| Esther Epstein | |
|---|---|
 Epstein in 2003 | |
| Born | May 10, 1954 |
| Title | Woman International Master |
Esther Danilovna Epstein [1] (born May 10, 1954) is a United States chess player and systems manager, who has won the U.S. Women's Chess Champion in 1991 and 1997. She holds a Woman International Master title.
Still in the USSR, Epstein was the USSR Women's Vice-Champion in 1976. She has played for the U.S. Women's Olympiad team four times.
She is married to chess grandmaster Alexander Ivanov.
Irina Borisivna Krush is an American chess Grandmaster. She is the only woman to earn the GM title while playing for the United States. Krush is an eight-time U.S. Women's Champion.
The USSR Chess Championship was played from 1921 to 1991. Organized by the USSR Chess Federation, it was the strongest national chess championship ever held, with eight world chess champions and four world championship finalists among its winners. It was held as a round-robin tournament with the exception of the 35th and 58th championships, which were of the Swiss system.
Maia Chiburdanidze is a Georgian chess Grandmaster. She is the sixth Women's World Chess Champion, a title she held from 1978 to 1991, and was the youngest one until 2010, when this record was broken by Hou Yifan. Chiburdanidze is the second woman to be awarded the title of Grandmaster by FIDE, which took place in 1984. She has played on nine gold-medal-winning teams in the Women's Chess Olympiad.
Following are the results of the U.S. Women's Chess Championship from 1937 to date. The tournament determines the woman chess champion of the United States.
Jennifer Shahade is an American chess player, poker player, commentator and writer. She is a two-time United States Women's Champion and has the FIDE title of Woman Grandmaster. Shahade is the author of the books Chess Bitch, Play Like a Girl, and most recently, Chess Queens, and co-author of Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess. From 2018 to 2023, she was the Women's Program Director at US Chess. She is also a MindSports Ambassador for PokerStars and a board member of the World Chess Hall of Fame in Saint Louis.
Lyudmila Vladimirovna Rudenko was a Soviet chess player and the second women's world chess champion, from 1950 until 1953.
Elena Donaldson-Akhmilovskaya was a Soviet-born American chess player. She was awarded the title of Woman Grandmaster by FIDE in 1977. She won the Women Candidates' tournament in 1986 and later in the same year played a match against Maia Chiburdanidze in Sofia for the Women's World Championship title, but lost by 8½–5½.
Maxim Alexandrovich Dlugy is an American chess player with the FIDE title of Grandmaster.
Alexander Ivanov is a Soviet-born American chess grandmaster. Born in Omsk, present-day Russia, he moved to the United States in 1988. FIDE awarded him his Grandmaster title in 1991. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, fellow chess player and Woman International Master Esther Epstein.
Tatiana Zatulovskaya was an Israeli chess player. She was three-time Soviet women's champion and twice world women's senior champion. She was awarded the titles Woman International Master (WIM) in 1961 and Woman Grandmaster (WGM) in 1976 by FIDE. Her last name may also be spelled as Zatulovskaia or Zatulovskaja.
Alla Shulimovna Kushnir was a Soviet-born Israeli chess player. She was awarded the FIDE titles of Woman International Master (WIM) in 1962 and Woman Grandmaster (WGM) in 1976. In 2017, she was inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame.
Patricia Anne Sunnucks was an author and three-times British Women's Chess Champion. During her chess career she was always known as Anne Sunnucks.
Nana Alexandria is a Georgian chess player. A three-time Soviet women's champion, she was the challenger in two matches for the Women's World Chess Championship.
Camilla Baginskaite is a Lithuanian and American chess player. She was awarded the title of Woman Grandmaster (WGM) by FIDE in 2002.
Sport in Azerbaijan has ancient roots, and even now, both traditional and modern sports are still practiced. Freestyle wrestling has been traditionally regarded as Azerbaijan's national sport, however today, the most popular sports in Azerbaijan are football and chess. Other popular sports are gymnastics, judo, futsal, weightlifting, and boxing. Azerbaijan's mountainous terrain provides great opportunities for the practice of sports like skiing and rock climbing. Water sports are practiced on the Caspian Sea and in inland waters. Competitively, Azerbaijan has been very successful at chess, weightlifting, and wrestling at the international level. Azerbaijan is also an active member of the international sports community, with full membership in the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA), Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), European Athletics Association (EAA), International Olympic Committee (IOC), among many others. It has also hosted the first European Games and 2017 Islamic Solidarity Games.
FIDE titles are awarded by the international chess governing body FIDE for outstanding performance. The highest such title is Grandmaster (GM). Titles generally require a combination of Elo rating and norms. Once awarded, titles are held for life except in cases of fraud or cheating. Open titles may be earned by all players, while women's titles are restricted to female players. Many strong female players hold both open and women's titles. FIDE also awards titles for arbiters, organizers and trainers. Titles for correspondence chess, chess problem composition and chess problem solving are no longer administered by FIDE.
The 1984 Women's World Chess Championship was won by Maia Chiburdanidze, who successfully defended her title against challenger Irina Levitina.
Tamara Golovey is a Chess Master, Chess International Arbiter and the Merited Coach of the Republic of Belarus. Her United States Chess Federation rating (USCF) is 2322.
Nazí Paikidze, sometimes also referred to as Nazí Paikidze-Barnes, is a Russian-born Georgian–American chess player. She holds the titles of International Master (IM) and Woman Grandmaster (WGM), which FIDE awarded her in 2012 and 2010 respectively. Paikidze was twice world girls' champion and four-time European girls' champion in her age category, and is a twice U.S. women's champion.
Miron Naumovich Sher was a Soviet-born American chess player, who was awarded the title of Grandmaster (GM) by FIDE in 1992. Towards the end of the Soviet era, he began winning the open sections at international tournaments. In 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, Sher became a Russian citizen. In 1997, Sher, his wife, Woman Grandmaster (WGM) Alla Grinfeld (ru), and their son, Mikhail, who then was 14, emigrated to America and settled in Brooklyn. Sher went on to become a distinguished scholastic chess coach and clinician in New York and was instrumental in developing several internationally strong players, notably Fabiano Caruana, many times number two in the world, and Robert Hess, who at age 15, while attending Stuyvesant High School, became an international master and at 16, a grandmaster. Before immigrating, Sher had also coached a number of students around Europe, including Peter Heine Nielsen.
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