Alexandra Botez – the perfect blend of beauty and intelligence
Alexandra Botez (born Alexandra Botez; September 24, 1995, Dallas, Texas, USA) – Canadian-American chess player, FIDE master of women (WFM).
Chess player Alexandra Botez
Alexandra Botez
Family and chess career
Alexandra Botez of Romanian descent. Born in the USA. Grew up in the close-knit Romanian community of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
She started playing chess at the age of 6 years. According to Alexandra, it all started with a bet:
When I was six years old, my father bet with his mother. He told her that after two weeks of teaching me how to play chess, I could defeat her. The appointed time has come, and I won the game. My mom must have had little experience playing chess. She also encouraged me to continue playing.
Alexandra studied at the Golden Knights chess club under the Romanian community center under the guidance of coach V. E. Demyan.
Alexandra Botez in childhood
Canadian Girls Championship Winner
She played for the Canadian national team and five times became the champion of Canada among girls. She took part in several chess olympiads.
In 2011, at the age of 15, she won the U.S. Women’s Championship. The tournament was organized by the Kasparov Foundation with the support of the USCF (United States Chess Federation) and the University of Texas. Botez participated in the category up to eighteen years of age, gaining five points out of six possible without losing a single game.
Chess advances allowed a scholarship to study at the University of Texas at Dallas in the amount of $ 105,000. In March 2011, she won first place at the Susan Polgar National Girls Tournament, earning another $ 40,000 for training. Despite a scholarship to the University of Texas, she decided to study at Stanford University at the Department of International Relations.
Stanford University is a private research university in the USA, one of the most respected and rated in the USA and in the world. Located in the state of California near the city of Palo Alto (south of San Francisco).
Alexandra Botez became the first woman president of the Stanford Chess Club. One of the best Canadian chess players, speaks five languages. He gives lectures at the local chess school, mentors of various chess clubs and works on projects to develop chess as a teaching tool for children.
In April 2018, Botez commented on the PRO Chess League Finals Set For San Francisco games with the international master Daniel Rensch, international master Anna Rudolph and grandmaster Robert Hess.
In June 2018, she commented on ChessKid Crowns 7 – a tournament for children from the United States.
Alexandra has a younger sister Andrea (born in 2002), who also plays chess.
SuperFan Project
Alexandra had a Facebook page that she created to stay in touch with the chess community. Every day she received dozens of messages with questions regarding chess. Alexandra wanted to help as many people as possible with advice, but there was no way to answer everyone. Then she decided to discuss the problem with classmate Ruben Mayer, who had the necessary skills in the field of data analysis.
Ultimately, SuperFan came about. This is a unified mailbox that uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) to interpret and combine incoming messages that are similar, initially via SMS. Why is it needed? For example, Alexandra has a large army of fans who ask similar questions. It is physically impossible to answer each individually, which affects the interaction with fans. Thanks to SuperFan, you can answer at the same time many fans who asked similar questions, for example, “what debut do you recommend for beginner chess players?”
SuperFan found support from Planet of the Apps. Mentor Alexandra and Ruben Gary Vaynerchuk introduced them to four famous people who wanted to test a new product. A / B testing showed that fans who interact with the idol in this way become more active on existing social networks. Essentially, fans become Super fans. This is due to the active feedback, because usually the messages of fans fly away into the void, without hope of an answer.
Alexandra says that, thanks to personal experience, she became immune to repeated sexism in chess, as she was exposed to it for a long time. She was the best high school player in Oregon, despite the fact that her peers were almost all male. Alexandra believes that the environment does not bode well for young chess players. “The number of men over forty attacking underage girls in chess tournaments in eerie, external manners is staggering,” she says. She also notes that women are often considered inherently worse than men in chess, and this stereotype continues to exist.
