What is a chess grandmaster?

Answer 1

There are two basic requirements for the title. First, you must obtain a rating of at least 2500 in the FIDE. Second, 3 grand master norms must be obtained. This means participating in a 9 round minimum tournament competing with other grand masters and participants from 3 separate countries. In that tournament, you must have a favorable result, aka, more wins than losses.

Answer 2

The title of Chess Grandmaster is the highest title one can achieve in the game of chess. The criteria to get it are a bit complex. But once you achieve it you're always called that, just like how the President of the United States is always called President even after his terms are up.

To give an idea of how few grandmasters there are, the January 2014 list had 1,444 grandmasters on it. Keep in mind this is a sport that between 600-700 million people in the world play at least casually. There are about 200 million people who play chess online. And there are roughly 2 million competitive chess players in the world (people who actually play rated chess tournaments on the circuits). So among competitive chess players, only about 0.07% of them are grandmasters!