About

The Unemployed Fellow is me, Vinay Bhat.  I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2006 and then went on to work as an analyst at Cornerstone Research (an economic and litigation consulting firm) for a little under 2 years.

In mid-May 2008, I quit my day job to become a chess player, helped along by the 2008 Samford Fellowship.  The Fellowship is designed to help provide financial support for talented American chess players under the age of 25.  Many thanks to the Samford family for their generosity and providing US chessplayers with such opportunities.

I started playing chess when I was about six-and-a-half years old.  At the age of  ten-and-a-half, I set the then-current record for becoming the youngest national master in US history, breaking Bobby Fischer’s record by two years.  (That record has since been broken twice, first be GM Hikaru Nakamura).  I played quite a number of tournaments while in elementary, middle, and high school, representing the US in nine different World Youth competitions with top five finishes on five different occasions.  I started to ease off the gas my senior year in high school and then almost never played in four years at Cal.

Now with the Fellowship in hand, it’s back to chess.

For those visiting, this isn’t strictly a chess blog, although as that is what I do now, it will likely revolve around that. When I can, I will post tournament updates from my own events, and I may occasionally mention other events going on.