Kiril Alekseenko is one of the youngest and best players right now in Russia, boasts really high quality in his play. Nowadays he figures among the list of the best 100 players of the world, for well-earned success.
Kiril Alekseenko is a really interesting grandmaster, especially because he doesn’t keep anything to himself. He has been really straight in his interviews; he even tells us some stuff about his personal life.
Alekseenko is a regular university student with a normal life but is also a super grandmaster at the top level. His story is very interesting to hear, and there is a lot of expectations for him in the future.
Just right now, the new generation of chess players is forming, and even taking over, how far will this player get? Do you think Alekseenko is to face and best other players like Firouzja or Nihal Sarin?
In this post, we take a look at Kiril’s Career and the story of how he became one of the best players in the world.
Table of Contents
How Kiril Alekseenko progressed in chess
It’s interesting to know that who taught the chess rules to Alekseenko for the first time was his grandfather. He kept on playing and eventually winning his grandfather, which is why his grandfather took Kiril with a friend.
The grandfather took his grandson to Sergey Alexeevich, a recognized chess trainer that started with Kiril Alekseenko. After some time, he learned better the game and started improving while working with Sergey.
They spent hours analyzing classic games and sharing their love for chess as they also played blitz a lot. After some time, Kiril’s family moves to San Petersburg, where he joined the Chigorin chess club.
This is a very recognized club in the zone, where he started to get trained by the masters Vladimir Shushpanov and Andrei Lukin. These masters also worked with the proficient grandmaster Peter Leko, they are really good at what they do!
This is how Kiril Alekseenko improved and started winning medals and tournaments. Nowadays, he is still working with these masters after 10 years, and he is now one of the best.
Kiril Alekseenko’s achievements
First, he played and won the Europe Championship in the U10 category, just being 12 years old won the U16 San Petersburg Championship. And he also became the U14 World Chess Champion, at this point Kiril Alekseenko seemed unstoppable!
Kiril also won the Mikhail Chigorin in memoriam as the absolute best, in San Petersburg. Also won the tournament in 2016 with an outstanding 8/9 points ahead of grandmasters like Gata Kamsky and Evgeny Romanov.
Unless all of the tournaments were in San Petersburg, you can’t doubt this city has a world-class level. In San Petersburg live extremely strong grandmasters like Nikita Vitiugov, for example.
He won this prestigious tournament for the third time in a row, which gave him the fame of being the owner of the tournament.
Then, Kiril Alekseenko played the Rilton Cup and the PRO Chess League in a team’s tournaments. Getting impressive results in both of these, he played with the team named “Stockholm Snowballs”, nowadays called “Baden-Baden”.
Alekseenko played a decisive role in his team’s classification, he also won the Europe Club Championship in 2018. 2019 was the best year for him, he shared first place in Gibraltar Chess Tournament with Vladislav Artemiev and David Navara.
Kiril Alekseenko debuted in the Super Russian Chess League in the Turkey Team’s Tournament and Russia’s Super finals. Both competitions surprised everyone once again with a great score and got to the top 100 best chess players in the world.
This gave him the opportunity to play in the World’s Cup where he could best be very talented grandmasters. Pentala Harikrishna was one of them, but finally got eliminated in the 4th round by GM Ding Liren.
Kiril Alekseenko played in the Chess.com FIDE Grand Swiss, where he faced world-class masters. He couldn’t win but was 0,5 points behind the winners, Fabiano Caruana and Wang Hao. He managed to draw against Magnus Carlsen, Anand, Vitiugoc, and Wesley So and had the same points as Levon Aronian, Hikaru Nakamura, and Carlsen.
Interesting games by Kiril Alekseenko
This is not common, but do you want to see a grandmaster with more than 2600 resigning in 20 moves? Well, this is a game between GM Alekseenko and GM Markus Ragger, that is simply amazing to see…
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