in American chess. She competed in the 2021 and 2022 U.S. Women’s Championships, finishing second in 2021 and in the middle of the pack this year, and she held down the top board for the Women’s Olympiad team in Chennai, telling her story to Chess Life readers in our November issue.

Today’s guest on "Cover Stories with Chess Life" is our first returning guest. He’s the man with the fancy hat: Grandmaster Elshan Moradiabadi.

Elshan is the author of our November cover story on the 2022 U.S. Open, where, after a thrilling Armageddon match with GM Aleksey Sorokin, he finished second on tiebreaks. As the highest finishing American flagged player, he earned a seat at the 2022 U.S. Championship.

Born in Tehran, Iran, Elshan moved to the US in 2012 to attend college at Texas Tech and play on their chess team. He won the 2017 US Chess Grand Prix, the 2016 Washington International, and the Rilton Cup in Stockholm, Sweden in 2020. His most recent tournament was the U.S. Championship, where... well, let’s just say that things didn’t quite go according to plan.

A coach and author, Elshan has worked with American juniors both privately and at international events, and in 2020 he published Sherlock’s Method: The Working Tool for the Club Player, co-written with WGM Sabina Foisor.

Today we talk to Elshan ‘on the road,’ as he takes a break from his travels to speak with us.

My guest on this special edition of Cover Stories is Caroline King, the photographer who shot our July cover photo of the 2022 National High School Championship, which was held in Memphis in April. Caroline — the sister of previous guest Alex King, the author of our July cover story on the High School  — was on-site in Memphis, taking some of the best photos of a US Chess event that I’ve seen in my time with the organization.

To my knowledge, that issue of Chess Life was the first time that a brother and sister were the author and photographer for the cover story. Alex and I spent a lot of time talking about the High School and Caroline’s photography, but it seemed kind of brotastic to be talking about Caroline and not talking to her. This is an attempt to fix that faux pas.

Please welcome Caroline King, who may be the first photographer ever featured on this program.

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Cover Stories with Chess Life" hosted by Chess Life and Chess Life Online Editor John Hartmann, goes in depth and behind the scenes of each month’s Chess Life cover story. 

Today’s guest on Cover Stories is the author of our July cover story on the 2022 National High School Championship, which was held in Memphis in April. He is also the author of a series on the Tarrasch defense that will wrap in our August issue, and he has written quite a few pieces for US Chess publications in these past few years.

Newly minted FM Alex King is a teacher, player, and father, currently residing in Memphis, TN with his wife and daughter. He comes from a very talented family, with musicians and artists of multiple stripes, including his sister, Caroline, who was the photographer at the 2022 National High School and whose photo graces the cover of the issue. Alex is a skilled pianist, and he often posts videos of his original compositions to his social media accounts.

I’m speaking to Alex today after having the toughest time scheduling this interview. He was on vacation, then I was on vacation, and then we both had conflicts. But now we’ve clear the time to get to talk, and I expect to learn a lot about Alex in the time we have.

Our bonus Candidates preview is out! Chess Life and Chess Life Online editor John Hartmann chats with GM Jacob Aagaard about the Candidates, Magnus Carlsen possibly not playing in the next World Championship, the new tiebreak regulations, and why Sergey Karjakin may or may not have deserved a red card.

Aagaard will be doing daily annotations for our CLO Candidates coverage, exclusively for Chess Life Online. Keep up with all the Candidates news at https://new.uschess.org/news and https://new.uschess.org/category/candidates over the next few weeks!

Vjekoslav (“Vjeko”) Nemec is a Croatian candidate master, and the main proprietor of the chess website chessentials.com. When I put out the call on Twitter for an author to write about the Grand Prix for our June issue, Vjeko put himself forward, and after a bit of investigation, I was happy to hand him the project.

Vjeko’s story in chess begins, as so many of ours do, in games with family members. But soon he really caught the bug, and after some trials and tribulations, he played in his first tournaments in college. After graduating with a master’s degree in electrical engineering, he took his place in the field, but chess remained an itch that he could never quite scratch. So he began writing about the game, on his own website and on Quora.com, and kept playing.

In 2020 he took a job with Chessable as a content editor – a job that many might see as a dream job! – but this year, in 2022, he left their employ to strike out on his own as an independent content creator. His Chess Life cover story is part of that work, and – speaking as his editor – I think it bodes well for his future in our game.

This month's guest on Cover Stories with Chess Life is... me. 

John is the author of our May 2022 cover story on the 2022 Spring Classic. He also wrote about Jamie Foxx's games with Jude Acers in New Orleans, and he also contributed his semi-regular "In the News" column.

John Hartmann is the editor of Chess Life and Chess Life Online. He was named the 2020 and 2021 Chess Journalist of the Year by the Chess Journalists of America. Away from the keyboard, John is a husband, a father, a coffee snob, a Yankees fan, a Cardiff City Bluebirds supporter, and an occasional presenter for GM Jacob Aagaard's Killer Chess Training. You can find him on twitter at @hartmannchess.

Thanks to IM John Watson for stepping in to interview me!

Today’s guest on "Cover Stories with Chess Life" is well known to American chess fans. He’s the man with the fancy hat: Grandmaster Elshan Moradiabadi. 

Elshan is the author of our April cover story on the Tata Steel tournament earlier this year, won by Magnus Carlsen. Instead of a traditional, blow-by-blow account, Elshan’s analysis focused on the most interesting and instructive moments in the event... although one of the most instructive may be found in a future issue of Chess Life. 

Born in Tehran, Iran, Elshan moved to the US in 2012 to attend college at Texas Tech and play on their chess team. He won the 2017 US Chess Grand Prix, the 2016 Washington International, and the Rilton Cup in Stockholm, Sweden in 2020. His most recent tournament was the 2022 Spring Classic at the Saint Louis Chess Club, where he finished with an even score in the B group. 

A coach and author, Elshan has worked with American juniors both privately and at international events, and last year he published Sherlock’s Method: The Working Tool for the Club Player, co-written with WGM Sabina Foisor. 

Today we talk to Elshan from his home in Durham, North Carolina, where he’s taking time out of a full day of teaching to speak to us.