February Chess Lovers

Welcome to a Valentine's Day special release! Read about highly rated chess couples!

I wasn't planning to do anything special blogging-wise, but then we started a pool in BlogChamps to guess how many valentine-related blogs would be posted in chess.com's All-Blogs on February 14th. Our simple counting criteria was they had to be blogs with a Valentine's Day theme.

I forecast a quite large number. The basis for my estimate was the answer provided in Hitchiker's Guide to the Universe regarding the ultimate question about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. You have to think love and marriage and occupation gets wrapped up in all that. So, I started with that number and then added one. Why did I add one to reach 43? Simple fascination with prime numbers, that's all. Or maybe I was mentally adding a kid to the mix.

Then folks started betting on realistic numbers, thereby sparking my competitive instinct. Though all it did initially was smolder. Particularly after I checked and found there were only five Valentine's Day themed blogs posted on 14 February 2024. So, I started considering how I might rig the contest.

First, I considered multiple blogs about the Romantic Era of chess. Laziness crushed that idea. I really, really, really didn't want to dig through my files to find some lesser-known, great games by Andersson, Chigorin, Kieseritzky, Morphy, Zukertort, and other chevaliers of the 64 squares. Why lesser-known contests? Well, I wouldn't want to trot out the classic Evergreen game (sounds like a fitting December topic with Yule logs and all the festive trimmings) or The Immortal Game (sounds like something suitable for Connor Macleod of The Highlander..."there can be only one", but I know of at least ten) or even A Night at the Opera (one of the most overanalyzed games of all time: gain a lead in development, open lines, crush the king foolish enough to remain in the center). Given those games were out, that meant days' worth of work assessing and writing analyses for tens of contests. Thank you, no.

I wanted to keep it simpler. And visualization came to my aid. Well, an image created months ago popped to mind. Read on!!

Given inspiration, I turned my gaze toward chess couples (chess couplets came in a poor tenth)! Woe unto them!!

Much to my dismay, I discovered well over a hundred chess couples if you peer into history (though no further back than the 19th century). Oof, that's too many couples. As if the thought of boiling an ocean of undiscovered Romantic attacking chess games weren't chilling enough. Again, no thank you. I wasn't looking to write The Neverending Love Story (with apologies to Erich Segal, Taylor Swift, and Michael Ende).

Befuddled and stymied again by the boundaries of time, space, and my other activities (shh...we won't go into that here), I finally applied the simplest of sieves, winnowing the problem set down to a manageable quantity.

My criteria? Glad you asked! At least one member of the chess couple must have been born in February! (Tragically for my puerile musings, there were no February chess couplets paired up.)

Please note that primacy in total newsprint is afforded to the member of the couple who was actually born in February. After all, this is all about Valentine's Month, a quirky month that, while already shorter than its peers, has a day that disappears for three years out of every four.

My biggest disappointment while compiling this information? Valentina Gunina wasn't born in February. Rats, and with that great first name. Plus, she appears to be single, if one is to trust the all-seeing, all-knowing, oops-we-got-that-wrong-so-sorry internet. So it goes (to quote Vonnegut).

And away we go!!

Table of Contents
The Showalters
The Gulkos
The Efimenkos
The Skripchenkos
The Rapports
The Cornettes
Q.E.D.

Nellie Love and Jackson Whipps ShowalterFive-time U.S. CC, World Chess Hall of Fame inductee, former #9 worldwide

Jackson Whipps Showalter, aka the Kentucky Lion, (February 5, 1859 – February 5, 1935) was a five-time U.S. CC when matches determined the title. Although Showalter won five matches, he lost six other matches for the title. He was inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame in 2010. ChessMetrics estimates his peak rating at 2676 in September 1897 and lists him as #9 in the world on the April and May 1902 lists.

His wife, Nellie Love Marshal Showalter, was a strong player in her own right. She led in a match for the American Women’s CC but had to withdraw due to an illness.

Boris and Anna Gulko

Boris Franzevich Gulko (Russian: Борис Францевич Гулько, IPA: [bɐˈrʲiz ɡʊlʲˈko]), 9 February 1947, is a Soviet-American GM. He is the only person to win both the Soviet CC and the U.S.CC. He won the latter twice. He also won the U.S. Masters CC once. Gulko played for the Soviet Olympiad team in 1978 and for the U.S. team in every Olympiad from 1988 – 2004. His peak ELO of 2644 in January 2000 was reached over a decade after his highest ranking among the world’s top players, which was #14 in January 1989.

