Ruslan Ponomariov

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Ruslan Ponomariov (Ukrainian: Руслан Пономарьов; Russian: Русла́н Пономарёв) (born October 11, 1983) is a Ukrainian chess player and former FIDE world champion. In the October 2006 FIDE Elo rating list, Ponomariov had a rating of 2705, making him number twenty in the world and the Ukrainian number two, behind Vassily Ivanchuk. His highest ever rating was 2743 in the April 2002 FIDE list.

Ponomariov was born in Horlivka in Ukraine. In 1994 he placed third in the World Under-12 Championship at the age of ten, and the following year won it at the age of eleven. In 1996 he won the European Under-18 Championship at the age of just twelve, and the following year won the World Under-18 Championship. In 1998, at the age of fourteen, he was awarded the Grandmaster title, making him the youngest ever player at that time to hold the title.

Among Ponomariov's notable later results are first at the Donetsk Zonal in 1998, 5/7 in the European Club Cup 2000 (including a victory over then-FIDE World Champion Alexander Khalifman), joint first with 7.5/9 at Torshavn 2000, 8.5/11 for Ukraine in the 2001 Chess Olympiad in Istanbul, winning gold medal on board 2, and first place with 7/10 in the 2001 Governor's Cup in Kramatorsk.

In 2002 he beat his fellow countryman Vassily Ivanchuk in the final of the FIDE Knock-Out World Championship by a score of 4.5-2.5 to become FIDE world champion at the age of eighteen, the first teenager to ever become world champion. In the same year he finished second in the very strong Linares tournament behind Garry Kasparov. His result in the strong 2003 Corus tournament at Wijk aan Zee was less good - despite having the third highest Elo rating, he finished only join eleventh out of fourteen players with 6/13, and at Linares the same year he finished only fifth out of seven with 5.5/12.

There were plans for him to play a fourteen game match against Kasparov in Yalta in September 2003, the winner of which would go on to play the winner of a match between Vladimir Kramnik and Péter Lékó as part of the so-called "Prague Agreement" to reunify the World Chess Championship (since 1993 there have been two world chess championships). However, this was called off after Ponomariov refused to sign his contract without reservation. He remained FIDE champion until Rustam Kasimdzhanov won the next Knock-Out World Championship in 2004.

On Ponomariov's 20th birthday, October 11, 2003, he became the first high-profile player to default a game because of his mobile phone ringing during play. This happened in round one of the European Team Championship in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, when Ponomariov was playing black against Swedish GM Evgenij Agrest.

In his games with white, Ponomariov has almost always played 1. e4 (see algebraic notation and chess opening), entering the main lines of the Ruy Lopez and Sicilian Defence. With black, he has played the Sicilian against 1. e4 and also replied 1... e5, going into the Ruy Lopez. Against 1. d4 he has adopted a variety of defences, including the Queen's Gambit Accepted, the Queen's Indian Defence and the King's Indian Defence. Earlier in his career he experimented with the Benko Gambit and Pirc Defence, but as of 2003 these have fallen out of his repertoire.