page_title: Fabiano Caruana
section_title: 2016
hierarchical_section_title: Fabiano Caruana / Chess career / 2016
caption_attribution_description: Fabiano Caruana receives his medal
context_page_description: Fabiano Luigi Caruana is an Italian and American chess player. A chess prodigy, he became a grandmaster at the age of 14 years, 11 months, and 20 days—the youngest grandmaster in the history of both Italy and the United States at the time.
  Born in Miami to Italian-American parents, Caruana grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He played for the United States until 2005, when he transferred to Italy. He earned his grandmaster title in 2007, and in the same year won his first Italian Chess Championship, a feat he repeated in 2008, 2010, and 2011. He won the Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting in 2012, 2014, and 2015. He also won the Sinquefield Cup 2014, recording a historic 3103 performance rating and improving his Elo rating to 2844, becoming the third-highest-rated player in history. He transferred back to the US in 2015.
  Having won the FIDE Grand Prix 2014–15, Caruana qualified for the Candidates Tournament 2016, where he was runner-up to Sergey Karjakin. He won the 2016 US Chess Championship, and represented the US on board one at the 42nd Chess Olympiad, winning team gold and individual bronze. He won the London Chess Classic in 2017.
context_section_description: In January, at the 2016 Tata Steel Chess Tournament, Caruana shared second (along with Ding Liren) with a score of 8 points out of 13 (+5-2=6), defeating Michael Adams, Wei Yi, Loek Van Wely, Pavel Eljanov, and Ding Liren, and losing to David Navara and Evgeny Tomashevsky. Had he defeated Tomashevsky, he would have at least tied for 1st place with Magnus Carlsen. Through this tournament, he gained 7 rating points and moved to #3 in the world. By March, as part of the qualification cycle for the World Chess Championship 2016, Caruana participated in the Candidates Tournament 2016, held in Moscow, Russia, from March 10–30 in the Central Telegraph (Центральный телеграф) Building. The lineup of the tournament included Viswanathan Anand, Hikaru Nakamura, Sergey Karjakin, Peter Svidler, Veselin Topalov, Anish Giri, and Levon Aronian. In the final round Caruana had Black against Sergey Karjakin in a winner-takes-all game. A complex position developed in which he made a mistake and was eventually defeated, making Karjakin the official challenger. Caruana eventually finished with a +1 score. On April 25, Caruana became US Chess Champion for the first time, after defeating IM Akshat Chandra in the last round of the US Chess Championship. He finished the tournament with 8.5 points out of 11 games, and went undefeated. The field consisted of world top ten players Hikaru Nakamura and Wesley So; top 100 players Ray Robson, Sam Shankland, Gata Kamsky, and Alexander Onischuk; GMs Alexander Shabalov, Varuzhan Akobian, Jeffery Xiong and Aleksandr Lenderman; and IM Akshat Chandra. In September, he played first board of the US Team at the 42nd Chess Olympiad. The US team won the gold medal, while Caruana won the bronze medal for first board.
caption: Caruana receives the bronze medal for Board 1 at the Chess Olympiad
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