GMMauricio Flores Rios

Mauricio Flores Ríos was born in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1990. He began studying chess at ten, learning mainly from books and analysis of his own games. He did not work with a titled coach until he was fifteen. As a teenager he won three Chilean championships. His international junior results included Pan-American gold in the under-sixteen division in Cuenca in 2006 and the under-eighteen division in Córdoba in 2008. FIDE awarded him the FIDE Master title in 2005, International Master title in 2007 and Grandmaster title in 2009.

In 2009 Flores Ríos moved to Texas after being recruited by the University of Texas at Brownsville. He played for its team in the collegiate Final Four and Pan-American Intercollegiate championships. He represented Chile at the Olympiads in Turin in 2006, Istanbul in 2012 and Tromsø in 2014. In 2013 he won the Montcada International Open in Spain outright with seven and a half points from nine games, ahead of a field that included twenty other grandmasters.

Alongside chess, Flores Ríos pursued mathematics and earned his doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 2018. His research examined algorithms for semi-supervised learning on graphs. His first book, Chess Structures: A Grandmaster Guide, appeared in 2015 and explains plans through twenty-eight recurring pawn structures. Chess Imbalances, published in 2025, examines positions involving unequal combinations of pieces, including bishop against knight and rook against minor pieces. His coaching uses concrete positions to teach students how to choose and carry out plans. Both books have also become Chessable courses. He founded ChessMind AI, a platform for chess study and game analysis. Chess.com named him its Coach of the Month for January 2026.