He won the
Moscow City Chess Championship in 1998 and 2003. In 2002 he shared the victory of the
U.S. Open Chess Championship with
Gennadi Zaichik. Najer won the
Cappelle-la-Grande Open of 2004 on tiebreak over
Kaido Külaots,
Artyom Timofeev,
Zoltan Gyimesi,
Sergey Grigoriants and
Oleg Korneev. In the same year he tied for 1st–3rd with
Michael Roiz and
Leonid Gofshtein in the
Ashdod Chess Festival. He won a gold medal at the
2005 Maccabiah Games in Israel. In 2007 he won the 3rd Moscow Open edging out on tiebreak
Vasily Yemelin. Najer won the
World Open in
Philadelphia consecutively in 2008 and 2009. He was one of the
seconds of
Gata Kamsky in his 2009 match against
Veselin Topalov ("
Challenger Match"). In July 2009, Najer won the strong
rapid round-robin tournament, whose field included
Boris Gelfand and
Judit Polgar among others, of the
Richard Riordan Chess Festival at the
2009 Maccabiah Games. Soon afterwards, in the same month, he tied for first with
Robert Fontaine in the
Paleochora Open Tournament. In 2010, he tied for 2nd–5th with
Michael Adams,
Victor Mikhalevski and
Jiří Štoček the 14th
Chicago Open. In 2015 he won the
European Individual Chess Championship in
Jerusalem with 8½/11. This victory qualified him for the
Chess World Cup 2015, where he was eliminated in the first round by
Rauf Mamedov. Najer won the 2016
Aeroflot Open edging out Boris Gelfand on tiebreak, after both scored 6½/9 points; this achievement earned him a spot in the 2016
Dortmund Sparkassen Chess Meeting. In 2017, he tied for first place with
Emil Sutovsky in the 18th
Karpov Chess Tournament in
Poikovsky, Russia. In 2019, whilst competing at the
FIDE Grand Swiss Tournament 2019, Najer created a first round upset defeating
Viswanathan Anand in 30 moves, the fourth seeded player in the tournament and former world chess champion. == Personal life ==