Valery Salov

Valery Salov in 1989
Full name	Валерий Борисович Салов
Country	Russia
Born	May 26, 1964 Wrocław, Poland
Title	Grandmaster
Peak rating	2715 (January 1995)

Valery Salov (born May 26, 1964 in Wrocław, Poland) is a Russian chess grandmaster.

Salov was awarded the International Master title in 1984 and the Grandmaster title in 1986. He was the World under-17 Champion in 1980 and European Junior Champion in 1983-84. He shared the 1st place with Alexander Beliavsky in the 1987 USSR Championship but lost the play-off match (+0−2=2). At the 1988 USSR Championship he finished equal third with Artur Yusupov, behind Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov.

He qualified twice for the Candidates Tournament for the World Chess Championship. In 1988, he reached the round of 16 but was defeated by Jan Timman in his first match (+0−1=5).

In 1994, he won both the 16-player Tilburg knockout event and the thematic Polugaevsky 60th Birthday Tournament in Buenos Aires, defeating Karpov with both colors in the latter.

In the FIDE World Chess Championship 1996 he qualified for the Candidates and won his first two matches against Alexander Khalifman and Jan Timman, to reach the quarterfinals, where he lost to Gata Kamsky.

He has not played any FIDE-rated tournaments since January 2000.

In 2009, Salov gave lectures to the Chigorin chess club in St. Petersburg, in which he played the role of an outsider to critique the previous decade in chess (particularly the prospects of Fischer Random Chess, and also in Russian politics.

In a long May 2015 interview with Chess-News (currently only available in Russian), he touched on a number of subjects, particularly that he was forced out of chess (by lack of invitations) for various reasons, the Kasparov-Karpov matches were a Kabbalistic "ritual" of Freemasonry, the Kasparov-Anand match at the World Trade Center was a precursor to 9/11, and other sundry theories. He is currently involved with political economy at universities near Madrid.

On November 9, 2015, in his capacity as President of the World Players' Council, Salov announced a sentence from the WPC Disciplinary Committee against Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, and Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, including lifetime bans and cancellation of titles for all, plus a 13 million euro fine for each.