Born in Bucharest on April
6, 1944, Gheorghiu moved to Ploiești with his family. He started playing chess at the age of 6, watching
his father play with his friends. Before long, he started defeating these
players, and after grabbing his first wins in junior championships, he won his
first trophies. At the age of 16, Florin Gheorghiu was the big surprise of the
national seniors’ championship as he won the trophy, becoming the youngest
national champion in the history of Romanian chess, a record that still stands
6 decades later. His record sheet includes 9 titles of Romanian national
champion. He was world junior vice-champion in 1961 in Hague, then in 1963 he
won the Vrnjacka Banja tournament in Serbia his first title as world junior
champion. We’ve asked Florin Gheorghiu to outline the top achievements of his
career:
Apart from the world junior champion title, which of course is
rather well-known, although it was in 1963, and which was the first world title
in the history of Romanian chess, there were other important tournaments I won
in the United States for almost three years, which peaked with me winning the
Long Pine Chess Open, considered a sort of Forest Hills of chess. A victory at
Long Pine was tantamount to an extraordinary feat. Later, I won three
consecutive international champion titles in the United States, between
1979-1981. After scooping the third trophy, professor Arpad Elo, who calculated
the rating of all participants, also calculated my ELO, which was 2,653 points,
the third highest ELO at global level. According to the current ELO standards,
it would be comparable to American Fabiano Caruana and close to that of the
current world champion, Magnus Carlsen.
The ELO rating is used to calculate not just the world ranking of
chess players, but also the list and draws of every chess open. Throughout his
career, grandmaster Florin Gheorghiu played 9 world champions. He represented
Romania in 14 Chess Olympiads. He had a stellar run at the Havana Olympiad of
1966, when he defeated Bobby Fischer, the rising star of world chess, who in
1972 would become world champion. (VP)