Alexander Valeryevich Khalifman (Russian: Александр Валерьевич Халифман; born January 18, 1966, in Leningrad) is a Soviet and Russian chess Grandmaster of Jewish descent; he is also a former FIDE World Chess Champion.

When Khalifman was 6 years old, he was taught chess by his father.

He gained the Grandmaster title in 1990 with one particularly good early result being his first place in the 1990 New York Open ahead of a host of strong players.

His most notable achievement was winning the FIDE World Chess Championship in 1999, a title he held until the following year. He was rated 44th in the world at the time, which some compared unfavorably to "Classical" World Champion Garry Kasparov being rated #1. Khalifman said after the tournament, "Rating systems work perfectly for players who play only in round robin closed events. I think most of them are overrated. Organizers invite same people over and over because they have the same rating and their rating stays high". Perhaps in response, Khalifman was invited to the next Linares chess tournament, and performed credibly (though placing below joint winner Kasparov).

Susan Polgar (born April 19, 1969, as Polgár Zsuzsanna and often known as Zsuzsa Polgár) is a Hungarian-American chess Grandmaster. She is an Olympic chess champion, a chess teacher, coach, writer and promoter and the head of the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence (SPICE) at Texas Tech University as well as the coach for the 2011 National Championship college chess team. She is the oldest of the famous "Polgár sisters": Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit. Susan is perhaps most famous for being a child prodigy at chess, for being the first female to earn the Grandmaster title through tournament play, and for breaking a number of gender barriers in chess.

On the July 1984 FIDE Rating List, at the age of 15, she became the top ranked woman player in the world, and remained ranked in the top three for the next 23 years. She was also the first woman in history to break the gender barrier by qualifying for the 1986 "Men's" World Championship. She was the Women's World Chess Champion from 1996 to 1999. In October 2005 Polgar had an Elo rating of 2577, making her the second-ranked woman in the world at the time, after her sister Judit Polgár. Polgar went on to win ten Olympic medals (5 Gold, 4 Silver and 1 Bronze) and four Women's World Championships. She has not played in official competition since 2006.

Vlastimil Hort (born 12 January 1944) is a chess Grandmaster of Czech nationality. During the 1960s and 1970s he was one of the world's strongest players and reached the Candidates stage of competition for the world chess championship, but was never able to compete for the actual title.

Hort was born in Kladno, Czechoslovakia and was a citizen of Czechoslovakia for the first part of his chess career, winning national championships in 1970, 1971, 1972, 1975, and 1977. He achieved the Grandmaster title in 1965 as a Czechoslovak citizen. While playing for Czechoslovakia he won a number of major tournaments (Hastings 1967-8, Skopje 1969, etc.), gaining recognition as one of the strongest non-Soviet players in the world. This led to him representing the "World" team in the great "USSR vs. Rest of the World" match of 1970, where he occupied fourth board and had a commendable +1 score against the formidable Soviet Grandmaster Lev Polugaevsky—in some regards his greatest result. He defected to the West after the 1985 Tunis Interzonal, moving to West Germany and winning the national championship of his new homeland in 1987, 1989, and 1991.

Klaus Bischoff (born June 9, 1961, in Ulm) is a German chess player. He was awarded the Grandmaster title by FIDE in 1990.

In international tournaments, he has taken a share of first place on a number of occasions, including Kecskemét 1988, Arosa 1996, Recklinghausen 1999, Essen 2000, Bad Zwesten 2003 and Bad Zwesten again in 2005. In 2006, he tied for 2nd-9th with Luke McShane, Stephen J. Gordon, Gawain Jones, Šarūnas Šulskis, Luís Galego, Danny Gormally and Karel van der Weide in the 2nd EU Individual Open Chess Championship in Liverpool.

He is a noted expert at rapid chess and is an eleven-time champion of his nation's blitz chess championship. In 1999, he shared first place at the prestigious Essen Rapidplay event with Vladimir Epishin.

Also a competitor in team chess events, he was part of the German team that took the silver medal at the 34th Chess Olympiad in Istanbul, 2000.