Chess grandmaster, the queen of the board

Alexandra Kosteniuk, 24, is the reigning queen of the board.

I WOULDN’T mind meeting Alexandra Kosteniuk over a game of chess. In fact, I know of many chess players who wouldn’t mind either. But I can almost hear some of you ask: who is Alexandra Kosteniuk?

Kosteniuk is the current women’s world champion. She’s newly minted, not more than 10 days old in this role.

Last week, she won this title in Nalchik, a city in the Russian region of Kabardino-Balkari, after a tense four-game battle with China’s Hou Yifan.

What makes Kosteniuk so special? Well, apart from her chess-playing ability, Kosteniuk looks nothing like the dowdy, matronly female chess players that you’d tend to associate with Soviet chess. No, that was a completely different era in chess.

Grandmaster Alexandra Kosteniuk with her gold world champion medal.

Kosteniuk represents a new breed of women players. She’s chic, smart, stylish and swanky. She looks stunning and makes women’s chess seem fashionable!

Kosteniuk, 24, has a very popular Internet presence. Her website, kosteniuk.com, set up about five years ago, is the 14th most popular chess website today according to Alexa’s worldwide rankings. The website’s ranking would have shot through the roof since she became the women’s world champion.

But Alexandra Kosteniuk was just one of at least 50 chess beauties from around the world at the championship. Initially, 64 players were supposed to take part in the knockout event but 11 of them withdrew due to the military conflict between Russia and Georgia that began just days before the championship started.

This included six Georgian players who pulled out despite an appeal from the World Chess Federation. Others refused to travel to Nalchik as they felt that the championship’s location, just north of the border between Russia and Georgia, was too close for comfort.

So while the first round of the championship was hit by a spate of withdrawals, the second round saw the remaining players well settled down into their games. If there were to be any shocks left, it would be on the chessboard.

Indeed, there was an upset in the second round itself. Defend ing champion (but not the top seed) Xu Yuhua tumbled out in this round, losing to her less-fancied opponent, Russia’s Svetlana Matveeva.

By the third round, the field had been whittled down to just 16 players. Matveeva, who had shocked Xu in the previous round, now failed to make it past her opponent. The top seed in the championship, India’s Koneru Humpy, made short work of her Vietnamese opponent while Kos teniuk advanced by eliminating her compatriot Tatiana Kosintseva.

It was then that players started taking stock of China’s 14-year-old wunderkind, Hou Yifan. From the way she was playing, she seemed a possible title contender.

In the fourth round, Hou eliminated Armenia’s Lilit Mkrtchian to set up a semi-final match against Humpy, who knocked out China’s Shen Yang. The other semi-final was to be between Sweden’s Pia Cramling who beat Antoaneta Stefanova of Bulgaria and Kosteniuk, who beat the Ukraine’s Anna Ushenina.

To everyone’s surprise, Humpy worked Hou. After losing the first game, Humpy levelled the score by winning the second game. They exchanged points in the first two games of the tie-break and then suddenly, Hou found herself in the final when she claimed the third and fourth tie-break games. On the other hand, Kosteniuk cruised through Cramling’s defences.

Thus, the stage was set for a nerve-biting four-game final. Kosteniuk won the first game very convincingly. In the second game, Kosteniuk had four pawns against Hou’s single pawn in a rook ending, but the Chinese player was able to pull off a miraculous save. The third game was a tough draw and then in the final game, Kosteniuk sealed her victory and the title by forcing a draw while in a winning position.

With this win, Kosteniuk is only the 12th person to become the women’s world chess champion. Vera Menchik of the United Kingdom was the first women’s world champion, holding the title from 1927 to 1944.

Lyudmila Rudenko was the second women’s world champion from 1950 to 1953, Elisabeth Bykova held the title from 1953 to 1956 and again from 1958 to 1962. In between from 1956 to 1958, the title was held by Olga Rubtsova.

Nona Gaprindashvili was women’s world champion for 17 years from 1962 and Maya Chibur danidze held the title from 1978 to 1991. China’s Xie Jun won the title in 1991, relinquishing it to Susan Polgar from 1996 to 1999, and then regaining it from 1999 to 2001.

Another Chinese player, Zhu Chen, was women’s world champion from 2001 to 2004. That year, the title passed to Antoaneta Stefanova until 2006 when Xu Yuhua brought it back to China. Kosteniuk is now the latest title holder.