Grigoriy Oparin

Russian-American Grandmaster Grigoriy Oparin showed tremendous potential at an early age as exhibited by his performance at the Moscow Under 16 Championship in 2005 where he obtained a FIDE rating of 1980 at the age of 8. He made steady progress the next few years and was awarded the International Master title at 14 and the Grandmaster title at 16. The following year in 2014, while still a teenager, he had a big breakthrough scoring 7.5/11 points in the European Championship and qualifying for the FIDE World Cup. The same year he also won the Russian Junior Championship. Oparin continued his upward rise while earning his undergraduate degree at Russian State University. He scored fifty percent in the Superfinal of the 69th Russian Championship in 2016 and at the end of that year had the best result of all the participants in the Nutcracker Match of the Generations in Moscow. Grigoriy joined the University of Missouri Chess team in the fall of 2019 making his debut in the Pan-Am Intercollegiate that December. The move to Mizzou suited Oparin well as witnessed by the number of fine results he produced the next five years. Highlights include tying for second with Fabiano Caruana in the 2021 FIDE Grand Swiss, and being a member of the Mizzou team that won the President's Cup (College Chess Final Four) in 2024. Oparin, who has represented the United States since 2022, received a bachelor’s degree in Fundamental and Applied Linguistics from the Russian State University of Linguistics and was awarded two masters degrees by the University of Missouri-Columbia (Romance Languages with Emphasis in Spanish and Economics). His GPA for the three degrees was just shy of a perfect 4.0. He is presently the assistant chess coach at Mizzou.