Today a press conference took place at the well-known Coffeemania in central Moscow to celebrate Alexandra’s Photo Exposition and her recent title of World Champion Chess960. Alexandra also played with 20 winners of our recent puzzle competition, it was a wonderful day! Have a look at our photo album by clicking here. Please go and vote for the photos you like best
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Alexandra is pleased to be able to offer to our site’s members 2 deeply commented games from the recent Tomsk Russian championship. The first one is a draw against Russian national team member GM Artiom Timofeev and the second is a loss against the future winner of the Russian Championship, GM Ernesto Inarkiev. Both games are very interesting and present opening novelties and sharp play. Members can watch them by clicking PDF1, PDF2, PGN1, PGN2. If you’re not a member, it’s not too late, buy anything from our shop above $40 and you’ll become one for a year! Thanks for your support!

We are pleased to announce that we have now the technology to allow you to record your voice messages directly from your browser. All you need is to connect your microphone to your computer (maybe it’s built-in and so you don’t even have to do that), and click HERE to leave a message up to 2 minutes for Alexandra. You can also send messages and MP3 greetings by email and also by phone on Alexandra’s voicemail at 1-305-767-2143. Alexandra sincerely appreciates your messages, thanks!

The super strong Russian Men’s Championship is over, Alexandra beat Vadim Karpov today in the last round. The overall Russian Championship winner ended up to be Ernesto Inarkiev, whom you see on the photo to the left gave a hard time to Alexandra in the second round, congratulations to him! Alexandra had a difficult tournament in Tomsk, and ended up with only 3 points, but we are sure you know that the only way to make progress is to meet players stronger than you, and to gather lessons from defeats. So we are sure this tournament is on Alexandra’s path to become a much stronger chess player. For fun, have a look at a caricature that was made of Alexandra in Tomsk.

Some news from Tomsk: After two difficult days playing strong GM’s, Alexandra today won her game in a convincing way against IM Dmitry Sitnikov, so she has 1.5 out of 4 in this very strong event, a good result so far. On the photo to the left you see Alexandra before her game. In the foreground, you can see ex-world champion Alexander Khalifman. Follow Alexandra’s games live daily at 4AM EST (if you’re not sleeping at that time!).

We have for you a 10 minute video of a blitz game Alexandra played last week in Moscow against International Master Oleg Nikolenko. She comments the games as it unfolds. You can watch the movie in web resolution (14 megabytes) by clicking here. Be patient while the video loads. Make sure you have the latest Quicktime plugin for your browser. For those of you who have very fast internet, get a better quality 48 MB file by clicking here. To better follow the game, you can download the PGN game file or look at the moves by clicking here. All the files are free, enjoy!

Alexandra did a great performance today, she played a very nice and complicated game with black and held her own against one of the favorites, Grandmaster Artiom Timofeev, FIDE ELO 2657, member of the Russian National Men’s Team. The game ended up in a draw after 46 moves. Thanks for your emails of encouragement, it’s not easy for Alexandra to be the only woman competing at this high level, she appreciates it. We hope Alexandra will continue to do well in this tournament. If you’d like to download Alexandra’s game in pgn, click here. If you want you can copy-paste the moves from the pgn file (it’s a text file and can be opened in any text editor) and play them in our PGN Player.

Today was the first round of the Russian Men’s Championships in Tomsk, Central Siberia. Alexandra Kosteniuk is the only woman taking part in this very strong competition (see participants on the official Tomsk site), qualifyer for the men’s Russian Superfinal. Alexandra is #35 on the starting list. The games are played at 3PM local time (4AM EST) and can be watched live. Click here for Chesspro’s tournament page (in Russian).