Ilia Smirin is an Israeli chess grandmaster. Born in Belarus on January 21, 1968, he achieved the Grandmaster title in 1990. Smirin has won the Israeli Chess Championship three times (1992, 1994, 1999). He came up as a runner-up in the 2001 FIDE World Chess Championship and won the annual Hastings International Chess Congress in 2005.
Smirin further proceeded to win three consecutive tournaments in Spain in 2005 and was the joint winner of the Gibraltar Chess Festival in 2008. In the U.S. Chess Championship held in 2016 and 2017, he finished third and rammed home the American Open in 2017.