In January 2014, Jobava finished equal second and third on tiebreak in the Tata Steel Challengers tournament in Wijk aan Zee scoring 8½/13. In the following month, he won the David Bronstein Memorial in Minsk on tiebreak over Sergey Fedorchuk and Mikhailo Oleksienko. In July he finished second behind Wesley So at the ACP Golden Classic in Bergamo, Italy.
In August, 2015, he took clear first place in the 19th HZ Chess Tournament in Vlissingen, the Netherlands, scoring 8/9 points (+7−0=2). In 2017 Jobava tied for first with Maxim Matlakov and Vladimir Fedoseev in the European Individual Championship in Minsk, taking the silver medal on tiebreak. In 2019, Jobava took clear first place in Abu Dhabi Masters scoring 8/9 points and 2904 performance rating.
Jobava won 4 out of the first 6 Titled Tuesday blitz events held on Chess.com and streams similar tournaments alongside casual games on Twitch to his 20,000 followers under the username "JamesBlunder".
Jobava is considered one of the most prolific users of Larsen's Opening in the modern era, having beaten Yu Yangyi in the Tata Steel Challengers 2014, Daniil Dubov in the Bronstein Memorial 2014, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov in the FIDE Grand Prix 2015 and David Howell in the FIDE Grand Swiss 2019 with it.
Team competitions
Jobava has played for the Georgian national team in the Chess Olympiad since 2000. He won the individual gold medal in 2004, scoring 8½/10 points. In 2010, he defeated the world's number one player Magnus Carlsen in the Georgia–Norway match. In 2016, he won the individual gold medal for the best first board performance, which included wins over Richárd Rapport, Francisco Vallejo Pons and the former FIDE world champions Ruslan Ponomariov and Veselin Topalov with a performance rating of 2926 which is the highest performance rating for board 1 since Garry Kasparov's 2933 performance rating in 2002.
Jobava London
Although the line had first been played by James Mason in 1882, Jobava is credited with popularizing an opening now known as the Jobava London System (also known as the Rapport–Jobava System). Characterized by the moves 1.d4, 2.Nc3, and 3.Bf4, Jobava successfully employed the opening to score wins against Veselin Topalov and Ruslan Ponomariov.
Xu Xiangyu controversy
On February 3, 2023, Jobava accused GM Xu Xiangyu of cheating after losing to him during the Airthings Masters Play-In and publicly berated Chess.com team members after the game saying "Ban all these Chinese motherf***ers [sic]." This resulted in him being banned from all Chess.com prize events for the remainder of 2023 for the alleged racism.
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