2007 U.S. Women's Chess Championship - Rohonyan

WGM Katerina Rohonyan

Here are the basics from the 2007 U.S. Women’s Chess Championship website:
Born: Nikolaev, Ukraine
Date of Birth: April 25, 1984
Home: Baltimore, MD
Ratings: USCF 2304, FIDE 2316

K.R. is a very recent émigré to the USA. Playing for Armenia, on January 30, 2006 Armenian Chess reported: Armenian chess player WGM Katerina Rohonyan (Ukraine) took the first prize in the FINEK-2006 women's international tournament held in St. Petersburg, Russia. She gained 6,5 points of 9, just as much as Julia Kochetkova (Russia) had, but was the first on tie break.

K.R. is playing chess for University of Maryland, Baltimore Campus, on scholarship, where she is majoring in computer science. In her own words:

The Kiev Killer [a nickname given to her at UMBC], it turns out, is not from Kiev. "When I came here, they gave me that name," Rohonyan says. "It was the only city in Ukraine anyone here has heard of." She comes from Nikolaev, a town on the shores of the Black Sea that she says is about the size of Baltimore . She says she found her chess legs a little late for a grandmaster--at age 7. She makes it sound as if, almost against her will, she found herself being sucked into Ukraine's gigantic chess apparatus. "In 1991, it was still like the Soviet Union--they would come to school to recruit chess players," she recalls. After a few rounds at the local chess clubs, her mother pressed her to develop her skills. "She told me that I could either stop playing or become very good," Rohonyan says. "She said she didn't want me to be an average chess player." By age 16, Rohonyan became the Ukranian women's chess champion.

Rohonyan says that the pressures placed on her as a young chess prodigy were certainly tough, but she marvels at the young players now being churned out of the internet chess world. "When Bobby Fischer won the grandmaster at 15," she says, "he was the first person in the world to do that." Fischer got his start by heading down the street to the Brooklyn Chess Club, where he began to play with--and eventually beat--local chess legends. Now, Rohonyan says, there are "dozens" of teenage grandmasters who spend eight to 10 hours a day logged into vast online chess databases.

You can find some chess games of K.R. here.