Leonid Kritz
German chess player

Leonid Kritz is a Russian-German chess grandmaster.
Chess career
Leonid Kritz was born in Moscow, Russia, where he began learning chess from his father at the age of 4. After showing significant improvement, he was admitted to the Chess School of Olympic Reserve named after the 9th world champion Tigran Petrosian. He received education from the top Russian coaches and capitalized on it in full - winning Y10 and Y12 Moscow championships and scoring second at the Y10 Russian championship in 1994.
Leonid's success story continued after his family immigrated to Germany in the fall 1996. Three years in a row he was winning German youth championships and in 1999 became the first Y16 World Champion in German history. Afterwards, he began training under Josif Dorfman., former assistant to the 13th world champion Garry Kasparov. Under Dorfman's supervision, Leonid achieved the title of International Master, and two years later, at the age of 19, became then second-youngest German grandmaster.
In the same year he qualified for the FIDE World Chess Championship 2004 held in Tripoli, Lybia where he knocked out in the first round Krishnan Sasikiran - one of the tournament's favorites. These achievements earned him a long-awaited nomination into the German national team.
“Leonid Kritz” enters the record as german chess player. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Leonid, Kritz and German can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Leonid Kritz” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Leonid, Kritz and German provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q74853. VIAF identifies the subject as 260983287. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1996, 1999 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Leonid Kritz” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.