Krishnan Sasikiran
Krishnan Sasikiran was born in Chennai, Tamil-Nadu in South Eastern India on January 7, 1981. He has been playing chess since he was ten years old. He has been playing professionally for almost two decades now. He started playing as a pro in 1995. He is married to Radhika and has a baby daughter.
He succeeded in earning the title of the International Master (IM) in 1999. He earned the title of the Grandmaster (GM) in the year 2000 after winning at the Commonwealth Championships. He is widely known for winning the Hastings Chess tournament in 2001, before which he had earned the title of the Grandmaster the previous year. He is also known for winning the Asian Championship in 2002. Krishnan Sasikiran is also the Indian representative at all major Olympiads globally. He has been doing this since 1998. He is also known nationally for leading his home country team to a victory in the ECC (European Club Cup) 2013.
He has a standard FIDE rating of 2699. His rapid ratings are 2664 and his blitz ratings are 2698. He has won 647 games and his winning rate is 45.28%. 528 games have ended up in a draw so the draw rate for Sasikiran is that of 36.95%. He has lost a total of 254 games in the span of his career so far. That makes his loss rate of 17.77%. He is the third best Indian player globally. The first and second positions are currently held by Viswanathan Anand and Pentala Harikrishna respectively. He is recognized as the 11th best professional chess player in Asia. In December 2012 his global FIDE ranking was 76th and his FIDE ranking was 2700. But it fell in the next years and has now gained again and risen to 2699 recently.
He now holds the 77th rank amongst all world players and the 73rd rank in the case of global active players. He holds the #3 position in India and the #12 position in all of Asia. For more ranking details you can see his activity charts online. He is also the winner of the fourth Asian Individual Championship. He is known to have won the Arjuna award in 2002. He also won the Gold medal in 2006 at the Asian games, in recognition of which he was awarded INR 200, 000.
Krishnan Sasikiran has again been gaining momentum. Recently Sasikiran has been working on his openings with the leading Indian champion and world champion, Anand. In 2013, Sasikiran played in the 2nd position for Anand, who is already a five-time world champion. Sasikiran hoped to emerge a better player after this tournament. In 2013, Krishnan Sasikiran also played in the World Cup in Tromso, Norway and then again in the ECC (European Club Championship) in Greece. In the World Cup in Tromso, he managed to gain a victory against the Grandmaster Constantin Lupulescu in the first round but then he lost the second round to the Grandmaster Sergey Karjakin.