Saturday, August 29, 2009

Olga Rubtsova Memorial Tournament

I found this report about the Olga Rubtsova Memorial Tournament at GM/Current Women's World Chess Champion Alexandra Kosteniuk's blog - thanks to a sort of backward link-through from Kosteniuk's website provided at Chessdom.com. It's fantastic news about some older generations of chess femmes coming together in Russia to compete against each other. These ladies are chessplaying legends to whom we do not give enough homage. Goddesschess has some bios of femmes who had a significant impact upon the world of chess - I see we must substantially update things from this 1999 edition! Good to see that the internet has finally caught up with our vision :) Thanks, GM Kosteniuk, for bringing this news to us. Here is the report - I was not able to provide a direct link-back to this post (it seemed to to be working when I put together this post), which is from Kosteniuk's blog on August 22, 2009: Today I was invited to the Moscow Central Chess Club on Gogol street to honor the veteran lady players participating in the Olga Rubtsova Memorial Tournament, taking place exactly 100 years after her birth. Olga Rubtsova was the fourth Women's World Chess Champion in history (1956-1958), see the Wikipedia article about her. All the participating ladies next to me in the photo below are true pioneers of Soviet and Russian chess, and it is with great emotion that I was among them. The veteran of the tournament was Kira Zvorykina (see her Wikipedia page), who will turn 90 years old next week, she was 5-time champion of the USSR, and was married to GM Alexei Suetin. It's very impressive to be playing a chess tournament at 90 years old... I hope I will be able to do that... The winner of the tournament was no one else than Elena Fatalibekova, who actually is the daughter of Olga Rubtsova and you can see me here giving her the first prize trophy. Every single woman in that group deserve most warm congratulations. They were simply amazing! The results table is below. Posted by Alexandra Kosteniuk 12th Women's World Chess Champion

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