Jeffery Xiong is an American chess player. He is the third youngest in the US to qualify, at age fourteen, for the title Grandmaster, which FIDE awarded him in September 2015.
Chess career
Xiong was aged seven when he played in his first tournament, quickly achieving the USCF title of expert on August 22, 2009. He was awarded the title FIDE Master a year later at the World Youth Chess Championships, where he was the runner-up to Jason Cao in the U10 category. Xiong achieved his norms required for the title International Master by scoring 6/9 points at the 4th Annual Golden State Open in January 2013, 5/9 at the UT Dallas Spring FIDE Open and 5½/9 at the Annual Philadelphia Open, both in March 2013. His title was confirmed in 2014, when his FIDE rating reached 2400. He achieved the norms for the Grandmaster title by scoring 6/9 points at the Chicago Open in 2014, 6/9 at the UT Dallas Open in November 2014, 7/9 at the Chicago Open in May 2015. Xiong is trained by Babakuli Annakov. Xiong came second at the US Junior Closed Chess Championships in July 2015 with a score of 6½/9. He won the 7th Saint Louis Grandmaster Invitational 2015 with a score of 7/9. He later received the organizer's wild card invitation to the 2016 US Chess Championship, where he finished 6th out of 12 players, with 1 win, 1 loss, and 9 draws. In February 2016 he entered the top ten players in the world under age 20, and a month later he reached a FIDE rating of 2600 for the first time. In July 2016, Xiong won the B group of the Capablanca Memorial and the US Closed Junior Championship. The following month, he won the World Junior Chess Championship, held in Bhubaneswar, India with a round to spare. In March 2018, Xiong won the St. Louis Spring Classic A group, a round-robin tournament of category XVII, with an unbeaten score of 6½ points out of 9, 1½ points clear of the field. His performance rating was 2819. One year later, he won again with an unbeaten 6/9 score, half point clear of second-placed Illya Nyzhnyk. In September 2019, Xiong participated in the FIDE World Cup. Sedeed 31st in the tournament, he made it to the quarterfinals by beating Igor Lysyj, Parham Maghsoodloo, Anish Giri and Jan-Krzysztof Duda. Xiong was then eliminated by the eventual winner, Teimour Radjabov
