Nodirbek Yakubboev: The Other Nodirbek
Chennai, August 2022: Uzbekistan, a country nobody had listed among the favourites, won the open section of the 44th Chess Olympiad. The headlines belonged to Nodirbek Abdusattorov, the teenage prodigy on board one. But the highest individual score on the team came from the second board, where a twenty-year-old from Tashkent named Nodirbek Yakubboev put up 8 points from 11 games at a performance rating of 2,759 and took an individual bronze medal. Three years later he would reach a World Cup semifinal, and three years later he would also become, briefly, the most argued-about player in chess for something that had nothing to do with the board.
Tashkent, and a Sister Who Got There First
Yakubboev was born on 23 January 2002 in Tashkent. Chess ran in the family before it ran in him: his older sister, Nilufar Yakubbaeva, has won the women's section of the Uzbekistani Chess Championship multiple times. Growing up in a household where a national title was already on the shelf is a particular kind of apprenticeship — the standard is set by someone you eat breakfast with, and it is not theoretical.
He won the Uzbekistani Chess Championship himself for the first time in 2016, at fourteen. He won it again in 2018 and a third time in 2020. The grandmaster title came in 2019, when he was seventeen — young by historical standards, unremarkable by the standards of his own generation, which is itself a comment on how fast the game has moved. He qualified for the 2021 Chess World Cup by finishing second in the Zone 3.4 Zonal Open Championship that year, his first appearance on the sport's biggest knockout stage.
Chennai and the Team That Changed a Country
The 2022 Olympiad remains the defining collective achievement of Uzbek chess and the single most important line on Yakubboev's record. Team gold at an Olympiad is chess's closest analogue to a World Cup football title: a nation, not a player, is measured, and there is nowhere to hide across eleven rounds. Yakubboev's 8 out of 11 on second board was the sort of contribution that wins such events — not the marquee result but the load-bearing one, delivered against a rotating cast of the world's strongest players while the tournament's pressure compounded round by round.
Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.
Take the IQ test →The performance rating of 2,759 was, at the time, well above his own rating, and it announced a player whose ceiling had been badly underestimated. What followed over the next three years was the slow, unglamorous work of turning a two-week peak into a permanent level. By December 2025 his rating had reached 2,691, his career high; in January 2026 he held that number and ranked thirty-sixth in the world.
Beating the Prodigy
Yakubboev's most curious speciality has been finishing ahead of his more famous compatriot. At the 2023 Qatar Masters, one of the strongest open tournaments in the world, he won the title in a tiebreak playoff against Abdusattorov. In June 2024, at the UzChess Cup Masters on home soil, he finished first with 5½ out of 9, again edging Abdusattorov on tiebreaks. Twice, in the two biggest events of his career to that point, the deciding margin was a tiebreak and the man on the other side of it was the player his country had built its expectations around.
The Handshake
At the 2025 Tata Steel Chess Tournament, Yakubboev declined to shake hands with four female opponents, citing religious reasons. In a sport whose etiquette begins and ends with the handshake — the gesture that opens every game and concedes every loss — the refusal became an immediate international story, one that set religious observance against the customs of a game played identically by everyone who sits at the board.
He subsequently apologised to Vaishali Rameshbabu, saying that he respects her as a player, and the two resolved the matter respectfully between themselves. He lost his game against her. It is the sort of episode that will attach to his name in search results long after the crosstables are forgotten, and the record shows both the offence and the apology.
The World Cup That Nearly Was
The 2025 Chess World Cup was the best individual run of his career and the most painful. Yakubboev beat Pranav V, the Armenian veteran Gabriel Sargissian, and Germany's Alexander Donchenko to reach the semifinals, where he lost to another compatriot, Javokhir Sindarov. That left the third-place playoff against Andrey Esipenko, with a place in the Candidates Tournament — the eight-player event that determines the challenger for the world championship — going to the winner. Yakubboev lost. He finished fourth overall, one match short of the qualification that separates very strong grandmasters from world title contenders.
Why Nodirbek Is Called a Genius
The defensible claim for Yakubboev is about a specific and unusual quality: he plays above himself when the stakes are collective or knockout, and he does it repeatedly. A 2,759 performance rating on board two of a gold-medal Olympiad, two tiebreak victories over Abdusattorov in elite opens, and a run to a World Cup semifinal past three grandmasters are not the record of a player riding one good fortnight. Knockout chess rewards a rarer cognitive profile than round-robin chess — the ability to reset overnight, to solve positions accurately without preparation time, and to keep calculating cleanly when a single loss ends the tournament. Yakubboev has that.
The honest counter-case is that nobody has yet called him a genius in the sense the word carries for a Carlsen or a Fischer, and the numbers do not support it. A peak rating of 2,691 and a world ranking of thirty-six place him among the best few dozen players alive — an extraordinary achievement, and not the same as being transformative. He has not qualified for the Candidates, has not won a supertournament, and lost the one match that would have changed the category he belongs to. What he demonstrably possesses is elite competitive craft: enormous opening preparation, tactical precision, and nerve. He is also only twenty-four, and his rating peak arrived in December 2025, which means the case for him is still being written rather than closed.
Legacy
Yakubboev is one of the four or five players who turned Uzbekistan from a chess afterthought into a country that wins Olympiads, and his name is permanently attached to the 2022 gold. He is likely to be remembered as the second Nodirbek — the one who beat the first one twice when it counted, and who came within one match of the Candidates. Whether that becomes the summary of his career or the prologue to it depends on the next decade.
