John Denis Martin Nunn (born April 25, 1955 in London) is one of England's strongest chess players, and once belonged to the world's top ten. He was twice world champion in chess problem solving. He is a chess writer and publisher, and a mathematician.

Career

As a junior, he showed a prodigious talent for the game and in 1967, at twelve years of age, he won the British under-14 Championship. At fourteen, he was London Under-18 Champion for the 1969/70 season^[1]and less than a year later, at just fifteen years of age, he proceeded to Oriel College, Oxford, to study mathematics. At the time, it was said that he was Oxford's youngest undergraduate since Cardinal Wolsey. Graduating in 1973, he went on to gain his doctorate in 1978 with a thesis on finite H-spaces, and remained at Oxford University as a mathematics lecturer until 1981, when he became a professional chess player.

In 1975, he became the European Junior Champion. He gained the Grandmaster title in 1978 and was British champion in 1979. Nunn has twice won individual gold medals at Chess Olympiads. In 1989, he finished sixth in the inaugural 'World Cup', a series of tournaments in which the top 25 players in the world competed. His best performance in the World Chess Championship came in 1987, when he lost a playoff match against Lajos Portisch for a place in the Candidates Tournament. He won the prestigious Hoogovens tournament (held annually in Wijk aan Zee) in 1982, 1990 and 1991.

On the April 2005 FIDE list, Nunn had an Elo rating of 2617, making him number 98 in the world and England's number four (behind Michael Adams, Nigel Short and Luke McShane). His highest ever ranking was equal ninth in the world in January 1985. He has retired from serious tournament play and hasn't played a rated game since August 2006.

As well as being a strong player, Nunn is regarded as one of the best contemporary authors of chess books. He has penned many volumes, including Secrets of Grandmaster Chess which won the British Chess Federation Book of the Year award in 1988 and John Nunn's Best Games which took the award in 1995. He is the director of chess publishers Gambit Publications.

Nunn is also involved with chess problems, composing several examples and solving as part of the British team on several occasions. On this subject he wrote Solving in Style (1985). He won the World Chess Solving Championship in Halkidiki, Greece, in September 2004 and also made his final GM norm in problem solving; he won the World Championship again in 2007.^[2] He is the third person ever to gain both over-the-board and solving GM titles (the others being Jonathan Mestel and Ram Soffer).

Since the mid-1990s, Nunn has been actively engaged in data mining from chess endgame tablebases. The products of this work include the books Secrets Of Rook Endings, Secrets of Minor-Piece Endings, and Secrets Of Pawnless Endings. These books include human-usable endgame strategies found by Nunn (and others) by extensive experimentation with tablebases, and new editions have come out and are due as more tablebases are created and tablebases are more deeply data-mined. Nunn is thus (as of 2004) the foremost data miner of chess endgame tablebases. This work corresponds to the endgame part of the work of Berlekamp, Conway et al. in dots-and-boxes, Hex and other games.

He is married to Petra Fink-Nunn, a German chess player with the title Woman FIDE Master. They have a son, Michael.

See also

• Punctuation (chess) - Nunn's system of describing chess moves

Books

• 101 Brilliant Chess Miniatures (2000), Gambit Publications. ISBN 1-901983-16-1.
• Beating the Sicilian 3 (1995, with Joe Gallagher), Henry Holt & Co. ISBN 0-8050-4227-X.
• The Complete Najdorf 6. Bg5 (1997), International Chess Enterprises. ISBN 1-879479-45-1.
• Endgame Challenge (2002), Gambit Publications. ISBN 1-901983-83-8.
• Grandmaster Chess Move by Move (2005), Gambit Publications. ISBN 1-904600-34-4.
• John Nunn's Best Games (2001), Batsford. ISBN 0-7134-7726-1.
• John Nunn's Chess Puzzle Book (1999), Gambit Publications. ISBN 1-901983-08-0.
• Learn Chess (2000), Gambit Publications. ISBN 1-901983-30-7.
• Learn Chess Tactics (2004), Gambit Publications. ISBN 1-901983-98-6.
• Mammoth Book of the World's Greatest Chess Games (2004, with Graham Burgess and John Emms), Carroll & Graf. ISBN 0-7867-1411-5.
• Nunn's Chess Openings (1999), with Joe Gallagher, John Emms, and Graham Burgess, Everyman Chess. ISBN 1-85744-221-0.
• Secrets of Grandmaster Chess (1997), International Chess Enterprises. ISBN 1-879479-54-0.
• Secrets of Practical Chess (1998), Gambit Publications. ISBN 1-901983-01-3. Second edition 2007, ISBN 978-1-904600-70-1.
• Secrets of Minor-Piece Endings (2001), Rowman Littlefield. ISBN 0-7134-7727-X.
• Secrets of Pawnless Endings (1994, 2002), Gambit Publications. ISBN 1-901983-65-X.
• Secrets of Rook Endings (1992, 1999), Gambit Publications. ISBN 1-901983-18-8.
• Solving in Style (1995, 2002), Gambit Publications. ISBN 1-901983-66-8.
• Tactical Chess Endings (2003), Batsford. ISBN 0-7134-5937-9.
• Understanding Chess Move by Move (2001), Gambit Publications. ISBN 1-901983-41-2.

References

1. ↑ British Chess Magazine - March 1970, p. 66. London Championships 1969/70, held at Islington Green Secondary School (December 29, 1969 - January 3, 1970)
2. ↑ John Nunn wins World Chess Problem Solving Championship, ChessBase News, 3 November 2007

External links

• Bio at chessbase.com

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