Supernationals V: GM Alexandria Kosteniuk Simul

Hola darlings!

The Chess Queen(TM), GM Alexandria Kosteniuk, came, saw, and conquered.  USCF online presents a video interview of the 12th Women's World Chess Champion in Nashville from CLO Editor Jen Shahade.  GM Kosteniuk is there (1) to give a simul and (2) to support her young daughter playing in the Supernationals.  The video below is from You Tube.  If you have keen eyes, you will see Alexandria's daughter clinging to Mama near the beginning of the video - for a few seconds only:

9Queens and Chess Queen Alexandra Kosteniuk!

As part of 9Queens' Fifth Annual Chess Fest, 12th Women's World Chess Champion GM Alexandra Kosteniuk played a 40-gam simul in Tucson, Arizona.

The 9Queens website hasn't been updated with the most recent information/photos yet, but you can read a little at Alexandra Kosteniuk's Facebook Page.

See also 9Queens' Facebook Page with some nice photographs of Alexandra in the simul, etc. 

The simul was held at the Congress Hotel.

Alexandra Kosteniuk Interview at WCL

Macauley Peterson has a video interview with 2008 Women's World Chess Champion GM Kosteniuk presently running at World Chess Live which he was kind enough to share, but being techy incompetent I can't figure out how to get it to paste in here correctly so that it works. The interview was after a 57-game simul she gave at the recently-concluded Super-Nationals in Nashville, Tennessee. She gave two simuls in Nashville and also recently in New York. Try here and scrolling to the video. (Photo: Kosteniuk at the 2007 European Team Championships).

Kosteniuk Seeks to Broaden Chess' Appeal

From The Christian Science Monitor (Photo: Kosteniuk, Round 5, Game 2, 2008 Women's World Chess Championship) A chess champion crusades to make the game ‘cool’ Russian Alexandra Kosteniuk, the women’s world title holder with a fashion-model image, wants to broaden the game’s appeal to young people. By Jacqui Goddard Correspondent / February 23, 2009 edition To a woman still reveling in the joys and novelty of motherhood, such a lifestyle has its challenges. Chess, she realizes, is no longer the central love of her life – she has won everything there is to win, and the days of relentless competition are obviously winding down. “I have a strong guilt that lives inside me if I’m away from my daughter,” she admits. “The problem now is that my main dream was fulfilled when I became world champion, and though there’s so many things to do, I have a family and baby and want to spend time with them too.” KEY BISCAYNE, FLA. Alexandra Kosteniuk’s hand quivers as she picks up a pawn and skips it to the center of the chessboard on the table before us. I wonder, just for one silly moment, whether she is trembling in fear of her opponent. Perhaps even the reigning Women’s World Chess Champion can have bad days, I speculate, when a beginner like me stands a chance of ambushing her king and declaring “Checkmate,” sending her reeling in admiration at my stealth and cunning? No, I discover after three minutes’ play, during which she slaughters me in just 14 moves. She doesn’t. And her shivers are nothing to do with nerves – it is simply a chilly day, here on the open veranda of an oceanfront cafe on Key Biscayne, Fla. “Your first move was good,” she compliments me, allowing me a fleeting second to feel proud of myself for my opening “pawn to E4” maneuver. Then she adds, “But by your fourth move, the position was hopeless,” referring to my clumsy sacrifice of a knight. A Russian with good looks and flowing hair, Ms. Kosteniuk has been dubbed the “Anna Kournikova of chess.” It’s a label she scorns, though: the fetching Kournikova, she points out, never won a singles tennis tournament. By comparison, Kosteniuk has made all the right moves and swept the board in the world of chess. A master when she was 8 and a grandmaster at 14 – rankings that denote supreme skills – she has since captured every title available to a woman player, culminating in the Women’s World Chess Champion crown in Nalchik, Russia, last September. But the undeniable similarity to Kournikova is that Kosteniuk is not averse to striking a glamorous pose for the cameras, sometimes while dressed in little more than a bikini. Her purpose, she says, is to illustrate her mantra, “Beauty and brains can go together.” There have been photo shoots in top fashion magazines, and advertising contracts with a Swiss watchmaker, a Russian electronics company, and a mobile phone firm. Her face has been plastered on billboards, buses, and television screens across Russia. Her commercial ventures include a chess computer game marketed under the name “Alexandra the Great.” The cover-girl poses and hunger for publicity have less to do with vanity or money than with her passion for injecting some color into the black-and-white world of chess. She wants to transform its geeky reputation. Indeed, she considers her glamour and youth – she is now 24 – powerful tools in her mission to enthuse more young people about the game and persuade them to believe that “chess is cool.” “Chess has a very wrong image. People think it’s boring, and only fat men in suits play it, so I break that signal and show them chess is cool,” she says. “You can easily be beautiful and play chess well, or be a professor, or any kind of high achiever. The only thing chess doesn’t have is a lot of attention from the media and from sponsors, so I think I can help in this way. If you tell people there are some nice models playing chess, somehow the modern world finds it more interesting.” ••• Born in Perm, Russia, and raised in Moscow, Kosteniuk set out on a path to greatness at the age of 5. That’s when her father Konstantin, an officer in the Red Army, taught her to play chess. She was limited to only 30 minutes of television a day, and every moment was filled with some kind of activity – playing soccer with friends, reading a book, poring over mathematical puzzles. “No time was ever idle,” says her father, adding that even now, Alexandra “absolutely hates to sit down doing nothing.” “She was always glad to sit at the chess table with me and listen to me talk about those chess pieces,” he recalls. She developed skills methodically. Rest of article.

