Alexandra Konstantinovna Kosteniuk is a Russian grandmaser, a former Women's World Chess Champion (from 2008 to 2010), and the current Women's World Rapid Chess Champion. She won the team gold medal for Russia at the 2010, 2012 and 2014 Women's Chess Olympiads, the 2007, 2009, 2011, 2015 and 2017 Women's European Team Chess Championships, and the Women's Chess World Cup 2021.
An illustrious chess career. But her fame was also connected with her looks, which she proudly displayed in photo shoots and adds for luxury products. She even played in a Russian film, directed by the famous Stanislav Govorukhin.
Alexandra also has a very active web site, http://www.kosteniuk.com/, whose main mottos are: "Chess is great!" and “Beauty and Mind Are Inseparable”. She has a personal blog on Instagram and conducts regular streams on her twitch channel. More than 200,000 chess fans follow Alexandra's official pages:
- www.youtube.com/chessqueen
- www.twitter.com/chessqueen - www.twitter.com/chessqueen
- www. facebook.com/chessqueen
- t.me/s/chessqueena
Since 2007, Alexandra has been holding a children's chess tournament "Alexandra Kosteniuk Cup" - www.chessqueencup.com, in which more than 1000 children have already taken part. She is an Ambassador for Chess for Peace in the organization Sport for Peace and is actively involved in charitable activities.
Most Photogenic Players of the Olympiad, Torino 2006
Kosteniuk.com had and has a very large collection of high-quality photos. In 2006 the photographer Pufichek selected 65 photos from the Torino Chess Olympiad for the first of two "Photogenic competitions". It was for female players – the next, we were assured, would be for males. Here are the female entries:
You might want to google the above players and see what they look like today. And how successful they are in a generally male-dominated game. Incidentally, we never saw a similar "photogenic competition" for men.