The Most Famous
CHESS PLAYERS from Iran
This page contains a list of the greatest Iranian Chess Players. The pantheon dataset contains 374 Chess Players, 2 of which were born in Iran. This makes Iran the birth place of the 40th most number of Chess Players behind Uzbekistan and Brazil.
Top 2
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Iranian Chess Players of all time. This list of famous Iranian Chess Players is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Alireza Firouzja (2003 - )
With an HPI of 37.05, Alireza Firouzja is the most famous Iranian Chess Player. His biography has been translated into 30 different languages on wikipedia.
Alireza Firouzja (Persian: علیرضا فیروزجا, pronounced [æliːɾeˈzɒː fiːɾuːzˈdʒɒː]; born 18 June 2003) is an Iranian and French chess grandmaster. Firouzja is the youngest player to have surpassed a FIDE rating of 2800, beating the previous record set by Magnus Carlsen by more than five months. A chess prodigy, Firouzja won the Iranian Chess Championship at age 12 and earned the Grandmaster title at 14. At 16, Firouzja became the second-youngest 2700-rated player. In 2021, at 18, he won the FIDE Grand Swiss tournament and an individual gold medal at the European Team Chess Championship. In 2022, Firouzja won the Grand Chess Tour. He qualified for the Candidates Tournament in 2022 and 2024. Firouzja left the Iranian Chess Federation in 2019 because of the country's longstanding policy against competing with Israeli players. Firouzja played under the FIDE flag until mid-2021, when he became a French citizen and began representing France, where he had already been living.
2. Atousa Pourkashiyan (1988 - )
With an HPI of 23.77, Atousa Pourkashiyan is the 2nd most famous Iranian Chess Player. Her biography has been translated into 16 different languages.
Atousa Pourkashiyan (Persian: آتوسا پورکاشیان; Persian pronunciation: [ɒːtuːˈsɒː puːɾkɒːʃiˈyɒːn]; born 16 May 1988) is an Iranian-American chess player. She holds the title of Woman Grandmaster, which FIDE awarded her in 2009.
Pantheon has 2 people classified as chess players born between 1988 and 2003. Of these 2, 2 (100.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living chess players include Alireza Firouzja and Atousa Pourkashiyan.