Kosteniuk - American Resident

Chess By Lubomir Kavalek Special to The Washington Post Monday, September 15, 2008; Page C10 Florida attracts not only hurricanes. Many excellent foreign tennis players found a second home there, and chess players were not far behind. The Russian grandmaster Alexandra Kosteniuk also lives in the Sunshine State. Last week, she made it to the final of the FIDE Women's World Championship in Nalchik, Russia. Her decisive quaterfinal victory against Ukraine's Anna Ushenina came in a Nimzo-Indian variation that debuted in a world championship match in 1993 in London. By slightly tweaking the move order, Kosteniuk created a perfect storm. Ushenina-Kosteniuk 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.Qc2 d5 5.cxd5 exd5 6.Bg5 c5 7.dxc5 h6 8.Bh4 g5 9.Bg3 Ne4! 10.e3 Qa5! (I found this precise move order when I was preparing Nigel Short for his world championship match against Garry Kasparov in 1993. It improves on 10...Nc6 11.Nf3 Qa5 12.Nd2! Nxc3 13.bxc3 Bxc3 14.Rb1 Qxc5 15.Rb5 Qa3 16.Rb3 Bxd2+ 17.Qxd2 Qa5 played in the game Spassky-Fischer, Belgrade 1992.) 11.Be5 (The bishop move was also Kasparov's first reaction against Short. After he had time to analyze it, he came up with 11.Nge2.) 11...0-0 12.Bd3 Nc6 13.Bxe4 Nxe5! 14.Bh7+ ?! (A suspect move. After 14.Bxd5 Bg4! the game Kasparov-Short, London 1993, went 15.Nf3 Bxf3 16.Bxf3 Nxf3+ 17.gxf3 Rac8 18.0-0 and draw was agreed. As later games confirmed, black is already better after 18...Rxc5. Instead of 15.Nf3, grabbing the pawn 15.Bxb7 led to a disaster in the game Carlhammar-Kosten, Villeurbanne 2003, after 15...Rad8 16.Be4 Nc4 17.Rc1 Nxb2 18.f3 Nc4 19.Nge2 Nxe3 20.Qb1 Be6 21.Kf2 f5 and white resigned.) 14...Kg7 15.Bd3 b6! (Kosteniuk finds an improvement to 15...d4 16.exd4 Nxd3+ 17.Qxd3 Re8+ 18.Nge2 b6 when white can try to escape with 19.0-0-0.) 16.cxb6? (Loses by force. After 16.0-0-0 Bxc3 17.Qxc3 Qxc3+ 18.bxc3 Nxd3+ 19.Rxd3 Bf5 20.Rd2 [On 20.Rxd5 Be4 wins.] 20...bxc5 black has the edge.) 1 6...d4! 17.exd4 Nxd3+ 18.Qxd3 Re8+ 19.Kd1 (After 19.Nge2 Ba6 wins.) 19...Bf5 20.Qd2 (20.Qf3 only transposes to the game after 20...Bxc3 21.Qxc3, since 21.bxc3? allows 21...Qa4+ 22.Kd2 Qc2 mate.) 20...Bxc3 21.Qxc3 Qxb6 (21...Qa6! 22.Kd2 Rac8 23.Qb3 Qa5+ also wins.) 22.Ne2 Rac8 23.Qa3 Rc2 (Almost everything wins here, for example 23...Qc6 24.Rc1 Qe4!; or 23...Rc4 24.h3 Rxd4+ 25.Ke1 Rxe2+! 26.Kxe2 Qb5+ 27.Ke1 Re4+.) 24.Re1 Rd8 (24...Rc4 is also good.) 25.Qe3 Qxb2 26.Rc1 Re8 (27.Qxe8 allows 27...Rd2 epaulet mate.) White resigned.

