[8] The young first-ranked player eventually played at the All-Union Youth Olympiad in Kiev as a part of the Ukrainian team in 1954.

Boris Spassky, Mikhail Tal, Edward Gufeld and others took part in this tournament, but Yuri Shabanov did not meet them.

A zonal competition of the leading chess players of the Khabarovsk and Primorye Territories, Amur, Sakhalin and other regions was held in the city of Blagoveshchensk in 1957.

At this time, Yuri Shabanov was a student of the Magadan mining technical school and became a candidate for the USSR Master of Sports after he scored 12 points out of 17 and took the first place.

Yuri was awarded a diploma in geology and worked in his specialty, so he didn't have much time to play chess.

Only after the 1964 Trud Championship, where Yuri took the first place and became the first player ever from the Magadan region to get the title of the USSR Master of Sports, chess come to the fore of his life.

Only after moving to Yaroslavl, where Shabanov worked as an instructor at the Children's and Youth Sports School, Yuri Fedorovich fulfilled his dream and entered in the First League of the Soviet Championship, where he took the fifth place in the 80s.

Shabanov was awarded the title of international grandmaster for the victory at the 13th World Senior Chess Championship in 2003.

Close people and comrades of Yuri Fedorovich Shabanov characterized him as an exceptionally modest, conflict-free, erudite and principled person.

We were acquainted with Yuri Fedorovich a long time ago, but seniors chess brought us together.