Yasser Seirawan is an American chess Grandmaster and four-time United States champion. He was born on March 24, 1960, in Damascus, Syria, and moved to Seattle, Washington at the age of seven. His involvement with chess began when he was around twelve years old, and he rapidly climbed the chess ladder, earning his International Master title by 1979 and becoming a Grandmaster in 1980.
Seirawan has won the U.S. Championship four times: in 1981, 1986, 2002 (concurrent with the first edition of the U.S. Chess Championship), and 2000. In all, he has taken part in eight Olympiads.
In 1990, Seirawan played a significant role in unifying the World Chess Championship cycle by staging the World Chess Championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. Furthermore, in 2002 he was a commentator for the historic match between world number one Garry Kasparov and the computer program Deep Junior.
Throughout his career, Seirawan has written several chess books, co-owns a chess publishing house, International Chess Enterprises, and has provided commentary for numerous chess events. He was also a co-founder of the Seattle Chess Foundation, which later became the America's Foundation for Chess (AF4C) and is responsible for the U.S. Chess School.
Seirawan introduced a chess variant, "Seirawan chess" in 2007, and later initiated a new system of rules for professional chess competitions in a proposal called "Fresh Start". This included rules on draws and a new system of qualifying for the world championship. However, the idea met with mixed reception.
Seirawan retired from competitive chess in 2003 but returned in 2011. His last tournament was in November 2017, and he retired from chess once again in May 2019. He currently lives in the Netherlands with his wife.