competing against stars such as Boris Gelfand, Vasyl Ivanchuk, Vladimir Akopian, Gregory Serper and Susan Polgar. Gelfand, Ivanchuk and Serper tied with him for the first place, but the tiebreak was the most number of wins and thanks to that Lautier became the youngest World Junior Champion; a record which is intact to date. The same year he became an International Master. In 1990, he became an International Grandmaster and also won the zonal tournament with 10.0/12 which qualified him to the inter-zonal. He started well at the inter-zonal with 3.5/4, beating strong players like Michael Adams, Vaganian and Yudasin but he lost to Viswanathan Anand and Alexei Shirov towards the end of the tournament and failed to qualify for the candidates’ matches. During this time, Lautier also improved his Russian, which he would learn to a fluent level alongside French, English and Japanese. Lautier was a long-time leader of his national team at Chess Olympiad and, with him at the helm, France turned from a country that finished mid-table in the Tournament of nations into a mighty chess nation. Lautier performed well at the 1993 interzonal tournament, qualifying for the candidates’ matches under FIDE rules. He triumphed in over 30 international tournaments and national club championships in France, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain. Besides Vasyl Ivanchuk, he is the only grandmaster who defeated every world champion of his time; he beat Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Alexander Khalifman, Vishwanathan Anand, Ruslan Ponomarev, Rustam Kasimdzhanov and Veselin Topalov. He is one of the few players who has a positive score of +2−1=7 against Garry Kasparov. He was the second of Vladimir Kramnik during the Classical World Chess Championship 2000 against Garry Kasparov. Despite all his success, Lautier never won the fight for the world championship. He partially realized his ambitions as a trainer: as part of Vladimir Kramnik’s team when he helped his friend to overcome Garry Kasparov. He is one of the founders of the Association of Chess Professionals and was its president from 2004 to 2005. Personal life He married Almira Skripchenko in 1997. Almira Skripchenko is a Woman Grandmaster and one of the strongest women chess players in late 1990s and early 2000s. They divorced in 2002. In 2007, he married his second wife Alissa with whom he has a daughter named Naomi. Business career As of 2022, Lautier no longer classified himself as a