Joël Lautier

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Joël Lautier
Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
TitleGrandmaster (1990)
Years active1985-2009
FIDE rating2658 (April 2024)
Peak rating2687 (January 2002)
Peak rankingNo. 13 (January 1995)

Joël Lautier (French pronunciation:

CEO of the Moscow-based investment banking firm RGG Capital.[1]

Early life

Joel Lautier was born in

Ontario, Canada on April 12, 1973. His father was French and his mother was Japanese. Later on, the family moved to France. He started playing chess when he was three and a half years old. His father introduced him to the game of chess. His father was a pretty decent player – rated around 2200 who often gave him interesting puzzles and quizzes and kept him interested in the game. He progressed quite quickly due to this. When he was 11, he started to beat his father on a regular basis. He dropped out of school when he was 16 as he wanted to focus more on chess tournaments.[2]

Chess career

Lautier won the Paris Championship for under-10 and then the under-10 French national title. In 1986, he participated in the U-14 World Championship in

Judit Polgar. He beat Sofia and drew against Judit. Eventually, he won the event with a good margin of 1.5 points, ahead of both the Polgar sisters. He worked with his father until he got his first world title in 1986, and then he trained with an IM named Didier Sellos.[3]

Korchnoi
looking at the board.

In 1988, at the age of 15, he won the

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

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.[5]

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.[6] Since 2009, Lautier has been focusing on his business/professional activities rather than chess.

Personal life

He married

Woman Grandmaster and one of the strongest women chess players in late 1990s and early 2000s. They divorced in 2002.[7] In 2007, he married his second wife Alissa with whom he has a daughter named Naomi.[8]

Business career

As of 2022, Lautier no longer classified himself as a chess professional but as a businessman working in Russia. He quit his professional chess career in 2006 to pursue a career in investment banking in Russia. After his professional playing career, he turned to business in 2006 and made use of his connections to Russia which he found useful. At first, he worked as chairman of the mergers and acquisitions division of the European Business Associate. He quickly climbed up the ladder and is currently the CEO of RGG Capital, a company that specializes in Mergers and Acquisitions. In fact, he founded his mergers and acquisitions consultancy RGG (Russia goes global) which specialized in buying and selling assets in Russia. He also studied at Skolkovo management school in Moscow. He advised several large Russian companies in the oil, electricity, and pharmaceuticals sectors and acted as a non-executive director for Evropeyskaya Elektrotekhnica, a Russian electronics company.

In 2020, he became a non-executive director and member of the supervisory board of the Russian bank

war in Ukraine. The same day Anatoly Karpov was also added to the US sanctions list with Lautier. French business newspaper Les Echos called the US sanctioning Lautier 'bizarre' and noted him having already resigned from his position in the bank on 25 February, the day after the bank itself was placed on the sanctions list.[9] As of June 2023, Lautier is no longer on the sanction list after OFAC in the US Department of Treasury accepted a petition he filed challenging the validity of his designation.[10]

Notable games

References

  1. ^ "The chess games of Joel Lautier". www.chessgames.com.
  2. ^ "A school drop-out, a world class GM and a CEO (1/2)". en.chessbase.com. August 11, 2016. Retrieved November 12, 2022.
  3. ^ "A school drop-out, a world class GM and a CEO (1/2)". en.chessbase.com. 11 August 2016.
  4. ^ "1988 World Junior chess championship". www.chessgames.com. Retrieved November 12, 2022.
  5. ^ "A school drop-out, a world class GM and a CEO (2/2)". en.chessbase.com. August 16, 2016. Retrieved November 12, 2022.
  6. ^ "Joel Lautier". ruchess.ru.
  7. ^ "20 самых красивых шахматисток мира". www.sports.ru (in Russian). 9 June 2016.
  8. ^ "A school drop-out, a world class GM and a CEO (2/2)". en.chessbase.com. 16 August 2016.
  9. ^ "Joël Lautier, the French chess star on the US sanctions list". France24.com. 23 April 2022. Retrieved 23 April 2022.
  10. ^ "Russia-related Designations; Issuance of Amended Russia-related Directive 4, Russia-related General Licenses; Publication of Russia-related Determinations; and New and Amended Frequently Asked Questions". 19 May 2023. Retrieved 26 June 2023.
  11. ^ "Garry Kasparov vs Joel Lautier (1994) Chess is Mental Torture". www.chessgames.com.
  12. ^ "Joel Lautier vs Peter Leko (1997)". www.chessgames.com.
  13. ^ "Veselin Topalov vs Joel Lautier (1998)". www.chessgames.com.
  14. ^ "Joel Lautier vs Anatoly Karpov (1993)". www.chessgames.com.
  15. ^ "Joel Lautier vs Viswanathan Anand (1994)". www.chessgames.com.
  16. ^ "Joel Lautier vs Ivan Sokolov (1995)". www.chessgames.com.
  17. ^ "Joel Lautier vs Victor Bologan (1999)". www.chessgames.com.

External links

Media related to Joël Lautier at Wikimedia Commons Joel Lautier player profile and games at Chessgames.com

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