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 rat ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ch ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 h ..read more

Yes, it's January. And yes, this is the December edition of Cover Stories. (Look for the January EP soon!) GM Maxime Vachier-Lagrave is the author of our December cover story, “My American Tour,” which discusses his victory at the 2021 Sinquefield Cup and his second place finish at the 9LX (or 960) tournament directly afterwards. We’ve been trying to set up time for an interview for a few weeks, but Maxime’s packed schedule meant that today – January 2nd – was our first opportunity to record. It turns out that this was fortunate indeed, as in the interim, Maxime played in a number of events, i ..read more

Today’s guest on Cover Stories with Chess Life is the author of our November 2021 cover story on the U.S. Open, which he won with a dominating performance and score of 8½/9. More recently, he finished in shared fourth through sixth place at the 2021 U.S. Championship, his +1 score leaving him just a half-point outside the playoff won by GM Wesley So. GM Alex Lenderman is one of America’s top grandmasters, and his story is one of long, hard work paying off with success. US Chess records have him playing nearly 1200 tournaments since 2001, including seemingly every event in the NYC area for many ..read more