Nona Gaprindashvili

World chess champion, the first woman grandmaster

born 1941

Nona Gaprindashvili was born in 1941 in Zugdidi. In 1962, at twenty-one, she beat Elisaveta Bykova by a wide margin to become women's world chess champion. She held the title for sixteen years and lost it only in 1978, to the seventeen-year-old Maia Chiburdanidze, another Georgian.

Gaprindashvili played a great deal against men. In 1977 she tied for first at the strong Lone Pine tournament in the United States, the first grandmaster norm ever earned by a woman. In 1978 FIDE awarded a woman the grandmaster title for the first time in history, and that woman was her. She herself counts these two events as the greatest of her chess life.

At the women's chess olympiads she won twenty-five medals, eleven team golds and nine individual golds among them. From 1989 to 1996 she headed the National Olympic Committee of Georgia. In 2021 Gaprindashvili sued Netflix after the series “The Queen's Gambit” called her a Russian player who had never faced men. The parties settled in 2022.