You wouldn’t expect Yury Shulman, a grandmaster and comp sci and business graduate to be superstitious. But he raves about the “lucky car” at the 2006 U.S Championship in San Diego. He drove to the tournament each afternoon with soon to be champions, Alex Onischuk and Anna Zatonskih. Yury won his 32-player group and Alex won his, resulting in a friend vs. friend battle. Why did Yury lose? Probably because he sat in the back seat on the ride to the final.

Yury moved from his native Belarus to the United States in 1999 to attend UTD (University of Texas at Dallas), a three-time national championship college team. UTD takes chess very seriously. In addition to offering scholarships to top players like Yury, UTD wants to see chess taught in elementary schools across the country.

Although Yury's second place finish in the 2006 US Championship was a surprise to most fans, those who followed his performance in the 2005 World Cup in Russia weren't surprised at all. Yury went up against some of the top players in the World in this knockout tournament and defeated three higher rated GMs to advance to the round of 32, including a very impressive victory over former FIDE World Champion Alexander Khalifman. Despite 8 Americans competing in this event, only Gata Kamsky was able to advance further than Shulman.

Yury credits his recent spurt of excellent results to his chess students. Yury has been teaching since he graduated from UTD. Teaching has helped him see chess in a different way, and he even came up with opening novelties while working with his students. Some chess professionals only teach cause of the financial reward, but Yury claims that even if he were rich, he’d still coach.

He also leads the summer chess camp in Lindsborg, Kansas and coached the 2006 Women’s Olympiad team in Turin to an impressive fourth place finish.

Relying mostly on 1.d4 as white and the French defense as black, Yury possesses the repertoire of a solid, positional player. But don’t let that deceive you! Yury is about as aggressive as they come, and could have easily been an e4 player in another life.

Read an interview with Yury on CLO.

Check out the following two positions by Shulman, both of which suggest a readiness to give up the powerful lady! One is hard, and the other is extremely hard. In both problems he is playing white.