Nona Gaprindashvili

Nona Gaprindashvili
ნონა გაფრინდაშვილი

Nona Gaprindashvili at Bad Kissingen, 1982
Country Soviet Union
Georgia
Born (1941-05-03) 3 May 1941
Zugdidi, Georgian SSR, Soviet Union
Title Grandmaster
Women's World Champion 1962–78
Peak rating 2495 (July 1987)

Nona Gaprindashvili (Georgian: ნონა გაფრინდაშვილი; born 3 May 1941) is a Georgian chess player, the sixth women's world chess champion (1962–1978), and first female Grandmaster. Born in Zugdidi, Georgia (then part of the Soviet Union), she is the strongest female player of her generation.

In 1961, aged 20, Gaprindashvili won the fourth women's Candidates Tournament, setting up a title match against Russian world champion Elisabeth Bykova. She won the match easily, with a final score of 9-2 (+7−0=4), and went on to defend her title successfully four times: three times against Alla Kushnir (1965: 10–6; 1969: 12–7; 1972: 12–11) and once against fellow Georgian Nana Alexandria (1975: 9–4). She finally lost her crown in 1978 to another Georgian, 17-year-old Maia Chiburdanidze, by a score of 6½–8½ (+2−4=9).

Gaprindashvili played for the Soviet Union in the Chess Olympiads of 1963, 1966, 1969, 1972, 1974, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1990, and for Georgia in 1992.[1] She was one of the contributing players of the USSR team that dominated the women's Olympiads of the 1980s. She won as many as 25 medals, among which 11 team gold medals and 9 individual gold medals.[2] At the Olympiad of Dubai 1986 she won all the ten games she played.

She was a five-times winner of the Women's Soviet Championship: in 1964, 1973, 1981, 1983, and 1985.

During her career Gaprindashvili successfully competed in men's tournaments, winning (amongst others) the Hastings Challengers tournament in 1963/4 and tying for first place at Lone Pine International tournament in 1977.

In 1978 Gaprindashvili became the first woman to be awarded the Grandmaster title. She was awarded the title after scoring two grandmaster norms totaling 23 games, the last of which was winning Lone Pine 1977 against a field of 45 players, mostly grandmasters. Although the GM title normally required 24 games, by exceeding the GM 'norm' requirement in Lone Pine, FIDE found her results over 23 games equivalent to 24 games and made her the first woman Grandmaster.[3]

In 1975 she had a perfume named after her.

In 1995 Gaprindashvili won the Women's World Senior Championship for the first time. She won it also in 2009, 2014, 2015 and 2016 the latter three in the over-65 division. She also won the Women's European Senior Championship in 2011 and 2015.

In 2005, at age 64, Gaprindashvili won the BDO Chess Tournament held in Haarlem, the Netherlands with a score of 6.5/10 and a performance rating of 2510.[4]

Gaprindashvili was awarded the Order of Excellence in 2015 by President of Georgia Giorgi Margvelashvili for "her outstanding contribution to the country and nation" and "representing Georgia at an international level".[5]

References

  1. ↑ OlimpBase: Women's Chess Olympiads, Nona Gaprindashvili
  2. ↑ Only her compatriot Maia Chiburdanidze won more: 28 medals in 15 olympiads (15 individual and 13 team medals, of which 15 gold)
  3. ↑ Pal Benko wrote in Chess Life & Review (January 1979):
    ...Of course (Nona) had earned the "woman grandmaster" title awarded by the International Chess Federation (FIDE), as have some two dozen other women. But she also earned the (men's) international master title, becoming the first woman ever to have done so (Vera Menchik was probably strong enough to have earned this title, but she died in 1943 (sic), long before the modern title system was adopted), and in Buenos Aires in November 1978 FIDE bestowed upon Nona Gaprindashvili the (men's) international grandmaster title. Not only is she the only woman ever to have received this title, she is the only woman ever to have deserved it.
    It is regrettable, therefore, that she did not actually earn the title in the regular way: FIDE requires that to earn the grandmaster title a player must achieve certain minimum scores in tournaments consisting of at least twenty-four games in aggregate (the description is highly oversimplified, but you get the idea), and Nona was two or three games short. Yet the FIDE Qualifications Commission voted to give her the title. In my opinion, this historic occasion should not have been allowed to carry even this slight tarnish.
  4. ↑ http://en.chessbase.com/Home/TabId/211/PostId/4002621
  5. ↑ "Order of Excellence to Nona Gaprindashvili". FIDE. Retrieved 29 December 2015.
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Preceded by
Elisabeth Bykova		 Women's World Chess Champion
1962–1978 		Succeeded by
Maia Chiburdanidze
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