page_title: Grandmaster (chess)
section_title: Early tournament use
hierarchical_section_title: Grandmaster (chess) / History / Early tournament use
caption_attribution_description: English: photo of Dr. Siegbert Tarrasch, German physician and chess grandmaster; lost to Emanuel Lasker in the world chess championship match 1908.
context_page_description: Grandmaster is a title awarded to chess players by the world chess organization FIDE. Apart from World Champion, Grandmaster is the highest title a chess player can attain.
  Once achieved, the title is generally held for life, though exceptionally it may be revoked for cheating. The abbreviation IGM for International Grandmaster is also sometimes used, particularly in older literature.
  The title of Grandmaster, along with the lesser FIDE titles of International Master and FIDE Master, is open to both men and women. The majority of grandmasters are men, but a number of women have also earned the GM title, with the first three being Nona Gaprindashvili in 1978, Maia Chiburdanidze in 1984, and Susan Polgar in 1991. Since about 2000, most of the top 10 women have held the GM title.
  There is also a Woman Grandmaster title with lower requirements awarded only to women.
  FIDE awards separate Grandmaster titles to composers and solvers of chess problems, International Grandmaster for chess compositions to the former and International Solving Grandmaster to the latter. The International Correspondence Chess Federation awards the title of International Correspondence Chess Grandmaster.
context_section_description: In the Ostend tournament of 1907 the term grandmaster was used. The tournament was divided into two sections: the Championship Tournament and the Masters' Tournament. The Championship section was for players who had previously won an international tournament. Siegbert Tarrasch won the Championship section, over Carl Schlechter, Dawid Janowski, Frank Marshall, Amos Burn, and Mikhail Chigorin. These players were described as grandmasters for the purposes of the tournament.
  The San Sebastián 1912 tournament won by Akiba Rubinstein was a designated grandmaster event. Rubinstein won with 12½ points out of 19. Tied for second with 12 points were Aron Nimzowitsch and Rudolf Spielmann.
  By some accounts, in the St. Petersburg 1914 chess tournament, the title Grandmaster was formally conferred by Russian Tsar Nicholas II, who had partially funded the tournament. The Tsar reportedly awarded the title to the five finalists: Emanuel Lasker, José Raúl Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Siegbert Tarrasch, and Frank Marshall. Chess historian Edward Winter has questioned this, stating that the earliest known sources that support this story are an article by Robert Lewis Taylor in the June 15, 1940, issue of The New Yorker and Marshall's autobiography My 50 Years of Chess (1942).
caption: Siegbert Tarrasch (1862–1934)
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