Full name | Kenneth Terence Solomon |
---|---|
Country | South Africa |
Born | 1979 Mitchells Plain, Cape Town |
Title | Grandmaster |
Peak rating | 2461 (January 2012) |
Kenneth Terence Solomon (born 8 October 1979) is a South African chess Grandmaster and FIDE Trainer (2005). He took up chess at the age of 13, inspired by his elder brother’s qualification for the Chess Olympiad in Manila in 1992. Borrowing a chess book from him to study, Solomon was soon taken under his brother’s wing to study and within two years, he was the South African Under-16 champion.
He has won the South African Championship once, in 2003 and the South African Open three times, in 1999, 2005 and 2007, and was also the top ranked South African in 2003. He became an International Master in 2004. During the 40th Chess Olympiad in Istanbul Solomon earned his final GM norm.
Although Solomon has never reached a peak rating of 2500, the usual criteria, along with the GM norms, for becoming a grandmaster, he earned the Grandmaster title by winning the African Chess Championship in December 2014, thereby becoming the first grandmaster from South Africa.