Wesley So (born October 9, 1993) is a Filipino chess grandmaster. A chess prodigy, he achieved the GM title at the age of 14 years, 1 month and 28 days, making him the 8th youngest person to achieve the Grandmaster title in the history of chess. Before becoming a Grandmaster, So had become the youngest Filipino International Master at the age of 12 years and 10 months. He won the 2009 Corus chess tournament for the Grandmaster C group.

Wesley So's world ranking is 99th as of March 2012. He previously was the strongest Under-16 player in the world. He is currently ranked 9th highest junior (Under-20) in the world. His current FIDE rating is 2669 (see live rating). In January 2005, So raised his rating from 2165 to 2216 the following year. In January 2007, he improved his mark to 2451 before reaching 2526 exactly a year later. In October 2008, he was at 2610 and by doing so, he became the youngest player ever in the history of the game to break the 2600 Elo barrier, breaking the record previously held by Magnus Carlsen. In January 2009, he achieved a rating of 2627, a Philippine national record, surpassing the Elo 2621 rating of GM Mark Paragua in April 2006.

Boris Abramovich Gelfand (Belarusian: Барыс Абрамавіч Гельфанд; Hebrew: בוריס אברמוביץ' גלפנד‎; born 24 June 1968) is a Belarusian-born Israeli chess Grandmaster. He won the 2011 Candidates Tournament and faced World Champion Viswanathan Anand for the World Chess Championship 2012. Although the match was level at 6–6, Gelfand lost in the rapid tie break games.

Boris Gelfand was born in Minsk, Belarussian SSR, on 24 June 1968. His parents, Abram and Nella, were engineers. His father bought him a book about chess, Journey to the Chess Kingdom, by Averbakh and Beilin, when he was four years old. In 1980–1983, he attended the Tigran Petrosian School, where he met the former world champion in person and received advice that impacted on his life as a chess player: “I remember Petrosian saying to me that I shouldn’t make a single move without having an idea: ‘Even when you’re playing blitz, always think!’"

In 1998, Gelfand immigrated to Israel and settled in Rishon LeZion, where he became Israel's top ranking chess player. He is married to Maya.

Alexei Dmitrievich Shirov (Russian: Алексей Дмитриевич Широв, Latvian: Aleksejs Širovs; born July 4, 1972) is a Soviet-born Latvian chess grandmaster. He has consistently ranked among the world's top players since the early 1990s, and reached a ranking as high as number four in 1998. Shirov is also a well-regarded chess author.

Shirov became the World Champion (under 16) in 1988, the World Under-20 Vice-Champion in 1990 (second on tiebreaks to Ilya Gurevich), and achieved the title of Grandmaster in 1990. Shirov is the winner of numerous international tournaments: Biel 1991, Madrid 1997 (shared first place with Veselin Topalov), Ter Apel 1997, Monte Carlo 1998, Mérida 2000, two time winner of the Paul Keres Memorial International Chess Tournament in Tallinn, Estonia, with victories in 2004 and 2005 just to name a few. He won the 2005 Canadian Open Chess Championship.

In 1998 Shirov's ranking rose to number four in the world. On the basis of his rating, he was invited to play a ten game match against Vladimir Kramnik to select a challenger for World Champion Garry Kasparov. Shirov won the match with two wins, no losses and seven draws. However the plans for the Kasparov match fell through when sufficient financial backing could not be found. When Kasparov instead played Kramnik for the world title in 2000, Shirov maintained that the match was invalid and he was the rightful challenger.

Alexander Igorevich Grischuk (Russian: Алекса́ндр И́горевич Грищу́к) (born October 31, 1983) is a Russian chess grandmaster and Russian Champion in 2009. He has won two team gold medals and one individual bronze medal at Chess Olympiads.

In the FIDE World Chess Championship 2000, Grischuk he made it to the semifinals, losing to Alexei Shirov. In the FIDE World Chess Championship 2004 he made it to the quarter finals, where he lost 3–1 to eventual champion Rustam Kasimdzhanov.

Grischuk finished in the top 10 in the 2005 FIDE World Cup, which qualified him for the 2007 Candidates Tournament in May–June 2007. He won his matches against Vladimir Malakhov (+2 −0 =3) and Sergei Rublevsky (tied at +1 −1 =4, winning the rapid playoff +2 −0 =1), to advance to the eight-player FIDE World Chess Championship 2007 tournament. In that tournament he scored 5.5 out of 14, placing last in the eight-player field.

In 2009, Grischuk won the Russian Chess Championship. In the same year he became the champion of Linares 2009, winning on tie-break over Vassily Ivanchuk because he had more wins. In 2010, he finished second in Linares to Veselin Topalov.

Levon Grigor Aronian (Armenian: Լևոն Գրիգորի Արոնյան; born 6 October 1982) is an Armenian chess Grandmaster and the reigning World Blitz Chess Champion. On the May 2012 FIDE list, he had an Elo rating of 2825, making him number two in the world and third highest of all time.

Aronian won the Chess World Cup 2005. He led the Armenian national team to the Gold medals in the 2006 (Turin) and 2008 (Dresden) Chess Olympics and at the World Team Chess Championship in Ningbo 2011. He won the FIDE Grand Prix 2008–2010, qualifying him for the Candidates tournament for the World Chess Championship 2012, where he was knocked out in the first round. He was also the World Chess960 Champion in 2006 and 2007, the World Rapid Chess Champion in 2009, and is the current World Blitz Chess Champion.

Aronian was declared the best sportsman of Armenia in 2005 and was awarded the title of "Honoured Master of Sport of the Republic of Armenia" in 2009.

Aronian was born on 6 October 1982 in Yerevan, Armenia, to Seda Sarkisovna, a mining engineer and Grigory Leontievich, a physicist. He was taught to play chess by his sister Lilit at the age of nine. His first coach was the Grandmaster Melikset Khachiyan. An early sign of his ability came when he won the 1994 World Youth Chess Championship (under-12) in Szeged with 8/9, ahead of future luminaries Étienne Bacrot, Ruslan Ponomariov, Francisco Vallejo Pons, and Alexander Grischuk.