Nigel Short

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Nigel Short (born June 1, 1965 in Leigh, Lancashire) is an English chess player. In 1993 he played Garry Kasparov for the Professional Chess Association World Chess Championship, losing 12.5 - 7.5. He had won matches against former world champion Anatoly Karpov and Jan Timman on his way to meeting Kasparov.

A chess prodigy, Short qualified for the British Men's Chess Championship three days before his twelfth birthday. Participating in four World Junior Championships (1980–1983), he finished second to Kasparov in 1980. He earned the grandmaster title in 1984. Short won the British Chess Championship in 1984, 1987, and 1998 and the English Championship in 1991. One of Short's best tournament results came at the Amsterdam VSB tournament in 1991 when he tied for first place with Valery Salov ahead of both Kasparov and Karpov. In April 2003 he won the Hunguest Hotels Super Chess Tournament held in Budapest ahead of Boris Gelfand, Judit Polgár and Péter Lékó among others (Polgar and Lékó were in the world's top ten at the time). In 2004 he won the Commonwealth Chess Championship and the Gibraltar Chess Congress as well as a tournament in Taiyuan, China.

Short reached his peak ELO rating of 2712 in April 2004. In the April 2005 FIDE rating list, Short was ranked number 28 in the world with an Elo rating of 2673, making him England's number two behind Michael Adams.

As well as his playing activities, Short wrote the chess column in the British newspaper, The Sunday Telegraph for a decade. With the Telegraph under new management in 2005, Nigel's chess column was replaced by a poker feature. His last column appeared on July 10 2005. He is now (in November 2005) writing a column for The Guardian. He also reported on the FIDE World Chess Championship 2005 in San Luis, Argentina, on the ChessBase news service.

In recognition of his chess accomplishments, in 1999 he was appointed MBE. He resides in Athens and is married to drama-therapist Rhea Argyro Karageorgiou. The couple have two children: Kyveli Aliki (born July 7, 1991) and Nicholas Darwin (born December 18, 1998).

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