30 October 2009
Dear Chess friends,
I am so pleased to let you know that just a few moments ago my team, the team of Russia, won what is probably one of the strongest and most important team competitions of the year, the European Team Championship.
It was a race until the last moment with Georgia. We had an individual point advantage before the last round, but it was critical we win our last match against Armenia. We managed to win, and so ended up the championship with 8 won matches out of 9 (see full rankings), that’s 16 match points, and more individual match points than anybody (26 points, see individual results). Second came in Georgia, with 16 match points (that’s 7 won matches and two drawn matches), but only 24 individual points.
I played all my games on Board 1, my team members are, in order of boards, Tatiana Kosintseva, Nadezhda Kosintseva, Marina Romanko and Valentina Gunina. I’d like to thank them all for supporting the team and helping us get gold.
The championship was extremely hard fought, and almost all my games have been interesting. I scored 6 out of 8, that’s 4 wins (against Monica Calzetta Ruiz, Kateryna Lahno, Zeinab Mamedjarova, Jana Jackova) and 4 draws (against Nana Dzadnidze, Szidonia Vajda, Monica Socko, and Elina Danielian). I missed winning opportunities in a few games, and played out some nice combinations, so you can be sure I will soon publish some new videos both for my Chess Killer Tips podcast and for my YouTube channel “ChessQueen”.
I’ll write much more after the prize ceremony.
Posted by Alexandra Kosteniuk
Women’s World Champion