At age 32 he lost seven years of his chess career because his prominence as a Soviet refusenik led Soviet officials to prevent his attendance at peak tournaments. Perhaps they also feared his lifetime record of 3W-4D-1L against Kasparov! (That’s unlikely.) In 2004 Gulko lost a chance to compete in the FIDE World CC cycle when Libya refused to invite Jewish players to participate.

Anna Akhsharumova is a WGM who won the Women’s Soviet CC twice and the U.S. Women’s CC once. Her peak rating was 2400. Their combined peak ratings put them in the club for chess power couples rated over 5000 ELO, rolling in at 5044.

Maria and Zahar Efimenko

Almira Skripchenko and Laurent Fressinet

Jovana and Richard Rapport

Jovana Rapport (née Vojinović, Serbian Cyrillic: Јована Војиновић; born 18 February 1992) is a Serbian WGM who achieved her IM norms by November 2015 but lacks the 2400 ELO required. A two-time Montenegrin Women’s CC she is also a Serbian Women’s CC and the winner of the Mediterranean Women’s CC in 2009. Jovana’s peak rating was 2388 in February 2019 placing her #73 among all women. That said, her rating slipped to 2318 in February 2024, so she is quite far from achieving the requisite rating. She has played in five Women’s Olympiads, on first board four times and second board once. Her overall record is 21W-12D-12L.

She is married to Hungarian GM Richárd Rapport, and they live in Serbia. With his peak rating of 2776 they easily join the 5000+ couples club with a peak combined ELO of 5094.

Deimantė and Matthieu Cornette

Deimantė Cornette (born Deimantė Daulytė; 22 February 1989) is a Lithuanian IM and WGM who won the Lithuanian Women’s CC five times. She competed in the Women’s World CC in 2015 and after two draws at classic time controls, she checkmated her opponent in the first rapid game and could have done so in the second with one move but instead lost her queen. After that, the tiebreak went completely sideways, so we’ll leave it at that. Her peak rating was 2470 in July 2018. She still plays actively with a 2375 rating coming into January 2025.

She is married to GM Matthieu Cornette. With his peak rating of 2629 their combined peak ELOs easily place them in the 5000+ chess power couples club at 5099.

Februarius est amatoribus

Love does seem to blossom in the workplace. I met my wife at work...sort of. We were both in the Air Force. She was a professor in the Logistics School, and I was a student in the Engineering School. Never the twain (this is not a Samuel Clemens reference) would have met except some of her friends were also in my engineering courses and thought we two sarcastic people should get together. Thirty-plus years later, here we are. Though it still boggles my mind that she doesn't love chess, doesn't drink beer, and is allergic to pork (turkey bacon just isn't as good). Still, there's plenty of romance as we got engaged at midnight atop the Eiffel tower and were officially married in February (the unofficial ceremony took place on New Year's Eve.)

Hope you enjoyed this trip down Lover's Lane. At some point I will do some more work on chess couples, but come on, over a hundred? That's a lot. 

In the meantime, I'll be posting another of my monthly chess baby zodiacs on 28 February, barring world upheavals or internet interruptions.

If you want to read more about chess lovers, you might start with @turtlepro's post The Lovebirds of Chess (updated Feb 2024) or @Pete's post 14 Famous Chess Couples (circa 2016). If you'd like to read about an untitled (like the majority of us) chess couple who leveraged chess.com as their unexpected dating service, I recommend @MomOnaBreak's Cupid's Move: A Chess.com Click That Sparked an Extraordinary Love Story. On the other hand, if you want a more leisurely read about various chess couples, from the highest-rated couple to couples-only tournaments to chess personalities, I'll point you toward @NathanielGreen's Chess Romances (updated February 2022). If you'd like to take a historic look (circa 2009) at the chess couples with a combined rating of 5000+ I'll point you towards @Vlad_Akselrod's Strongest chess couples: 5000+ club (note that he credits Natalia Pogonina's website as the primary source for his post.) That last is certainly due for an update! 

So long and thanks for all the fish!