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Nona Gaprindashvili - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nona Gaprindashvili
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nona Gaprindashvili (Georgian:

; 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 was 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 (+70=4), and went
on to defend her title successfully four times: three times
against Alla Kushnir (1965: 106; 1969: 127; 1972: 12
11) and once against fellow Georgian Nana Alexandria
(1975: 94). She finally lost her crown in 1978 to another
Georgian, 17-year-old Maia Chiburdanidze, by a score of
68 (+24=9).
Gaprindashvili played for 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 in 1977, earning a grandmaster norm.

Nona Gaprindashvili

Nona Gaprindashvili at Bad Kissingen, 1982

Full name

Nona Gaprindashvili

Country

Soviet Union
Georgia

Born

3 May 1941
Zugdidi, Georgian SSR,
Soviet Union

Title

Grandmaster

Women's World
Champion

196278

FIDE rating

2350 (November 2012)

Peak rating

2495 (July 1987)

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 she did not meet the technical requirements for the GM title,
which required 24 games, by exceeding the GM 'norm' requirement in Lone Pine, FIDE found her results equivalent
to 24 games and made her the first woman Grandmaster. Not until Zsuzsa Polgar did another woman achieve the
Grandmaster title through regular tournament play.[3]
In 1975 she had a perfume named after her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nona_Gaprindashvili

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Nona Gaprindashvili - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In 2005, at age 64, Nona won the BDO Chess Tournament held in Haarlem, the Netherlands with a score of
6.5/10 and a performance rating of 2510.[4]
In 2009 she won in Condino, Italy the World Senior Championship for women.

References
1. OlimpBase: Women's Chess Olympiads, Nona Gaprindashvili (http://www.olimpbase.org/playersw/pbjz9lbk.html)
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

External links
Nona Gaprindashvili (http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?

Wikimedia Commons has

media related to Nona
Gaprindashvili.

event=13600125) rating card at FIDE

Nona Gaprindashvili

(http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=16111) player profile and games at Chessgames.com

Preceded by
Elisabeth Bykova

Women's World Chess Champion

19621978

Succeeded by
Maia Chiburdanidze

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nona_Gaprindashvili&oldid=636324290"

Categories: 1941 births Living people People from Zugdidi Chess grandmasters
Chess woman grandmasters Women's World Chess Champions World Senior Chess Champions
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Nona Gaprindashvili - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chess players from Georgia (country) Soviet chess players Burevestnik athletes
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