Coached by Evgeny Ilgizovich Bareev and Gergely Szabo, GM Razvan Preotu became a FIDE Master in 2013 and an IM in 2014. His father is Rene Preotu and he won the Oktoberfest U2000 section in 2010. In 2011, he won the Hamilton club championship, playing for the Burlington club in Ontario, and also tied for 2nd-8th in the Canadian Youth U-12 chess championship with 5/7. He finished with 5.5/9 at the 2011 WYCC U-12 category in Brazil and was playing at the World Youth Championship (2012) in the U-14 category. He finished with 6/9 in Kitchener (2, 3) at the inaugural 2014 North American Junior chess championship.
By January 2015, he rose to 16th overall in the world for FIDE U-16 players and the top U16 in Canada and later swept the Ontario U-16 youth championship with a score of 5/5 (7). He entered the Calgary International(9) tournament in 2016 as top Canadian seed, winning it outright with 7/9 as the 1st Canadian to ever do so, soon after picking up a 3rd GM norm at the World open(11). In 2016, he, Victor Plotkin and Richard Chen topped the charts at the Hamilton Summer open and shortly afterwards in September, he was awarded his Grandmaster title(13, 14).
His 3 IM norms were awarded on the basis of his results at the 23rd Annual North American Open held toward the end of 2013 in Las Vegas, the 42nd Annual World Open held in Arlington, Virginia in July 2014 and the 2014 US Masters that finished 1 September 2014.
At Sault Ste Marie in 2017, he and Aman Hambleton both finished in a tie for share of 1st-2nd(20) at the Canadian open tournament.
Teams
He scored 6 points at the World youth team chess Olympiad after 9 out of the 10 rounds played (4) in 2014 and had previously played various SWOCL team events on top boards of the Hamilton-Mississauga suburbs of the so-called golden horseshoe.
Free-agents Bator Sambuev and Thomas Roussel-Roozmon (they do not live close enough to Toronto's suburban area) signed on to their Toronto Dragons(16) team, which includes Nikolay Noritsyn, Gergely Szabo, Kaiqi Yang, Arthur Calugar, Michael Song, Shiyam Thavandiran, Raja Panjwani and himself for play after 2016. The Dragons avoided a 4-0 shut-out by Pascal Charbonneau with Preotu scoring the only point against the Sopranos in the 1st round of the Pro Chess league's(16, 17) rapid-play match.
In 2017, he joined the U of Texas, Dallas' chess team(22) in his freshman year.
References / Sources
(1) http://chess-math.org/toronto/naycc... (North American 2013 U-18 chess championship),(2) http://ratings.fide.com/tournament_... (2014 North American Junior tournament),
(3) http://www.chessfest.ca/standings.h... (hosted by the Kitchener chess Festival, the page at one point had the 2014 North American Junior standings posted),
(4) http://wyco2014.chess.hu/gallery (played top board for the top of 3 Canadian teams at the youth team Olympiad in Hungary),
(5) http://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?l... (entered onto 75th place on this list on March 2015),
(6) http://www.cappelle-chess.fr/en2/de... (he scored 5.5/9 in the 2015 edition of this tournament),
(7) http://chess.ca/crosstable?tourname... (OYCC),
(8) http://www.canadianchesszonal.com/x... (a zonal 2.2 report),
(9) http://www.calgary-international.com/ (1st ever Canadian to outright win the Calgary International tournament),
(10) https://youtu.be/BETVqX9fmxM?t=5 (checking his clock at the 2014 World open),
(11) http://chessevents.com/2016/07/worl... (there is a possibility that with his result of 6.5/9 that he could register a 3rd and final GM norm or title - pending approval by FIDE),
(12) http://mdchess.com/index.php?option... (12th place finish),
(13) http://chess.ca/newsfeed/node/888 (Canadian chess federation newsfeed reports their 2nd youngest GM behind only GM Mark Bluvshtein as of 2016),
(14) http://ratings.fide.com/title_appli... (confirms title application),
(15) http://www.chess.ca/preotu-razvan (Chess Federation of Canada profile page),
(16) https://www.facebook.com/todragonsc... (Toronto Dragons fan page),
(17) http://chess.ca/newsfeed/node/924 (2017 Dragons vs Sopranos newsfeed article),
(18) http://www.chess-challenge.chess-ma... (scored 9/9 in his grade 12 group (ahead of Olivier-Kenta Chiku-Ratte and Shi Diwen who tied for 2nd-3rd in their grade with 7 points) for his Ontario provincial team at the 2017 Canadian chess challenge (see https://chess-math.org/blog/2017-ca... for another report) at U of Toronto in May),
(19) https://gmrazvanblog.com (his blog),
(20) http://www.ssmchess.ca/en/index.html (tournament ended 16 July, 2017),
(21) http://www.dallaschess.com/2017SWOp... (83rd annual south-west open tournament in Dallas),
(22) https://www.utdallas.edu/chess/ches... (U of Texas at Dallas chess team),
(23) http://www.gambitbooks.com/books/Th... (he and Michael Song are the book's coauthors).
Wikipedia article: Razvan Preotu
Kibitzing
