Aleksandra Goryachkina

Aleksandra Goryachkina
Goryachkina at the Women's Candidates Tournament 2024
Full name	Aleksandra Yuryevna Goryachkina
Country	Russia
Born	(1998-09-28) 28 September 1998 (age 25) Orsk, Russia
Title	Grandmaster (2018)
FIDE rating	2545 (June 2024)
Peak rating	2611 (August 2021)

Aleksandra Yuryevna Goryachkina (Russian: Алекса́ндра Ю́рьевна Горя́чкина; born 28 September 1998) is a Russian chess player who holds the title of Grandmaster (GM). She is the No. 4 ranked woman in the world by FIDE rating and is also the fourth-highest rated woman and highest rated Russian woman in chess history with a peak rating of 2611. Goryachkina was the challenger in the 2020 Women's World Championship match, which she lost in rapid tiebreaks to Ju Wenjun. She is also a three-time Russian Women's Chess Champion, which she achieved in 2015, 2017, and 2020. In August 2023, she won the FIDE Women's World Cup after defeating Nurgyul Salimova in a tie break match.^[1]

Goryachkina was born into a chess family; her father is a chess coach, and both of her parents have been rated above 2200. She quickly emerged as a chess prodigy, winning the under-10, under-14, and under-18 girls' divisions of the World Youth Chess Championship. She is also a two-time girls' World Junior Champion. At the age of 13, Goryachkina became the third-youngest Woman Grandmaster (WGM) of all time behind Hou Yifan and Kateryna Lagno. She then became the fifth-youngest woman to earn the Grandmaster title as a teenager in early 2018. She first entered the women's top 10 in the world later that year, and reached the top 3 with a dominant performance to win the 2019 Candidates Tournament and qualify for the 2020 World Championship match.

Some of Goryachkina's best performances have come in the open Russian Championship Higher League where she scored 5½/9 in both 2018 and 2020 for performance ratings of 2713 and 2656, and the Russian Team Championship Higher League where she scored 6/8 in 2019 for a performance rating of 2670. She also had a performance rating of 2666 when she won the 2019 Candidates Tournament with a score of 9½/14.