Alexander Shabalov
Alexander Anatolyevich Shabalov (; ; born September 12, 1967) is an American chess grandmaster and a four-time winner of the United States Chess Championship (1993, 2000, 2003, 2007). He also won or tied for first place seven times in the U.S. Open Chess Championship (1993, 1999, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2015, 2016). He was born in Riga, Latvia, and like his fellow Latvians Aleksejs Shirov and Mikhail Tal, he is known for courting complications even at the cost of objective soundness. In 2002 he tied for first place at the Aeroflot Open in Moscow with Gregory Kaidanov, Alexander Grischuk, Aleksej  Aleksandrov, and Vadim Milov. In 2009 Shabalov shared first place with Fidel Corrales Jimenez in the American Continental Chess Championship. Shabalov regularly lectured chess players of all ages at the House of Chess, a store that he ran at the Ross Park Mall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, until it closed in mid-2007. In 2015 he was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame. In 2019, Shabalov won the 23rd annual Eastern Chess Congress. In 2020, Shabalov won the 52nd annual Liberty Bell Open.