The Kings of New York

From Michael Weinreb's The Kings of New York, this is from the chapter "The Women in the Room." (The photo is 2003 U.S. Women's Chess Champion Anna Hahn, from an event in March, 2002.)

Anna Khan was sixteen years old and the reigning women's chess champion of Latvia when she enrolled at Murrow High School, the latest pubescent prodigy to arrive in Brooklyn from a distant corner of the crumbling Soviet empire. This was in 1993, ten years after Eliot Weiss founded the school's chess club and a few months after it won its first national championship. And for reasons entirely beyond Weiss's control, Anna Khan was the first female ever to compete on his traveling team.

Anna Khan would lead Murrow to two more national championships, in 1993 and 1994. Eventually, after changing her name to Anna Hahn, she won the U.S. Women's Championship in 2003 and earned the title of WIM, which is the abbreviation used for a "Women's International Master," a less stringent title than "International Master," and one that many of the best male players in the world deride as a second-class designation. On a Web site that archives past games from top players, the comments under Hahn's entry and photograph are a catalog of puerilities ("Anna Hahn can mate me any day. Growl.") But then, this is the way it has always been. Since the inception of competitive chess, the upper eschelons of the game have reeked of sexism, and women who dare intrude upon this sanctity are often treated with as much subtlety as if they'd wandered into the back room at Scores. "Guys aren't going to stand around and watch a guy's game because he's a guy," Bruce Pandolfini says. "Maybe if he's Bobby Fischer, but not for any other reason. But that's not why they stand around women. And if they say it's for any other reason, they're lying."

Forty-five years earlier, when a U.S. women's champion named Lisa Lane drew a sudden barrage of media attention (she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and was profiled in Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine, which described her as "comely" and "shapely"), Fischer, an equal-opportunity bigot, dismissed her and her entire sex with a barrage of insults. "They can't concentrate, they don't have stamina, and they aren't creative," he said of female chess players. "They're all fish." And that attitude didn't cease with Fischer: in 2002, Garry Kasparov told the Times of London that "chess is a mixture of sport, psychological warfare, science, and art," and that "when you look at all these components, man dominates. Every single component of chess belongs to the areas of male domination."

Of the top players in the world, only one, Hungarian Judit Polgar, is female, and fewer than ten of the world's 950 international grandmasters are women. [This information is somewhat dated.] Some efforts are being made to alter this: in recent years, Kasparov's own foundation has sponsored an all-girls national championship. But there remains a consensus among many of the best male players that this imbalance exists for a reason, that women are not wired for chess in the same way as men, that they they are, by nature and through societal pressure, more social creatures, and that they would prefer to interact with others than be locked in a room by themselves, poring over esoteric middle-game theory. Which is why most of these girls, when they reach the age of twelve or thirteen, an age that Bruce Pandolfini calls "crucial" to one's development as a chess player, simply fade away. Which is why approximately ninety-seven percent of competitive chess players in the United States happen to be male.

Of the thirty-five participants in the high-school varsity section at the city championships, two were girls. One of them was Anna Ginzburg, who came up through the Chess-in-the Schools program and landed one of those coveted spots at Stuyvesant High School. Ginzburg wears wire-rimmed glasses and has a tangle of thick brown hair and a penchant for feminine accessories, like her "Mrs. Affleck" tote bag. On the back of her Chronos digital clock, she's written her name in permanent marker, dotting the I with a flower and underlining the whole thing with a feminine flourish. when she was younger, she was painfully shy, but now she's gotten used to it, to being out-numbered and overlooked. At times, she is able to assimilate into this boys' world, beating them at cards and surprising them over the board and returning their banter when necessary. (Anna's rating is 1656, about the same as Oscar's whom she defeated at cities after an overconfident Oscar hung a rook). But the worst part, she says, is that when she travels to tournaments, she has so few people with whom she can share a hotel room. In that sense, she is very much on her own.

