Michael Roy Freeman (born 9 December 1960, London, England) is a New Zealand chess player. He emigrated to New Zealand in September 1967.
He was a pupil at Otago Boys High School, Dunedin from 1974 to 1978. He started playing chess in 1972 and joined the Otago Chess Club as a junior in 1974.
He moved to Christchurch in 1979 where he completed a major in theoretical computer science at Canterbury University. Today, he resides in Stratford, Taranaki, on the west coast of the North Island of NZ.
In 1977 Michael started playing correspondence chess. Within four years he had completed a spectacular rise to the highest echelon within NZ correspondence circles. Michael was NZ Correspondence Champion in 1979/80 and 1983/84, which earned him the coveted but rarely awarded NZ Correspondence Chess Master title.
In 1995 Michael won the international Abonyi event #13 organised by ICCF which gained him a second IM norm and the International Correspondence Master title (2450 level).
In 2003 Michael won the International Correspondence Chess Federation (ICCF) 50th anniversary IM-D event with a score of 11.5/14. This gave him a second and final Senior International Master norm, thus gaining his Senior International Master title which was conferred at the ICCF meeting in October 2003.
In his very occasional forays to OTB chess, Michael represented NZ in chess at the 1996 Chess Olympiad and the 1983, 1993 and 1995 Asian Teams events. Michael was the NZ Team Captain for four Chess Olympiads (1994, 1996, 1998, 2000) and was a member of the FIDE Executive Board from 1998-2002, and is the current FIDE delegate and also the NZ delegate to ICCF.
Michael is the webmaster of the NZ Chess website [http://www.nzchess.co.nz www.nzchess.co.nz].
Away from the chess scene Michael is Chief Executive of the Stratford District Council, the local government authority for the Stratford region in Taranaki.
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