Ben Finegold

Benjamin Philip Finegold (born September 6, 1969) is an American chess grandmaster.

Ben Finegold
Finegold, Las Vegas 2009
Full nameBenjamin Finegold
CountryUnited States
Born (1969-09-06) 6 September 1969
Detroit, United States
TitleGrandmaster (2009)
FIDE rating2476 (February 2021)
Peak rating2563 (January and April 2006)

Finegold was born in Detroit, Michigan into a chess family, the son of chess master Ron Finegold and his wife Rita. Stuart Rachels says when he was twelve he saw Ben Finegold and his father Ron hustling in a chess club at Manhattan, offering 8-1 money bets on one-minute-per-player bullet games.[1] Finegold became a USCF master at the age of 14, life master at 15, senior master at 16, international master at 20, and grandmaster at 40.

Finegold said he had played in hundreds of tournament games a year when he was young: "I loved chess and if I lost it did not matter to me. That's the main thing you have to do to get better at chess - if you lose hundreds of games in a row, that's OK".[2] Finegold tied for first place in the 1994 (Chicago, Illinois) and 2007 (Cherry Hill, New Jersey) U.S. Open Chess Championships. He tied for first (and achieved a grandmaster norm) in the 2002 World Open (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), and also tied for first in the 2005 and 2008 National Open Chess Championships (Las Vegas, Nevada). He was ranked as one of the top 40 players in the United States on the August 2013 USCF rating list. Finegold has played in nine U.S. Chess Championships: 1994 (Key West, Florida), 1999 (Salt Lake City, Utah), 2002 (Seattle, Washington), 2005 (La Jolla, California), 2006 (San Diego, California), 2008 (Tulsa, Oklahoma), 2010 (Saint Louis, Missouri), 2011 (Saint Louis, Missouri), and 2013 (Saint Louis, Missouri).

In September 2009, he earned the grandmaster title. He was the grandmaster-in-residence of the Saint Louis Chess Club (formerly the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis) until August 14, 2012, where he filmed a number of chess YouTube videos.

He has been a live commentator at the US Chess Championship, U.S. Junior Chess Championship and Sinquefield Cup, and he frequently gave lively and often humorous instructional lectures at the Saint Louis Chess Club.[3][4] Finegold's lectures are available on the YouTube channels of the Saint Louis Chess Club as well as the channel of the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Atlanta and on Twitch.

References
  1. Stuart Rachels (10 April 2020). "22". The Best I Saw in Chess: Games, Stories and Instruction from an Alabama Prodigy Who Became U.S. Champion. New in Chess. ISBN 978-90-5691-882-8.
  2. Stephen Moss (22 September 2016). The Rookie: An Odyssey through Chess (and Life). Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 266. ISBN 978-1-4081-8971-9.
  3. "Benoni, Benko Gambit, Nimzo Indian - GM Ben Finegold - 2014.01.26". YouTube.com. Retrieved May 14, 2018.
  4. "Opening Traps and Loose Pieces with GM Ben Finegold". Retrieved July 23, 2018.

Further reading
  • "The 40-Year-Old GM", by Ben Finegold, Chess Life, February 2010, pp. 18–25.
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