Because there is such disparity in numbers, the women who break through to competitive chess, the women who can manage to thrive amid a sea of testosterone, tend to be unique and forceful personalities. Some, like Elizabeth Vicary, admit that they thrive on the attention (one Russian women's GM, Alexandra Kosteniuk, has posed for so many risque photo shoots that she's been called "the Anna Kournikova of chess"). [Actually, Kosteniuk is a GM who just happens to be a woman]. Many say they've never felt discriminated against, and that if anything, it's just the opposite: men are so deferential, so cowed by their presence, that their brains often seize up and start melting when they play. Adults turn into randy adolescents. They make silly moves they would never make against other men, and when they are called on these things, they attribute their carelessness to the sex of their opponent: Against a man, I would never make such a move. "In most games, I am thinking about girls for fifty to seventy-five percent of the time, another fifteen percent goes to time management, and with what's left over I am calculating," grandmaster Alex Shabalov once admitted to Jennifer Shahade, the strongest female player ever to be born in this country.

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I'll bet Shabalov never figured those words would be immortalized in such a way. Har! Oooohhhh, Alex, Mr. Ladies' Man.

Blast from the Past - Zhu Beats Kosteniuk, Wins Women's Title

In this New York Times article, GM Robert Byrne gently reminds us that the old chestnut about women not playing "aggressive" chess is a lot of hooey. Chess; China's Zhu Beats a Russian To Win the Women's Title By ROBERT BYRNE Published: January 6, 2002 The old prejudice that women play timid chess was again exploded in the Women's World Championship, which ended Dec. 20 in Moscow. There wasn't one draw in the final confrontation. They kept on beating each other in a rhythmic tattoo until the winner, Zhu Chen, 25, of China, put two victories together and won the tiebreaker and the championship against Alexandra Kosteniuk, 17, a new star from Russia. The score in the four regulation games was 2-2. In the tiebreaker, Zhu forged a 3-1 triumph. The previous champion, Xie Jun of China, chose not to defend her title. Rumor has it that she wishes to follow Judit Polgar's road and enter only open competitions, against men. In the decisive game 8, Zhu showcased her power in attack. The Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense, introduced by 5 . . . a6, the favorite of two world champions, Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov, is played more often than all the other Sicilian variations put together nowadays. Black plans to thrust . . . e5, but wishes to exclude 5 . . . e5 6 Bb5 Bd7 7 Bd7 Qd7 8 Nde2 Qc6 9 Ng3 h6 10 O-O g6 11 f4 Nbd7 12 Qf3 Bg7 13 f5 with superior play for White. The advance 9 . . . h5 is typical of today's union of tactics and strategy. Black loosens her kingside pawn formation to prevent the opponent from thrusting g4 with the idea of continuing with g5, cramping the defender and thus an attack. Black knows that she has diminished the chance to make a safe place for her king on the kingside. She is willing to make that choice. It's not clear why Kosteniuk substituted 10 Be2?! for the usual 10 O-O-O, after which 10 . . . Nbd7 11 Nd5 Bd5 12 ed Rc8 13 Kb1 Nb6 14 Qa5 would yield her a slight superiority. In thrusting 13 . . . h4, Zhu went over from defense to attack. The white king position is not as secure as may appear. Zhu's 17 . . . f4!? leaves a hole at e4 and commits her to a mating attack. In the long run, a white knight would be sitting pretty at e4, but it takes three moves to get there, and a black knight could still challenge it. Kosteniuk's 19 c5!? is based on positional values: after 19 . . . dc 20 d6, she has a strong passed pawn at d6 and the diagonal a2/g8 becomes open for her king bishop. But maybe she should first have interpolated 19 g3!? to deny her foe the chance to exchange the dark-square bishops with 20 . . . Bh4! After 24 . . . Kf8, Kosteniuk should have tried 25 Be6 to make use of this piece. Her 25 Re2? was a terrible oversight in light of Zhu's smashing breakthrough with 25 . . . e4! 26 fe Ne5! The two threats were 27 . . . Nf3 and 27 . . . Nc4. After 27 Qc3 Ne4 28 Qc2, Zhu stormed through with 28 . . . Nf3! 29 Kf1 (29 Kh1 plunges into 29 . . . Ng3! 30 hg hg 31 Kg2 32 Qg3 33 Kf1 Qg1mate) Nh2 30 Ke1 Nf3 31 Kd1 hg 32 Qe4 g1/Q 33 Kc2 Nd4 34 Nd4 Qd4. With only a bishop for a queen, Kosteniuk staggered onward with 35 Rf1 Qe4 36 Re4, but after 36 . . . Qg2, she had to lose a rook, so she called it quits.