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.

Robert James "Bobby" Fischer (March 9, 1943 – January 17, 2008) was an American chess Grandmaster and the 11th World Chess Champion. He is widely considered one of the greatest chess players of all time. Fischer was also a best-selling chess author. After ending his competitive career, he proposed a new variant of chess and a modified chess timing system. His idea of adding a time increment after each move is now standard, and his variant Chess960 is gaining in popularity.

A chess prodigy, at age 13 Fischer won a "brilliancy" that became known as The Game of the Century. Starting at age 14, he played in eight United States Championships, winning each by at least a point. At age 15½, he became both the youngest grandmaster and the youngest candidate for the World Championship up to that time. He won the 1963–64 U.S. Championship 11–0, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament. In the early 1970s he became one of the most dominant players in modern history—winning the 1970 Interzonal by a record 3½-point margin and winning 20 consecutive games, including two unprecedented 6–0 sweeps in the Candidates Matches. According to research by Jeff Sonas, in 1971 Fischer had separated himself from the rest of the world by a larger margin of playing skill than any player since the 1870s. He became the first official World Chess Federation (FIDE) number-one rated chess player in July 1971, and his 54 total months at number one is the third longest of all time.

Anatoly Yevgenyevich Karpov (Russian: Анато́лий Евге́ньевич Ка́рпов, Anatolij Evgen'evič Karpov; born May 23, 1951) is a Russian chess grandmaster and former World Champion. He was the official world champion from 1975 to 1985 when he was defeated by Garry Kasparov. He played three matches against Kasparov for the title from 1986 to 1990, before becoming FIDE World Champion once again after Kasparov broke away from FIDE in 1993. He held the title until 1999, when he resigned his title in protest against FIDE's new world championship rules. For his decades-long standing among the world's elite, Karpov is considered one of the greatest players of all time.

His tournament successes include over 160 first-place finishes. He had a peak Elo rating of 2780, and his 90 total months at world number one is second all-time behind only Garry Kasparov since the inception of the FIDE ranking list in 1971.

Since 2005, he has been a member of the Public Chamber of Russia. He has recently involved himself in several humanitarian causes, such as advocating the use of iodised salt.

Ray Robson (born October 25, 1994) is an American chess player who holds the title of Grandmaster. In October 2009, about two weeks before turning 15, he became the youngest grandmaster-elect in history who plays for the United States (Italian-American Fabiano Caruana qualified for the title at 14 years and 350 days, but plays for Italy).

Robson's norms were gained at the Arctic Chess Challenge in Norway, at the 23rd North American FIDE Invitational in Chicago, and at the Pan-American Junior Championship in Montevideo, Uruguay. Robson will be playing in the 2010 U.S. Championship (seeded as US Junior Champion).

Robson was born in Guam to Gary Robson, a professor at the college of education (applied linguistics) at St. Petersburg College, and Yee-chen, a kindergarten teacher at Country Day School. They later moved to Largo, Florida, where they live today. An only child, he learned chess from his father at age three. He attended public school for kindergarten, then a public school for the gifted in first grade, then from grades 2-5 he was at a private Montessori school. He started homeschooling in grade 6.

Fabiano Luigi Caruana (born July 30, 1992) is a Grandmaster and chess prodigy with dual citizenship of Italy and the United States.

On 15 July 2007 Caruana became a Grandmaster at the age of 14 years, 11 months, 20 days – the youngest Grandmaster in the history of both Italy and the United States.

In the May 2012 FIDE list, he has an Elo rating of 2770, making him 8th in the world and Top World Junior.

Fabiano Caruana was born on July 30, 1992 in Miami, Florida of an Italian-American father and an Italian mother. At the age of 4 his family relocated from Miami, Florida to Park Slope, Brooklyn. Coincidentally, this was the same neighborhood where Bobby Fischer lived during his youth. At age 5, his chess talent was discovered in an after school chess program at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. That same year he played his first tournament at the Polgar Chess Center in Queens, New York.

Up to the age of twelve, he lived and played in the United States, occasionally traveling to Europe and South America for tournaments.