Great Players: Nona Gaprindashvili

 It's unusual to see chess get media coverage outside the specialist chess press, but it's certainly managed it this week. The chess-based series Queen's Gambit has got Netflix into a lawsuit, thanks to a passing reference in the script, claiming that Nona Gaprindashvili (1941-), the subject of today's piece, had only played against other women.

Whatever the merits of the lawsuit as a lawsuit (which I am not remotely qualified to comment on, but Twitter user questauthority is, and thinks she has a decent case), this was clearly an unforced error by Netflix: their script made a claim not present in the original novel, and one which was easily checkable - by 1968, when the scene in question is set, Gaprindashvili had faced a number of notable male opponents, including former world champion Mikhail Tal, and others such as Keres, Geller and Gligoric.

Moving on from the lawsuit, what can we say about Gaprindashvili's chess career? Well, it is impressive in a number of ways, both in its sheer length (the earliest games I have of hers in my database date back to 1956, and she was still active as of autumn 2019) and in its quality: she won the women's world championship in 1962 (scoring 13/16 to win the Candidates, and then defeating Bykova by an astonishing 9-2 margin), and retained the title until 1977, when she lost it to a fellow Georgian, Maya Chiburdanidze; only Vera Menchik held the title for longer.

She was also the first woman to be awarded the full grandmaster title, in 1978, and she certainly proved worthy of it; she was capable of producing 2500+ performances well into her sixties.

In recent years, she has consistently dominated the women's over-65 world championship, winning it five times between 2014 and 2019; Acqui Terme 2017 was the only one to get away from her.






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