In 1988, he won the World Junior Chess Championship, ahead of stars such as Vasily Ivanchuk, Boris Gelfand and Gregory Serper.

He was one of the people instrumental in Kramnik winning the Classical World Chess Championship 2000 against Kasparov by preparing the infamous 'Berlin Wall'.

In this tournament, Joel was competing against stars such as Boris Gelfand, Vasyl Ivanchuk, Vladimir Akopian, Gregory Serper and Susan Polgar.

Gelfand, Ivanchuk and Serper tied with him for the first place, but the tiebreak was the most number of wins and thanks to that Lautier became the youngest World Junior Champion; a record which is intact to date.

He started well at the inter-zonal with 3.5/4, beating strong players like Michael Adams, Vaganian and Yudasin but he lost to Viswanathan Anand and Alexei Shirov towards the end of the tournament and failed to qualify for the candidates’ matches.

During this time, Lautier also improved his Russian, which he would learn to a fluent level alongside French, English and Japanese.

He triumphed in over 30 international tournaments and national club championships in France, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain.

Besides Vasyl Ivanchuk, he is the only grandmaster who defeated every world champion of his time; he beat Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Alexander Khalifman, Vishwanathan Anand, Ruslan Ponomarev, Rustam Kasimdzhanov and Veselin Topalov.

He partially realized his ambitions as a trainer: as part of Vladimir Kramnik’s team when he helped his friend to overcome Garry Kasparov.

He founded his own corporate finance advisory firm RGG Capital, which specialised in advising Western companies in cross-border M&A transactions in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union.

[9] As of June 2023,[update] Lautier is no longer on the sanction list after OFAC in the US Department of Treasury accepted a petition he filed challenging the validity of his designation.