Alejandro Ramírez (chess player)


Alejandro Tadeo Ramírez Álvarez is a Costa Rican-born American chess player. At the age of 15, he became the first Central American to achieve the title of Grandmaster and the second youngest chess grandmaster in the world at the time.

Career

Born in San José, Costa Rica, Ramírez started playing chess at the age of four after watching the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer" and was taught the game by his father, Jorge Ramírez.
In 1998 Ramírez won the Under 10 division of the Pan American Youth Chess Festival, held in Florianopolis, Brazil and this achievement earned him the title of FIDE Master.
He was awarded the title of International Master at the age of 13 by scoring 6½ points in the sub-zonal tournament held in Managua, Nicaragua in November 2001.
In 2002, he played for the Costa Rican team on board three at the 35th Chess Olympiad, held in Bled, Slovenia, scoring 9/14 points; he drew with Russian Grandmaster Alexander Morozevich among others.
Ramírez gained his first norm for the title of Grandmaster at the 2003 Capablanca Memorial in Havana, Cuba, where he scored 8/11 points. The second norm was obtained in August 2003 at the zonal tournament 2.3 in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where he tied for first place with Leinier Domínguez. This result earned Ramírez a spot in the FIDE World Chess Championship 2004, where he was eliminated in the first round by the eventual winner, Rustam Kasimdzhanov.
He achieved his third norm at the age of 15 by scoring 7½/10 in the Los Inmortales Tournament in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in November 2003. FIDE awarded Ramírez the grandmaster title in 2004, making him the first chess grandmaster from the centro-American area.
He took part in the 2004 Chess Olympiad in Calvià playing for Costa Rica on top board.
In 2008, Ramírez took first place in the Morelia Open and played on board one for the Costa Rican team at the 38th Chess Olympiad.
He won the 2010 US Chess Open in Irvine, California. In 2011 he transferred to the United States Chess Federation.
In May 2013, Ramírez tied for first with Gata Kamsky in the U.S. Chess Championship, after they both scored 6½/9. Ramírez was declared runner-up after the playoff, where he drew the two rapid games and lost the Armageddon game, in which he had 19 minutes and 45 seconds against Kamsky's 45 minutes. This result enabled him to qualify for the Chess World Cup 2013, where he was knocked out by Evgeny Tomashevsky in the first round, after the Armageddon tiebreaker. Ramírez finished at the 2013 World Open with a score of 6½/9.
He finished in the 2014 Carlos Torre Repetto Memorial.
Ramirez served as one of the seconds of Fabiano Caruana during the 2018 World Chess Championship match.

Personal life

Ramírez graduated from the University of Texas in Dallas with a master's degree in arts and technology, video game design.