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Emil Sutovsky
Emil Sutovsky (born 19 September 1977) is an Israeli chess Grandmaster.
Successes
He achieved notable successes by winning the World Junior Chess Championship in Medellín in 1996, finishing first at the double-round-robin VAM Hoogeveen Tournament in 1997 (ahead of Judit Polgar, Loek van Wely and Vassily Smyslov) and winning Hastings 2000 (ahead of Alexey Dreev and Jonathan Speelman).
The following year, he recorded perhaps the greatest individual result by an Israeli player: seeded only 35th out of the 204 pariticipants (143 GMs!) in the 2nd European Chess Championship in Ohrid, Macedonia, he started with an ordinary 3.5/6. He then started a series of resounding victories (e.g. [1]), and finished the tournament with 9.5/13, along with future FIDE world champion Ruslan Ponomariov, and in front of Judit Polgar, Nigel Short and many other world-class players [2]. He went on to beat Ponomariov 1.5-0.5 in a rapid chess tie-break, and was crowned European Champion.
He finished tied for first in two major open tournaments in 2005: in Gibraltar he scored 7.5/10 (the same score as Levon Aronian, Zahar Efimenko, Kiril Georgiev and Alexei Shirov), and at the Aeroflot Open in Moscow he scored 6.5/9 (the same as Vasily Ivanchuk, Alexander Motylev, Andrei Kharlov and Vladimir Akopian). His superior tie-break in the latter gave him clear first place and with it an invitation to the prestigious Dortmund tournament later in the year, in which he beat classical world champion Vladimir Kramnik [3], scoring 3.5/9.
Playing style
His uncompromising style means his tournament results can be somewhat inconsistent: shortly before his successes in Gibraltar and Moscow, he had performed disappointingly in 2004 at round-robin events at Pamplona (3/7), Pune (3.5/9) and Ashdod (1.5/5). This same uncompromising style has also resulted in some spectacular games: his sacrificial victory over Ilya Smirin in the 2002 Israeli Championship was voted the best game of issue 86 of Chess Informant [4], and his victory over Danny Gormally at Gibraltar 2005 earned him the prize for best game [5].
Sutovsky played in two FIDE Knock-out World Championships: in 2000 he was eliminated in the first round by Igor Nataf; in 2001 he was eliminated in round three by eventual runner-up Vasily Ivanchuk. He did not participate in the controversial 2004 championship because of concerns about how its hosts, Libya, would treat Israeli players.
Sutovsky virtually always plays 1.e4 with White, occasionally testing unfashionable, old-fashioned openings such as the Two Knights Defence, Giuoco Piano and Four Knights Game. With black, he usually plays the Grünfeld Defence or King's Indian Defence against 1.d4 and almost exclusively the Sicilian Defence against 1.e4.
On the October 2005 FIDE list, Sutovsky had an Elo rating of 2654 (his peak was 2697), making him Israel's number 3 (behind Boris Gelfand and Ilia Smirin) and number 48 in the world.