Yasser Seirawan (Arabic: ياسر سيروان; born March 24, 1960) is a Syrian-born American chess grandmaster and four-time United States champion.

He honed his game at a now-defunct coffeehouse, the Last Exit on Brooklyn,[1] playing against the likes of Latvian-born master Viktors Pupols and six-time Washington State Champion James Harley McCormick.

He also won a game against Viktor Korchnoi, who had two years earlier narrowly lost a match for the world championship.

Impressed, Viktor then invited Seirawan to Switzerland, where Korchnoi was training for his 1981 world title match against Anatoly Karpov.

[5] In 2001, Seirawan released a plan called "Fresh Start" to reunite the chess world, which at that time had two world champions: Ruslan Ponomariov had gained the title under the auspices of FIDE, while Vladimir Kramnik had beaten Garry Kasparov to take the Classical title.

It called for one match between Ponomariov and Kasparov (the world number one), and another between Kramnik and the winner of the 2002 Einstein tournament in Dortmund, who turned out to be Péter Lékó.

Following a series of events, such as Seirawan participating in the Beijing Chess Challenge in September 2003,[7] there were reports that he would be retiring as a professional player.

In the July 2007 FIDE list, Seirawan had an Elo rating of 2634, placing him in the top 100 chess players in the world, and America's number four, behind Hikaru Nakamura, Gata Kamsky, and Alexander Onischuk.

SHARPER chess introduces two additional pieces, a "hawk" and an "elephant"—a rook/knight and a bishop/knight combination that in other variants are called the Empress and Princess, respectively.