Ruslan Ponomariov
Ruslan Olehovych Ponomariov (; born 11 October 1983) is a Ukrainian chess grandmaster. He was FIDE World Chess Champion from 2002 to 2004. He won the Ukrainian Chess Championship in 2011. He was runner-up in the Chess World Cup 2005 and Chess World Cup 2009, while reaching the semi-finals in 2011 and the quarterfinals in 2007. Early career Ponomariov was born in Horlivka in Ukraine. He was taught to play chess by his father at the age of 5. At 9 he became a first category player, and in September 1993 he moved to Kramatorsk. Here Ponomariov attended the A. V. Momot Chess School and was trained by Boris Ponomariov. In 1994 he placed third in the World Under-12 Championship at the age of ten. In 1996 he won the European Under-18 Championship at the age of just twelve, and the following year won the World Under-18 Championship. In 1998, at the age of fourteen, he was awarded the Grandmaster title, making him the youngest ever player at that time to hold the title. In 1999, he was a member of the Ukrainian national youth team, which won the U-16 Chess Olympiad in Artek, Ukraine. Among Ponomariov's notable later results are first place at the Donetsk Zonal tournament in 1998, 5/7 score in the European Club Cup 2000 (including a victory over then-FIDE World Champion Alexander Khalifman), joint first with 7½/9 at Torshavn 2000, 8½/11 for Ukraine in the 2001 Chess Olympiad in Istanbul, winning gold medal on board 2, and first place with 7/10 in the 2001 Governor's Cup in Kramatorsk. FIDE World Chess Champion 2002 In 2002 he beat his fellow countryman Vasyl Ivanchuk in the final of the FIDE World Chess Championship 2002 by a score of 4½-2½ to become FIDE World Champion at the age of 18, the first teenager and youngest person to do so. In the same year he finished second in the very strong Linares tournament, behind Garry Kasparov. His result in the strong 2003 Corus tournament at Wijk aan Zee was not as good – despite having the third highest Elo rating, he finished only joint eleventh out of fourteen players with 6/13, and at Linares the same year he finished only fifth out of seven with 5½/12. There were plans for him to play a fourteen-game match against Kasparov in Yalta in September 2003, the winner of which would go on to play the winner of a match between Vladimir Kramnik and Péter Lékó as part of the so-called "Prague Agreement" to reunify the World Chess Championship (from 1993 until 2006 there were two world chess championships). However, this was called off by FIDE on the grounds that Ponomariov failed to sign the contract in time. The latter always alleged lack of equality in the contract for both contenders. Ponomariov remained FIDE champion until Rustam Kasimdzhanov won the FIDE World Chess Championship 2004. Post-championship career On Ponomariov's 20th birthday, October 11, 2003, he became the first high-profile player to forfeit a