Keith Arkell

Keith Arkell
Full name	Keith Charles Arkell
Country	England
Born	(1961-01-08) 8 January 1961 (age 63) Birmingham, England, UK
Title	Grandmaster (1995)
Peak rating	2545 (July 1996)

Keith Charles Arkell (born 8 January 1961) is an English chess Grandmaster.

He won the English Chess Championship in 2008. In 2014 he was European Senior (50+) Champion, and, later in the year, tied for first in the World Senior (50+) Championship, but received the silver medal on tie-break.

Chess career

Arkell was born in Birmingham, and learned to play chess aged 13. His brother Nicholas was also a strong player.

In the early part of the 2000s, before taking a break from serious chess, he showed that he could perform consistently at a high level; he tied for second place at the 2001

In subsequent years he focused his chess play on the weekend congress circuit, rather than competing in overseas tournaments. However, he then bucked the trend in 2007 and 2008 by touring the USA. His itinerary included the

Arkell won the 2014 European Senior Chess Championship in Porto. It was the first year the championship had been split into two separate age categories; 50 years plus and 65 years plus. He won the former and was later voted the English Chess Federation's Player of the Year for 2014.

Arkell shared first at the 2014 World Senior (50+) Championship, in Katerini, with 8.5/11 losing on tiebreak to Zurab Sturua.^[6]

In 2015 Arkell finished equal first in the Vienna Open, scoring 7.5/9 in a field of 465 players, 138 of whom were titled. He received second prize on tie-break.^[7]

Arkell won the 2021 British online Championship with 7.5/9, a point ahead of runners up Michael Adams and Bogdan Lalic.

In 2022 England won the World Senior (50+) Team Championship, and such was its dominance that four of its five team members, Michael Adams, Nigel Short, Mark Hebden and Arkell himself won gold medals for the best performance on each of their respective boards. https://fide.com/news/1839 Later that year the team won the European title, with Arkell again collecting the gold medal for his board 2 performance. https://en.chessbase.com/post/european-senior-team-championships-2022-report

In 2020, he authored a second book, Arkell's Endings (published by GingerGM).

Playing style

As

In an interview in 2009 with Streatham and Brixton Chess Club,[9] Arkell suggests that the great precision required in long, exacting wins by players such as Ulf Andersson and Anatoly Karpov is the highest art form in chess and that for many years it never occurred to him that the majority of players would not share his enthusiasm. In the same interview, he laments that a reputation for keeping a tight rein on games and grinding out wins on the UK weekend circuit to support an existence as a professional chess player has negatively influenced coverage of his achievements by chess journalists and harmed his chances of selection for the England national team by overshadowing his record in international events.

Personal life

Keith Arkell was married to