Alexandra Kosteniuk


Alexandra Konstantinovna Kosteniuk is a Russian chess grandmaster and Women's World Chess Champion from 2008 to 2010. She was European women's champion in 2004 and a two time Russian Women's Chess Champion. Kosteniuk won the team gold medal playing for Russia at the Women's Chess Olympiads of 2010, 2012 and 2014, the Women's World Team Chess Championship of 2017, and the Women's European Team Chess Championships of 2007, 2009, 2011, 2015 and 2017.

Chess career

Kosteniuk learned to play chess at the age of five after being taught by her father.

1994

Alexandra won the girls under 10 division of the European Youth Chess Championship.

1996

Alexandra won the girls under 12 title at both the European Youth Championships and World Youth Chess Championships. At twelve years old she also became the Russian women's champion in rapid chess.

2001

In 2001, at the age of 17, she reached the final of the World Women's Chess Championship and was defeated by Zhu Chen.

2001-2004

Kosteniuk became European women's champion by winning the tournament in Dresden, Germany. Thanks to this achievement, in November 2004, she was awarded the grandmaster title, becoming the tenth woman to receive the highest title of the World Chess Federation. Before that, she had also obtained the titles of Woman Grandmaster in 1998 and International Master in 2000.

2005

Kosteniuk won the Russian Women's Championship.

2006-2008

In August, she became the first Chess960 women's world champion after beating Germany's top female player Elisabeth Pähtz by 5½–2½. She defended that title successfully in 2008 by beating Kateryna Lahno However, her greatest success so far has been to win the Women's World Chess Championship 2008, beating in the final the young Chinese prodigy Hou Yifan, with a score of Later in the same year, she won the women's individual blitz event of the 2008 World Mind Sports Games in Beijing.

2010

In the Women's World Chess Championship 2010 she was eliminated in the third round by the eventual runner-up, Ruan Lufei, and thus lost her title.

2013

In 2013, Kosteniuk became the first woman to win the "men's" Swiss Chess Championship. She also won the women's Swiss champion title, and thus became the first person to win both the women's and "men's" national chess titles in Switzerland.

2014

In 2014, she tied for first place with Kateryna Lagno in the Women's World Rapid Championship, which was held in Khanty-Mansiysk, and took the silver medal on tiebreak, as Lagno won the direct encounter.

2015

In 2015 Kosteniuk won the European–ACP Women's Rapid Championship in Kutaisi. In July of the same year, she lost the Swiss championship playoff to Vadim Milov, and was declared women's Swiss champion.

2016

Kosteniuk again won the Russian Women's Championship.

2017

In 2017 she won the European ACP Women's Blitz Championship in Monte Carlo.

2019

In late May, Alexandra faced Ukrainian-American International Master Anna Zatonskih in the quarterfinal match of the 2019 Women's Speed Chess Championship, an online blitz and bullet competition hosted by Chess.com. Kosteniuk dominated the match and won with an overall score of 20–8.In late November, Kosteniuk won the European Women's rapid and blitz championships in Monaco. In December, she shared first place in the second leg of FIDE Women's Grand Prix 2019–20 in Monaco. In December she also achieved 2nd place in the Belt and Road World Chess Woman Summit, behind Hou Yifan.

Other activities

Kosteniuk worked as a model and also acted in the film Bless the Woman by Stanislav Govorukhin.
Kosteniuk is a member of the "Champions for Peace" club, a group of 54 famous elite athletes committed to serving peace in the world through sport, created by Peace and Sport, a Monaco-based international organization.

Personal life

Born in Perm, Kosteniuk moved to Moscow in 1985. She has a younger sister named Oksana, who is a Woman FIDE Master level chess player.
Kosteniuk has dual Swiss-Russian citizenship. She married Swiss-born Diego Garces, who is of Colombian descent, at eighteen years old. On 22 April 2007 she gave birth to a daughter, Francesca Maria. Francesca was born 2½ months premature, but after an 8-week stay in the hospital has made a full recovery. In 2015, Kosteniuk married Russian Grandmaster Pavel Tregubov.

Notable games

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