- Rusudan Goletiani
Rusudan ("Rusa") Goletiani (born
September 8 1980 inSukhumi , Abkhaz ASSR, Georgian SSR,Soviet Union ) is a Georgian-Americanchess player. She won the 2005U.S. Women's Chess Championship and the Woman's Chess Champion for the Americas Continents (North and South America combined). She has achieved theFIDE InternationalWoman Grandmaster title. She now lives inWestchester County inNew York state.When Goletiani arrived in
New York City on a direct flight from her Republic of Georgia on FridayMay 12 2000 , she was unknown in America, in spite of having won the World Chess Championship for Girls Under 14, the World Chess Championship for Girls Under 16, and the World Chess Championship for Girls Under 18 in successive years. She had traveled extensively and won three world chess championships. In 1994, she won the World Championship for Girls Under-14 inHungary . In 1995, she won the World Championship for Girls Under-16 inBrazil . In 1997, she won the World Championship for Girls Under-18 InYerevan ,Armenia . Perhaps even more impressively, Goletiani won theSoviet Junior Championship for Girls Under-12 in 1990 when she was only nine years old. In 1990, she was the Soviet Representative in the World Youth Chess tournament for Peace inFond du Lac, Wisconsin .Goletiani qualified to the World Chess Championship, scheduled to begin on
November 25 2000 inNew Delhi ,India , by tying for first with GrandmasterNino Khurtsidze in a zonal tournament in Georgia in May, 2000, with representatives of six countries includingYugoslavia andTurkey competing. However, there were lengthy times when she was not able to compete in chess events because Georgia has been beset by civil war since 1992 and the war is primarily centered in her home region ofAbkhazia .After her arrival in the United States in 2000, she was prohibited from playing in the
U.S. Chess Championship for four years in a controversial ruling byTom Brownscombe who was theUSCF scholastic coordinator at the time. WhenBeatriz Marinello was first electedUSCF President in August 2003, her very first act as president was to fire Brownscombe. As a result, Rusudan Goletiani was allowed to compete for the U.S. Championship for the first time and she promptly won the U.S. Woman's Chess Championship, defeatingTatev Abrahamyan 2–0 in a playoff.External links
*fide|id=13601105|name=Rusa Goletiani
* [http://www.chessworld.net/chessclubs/statistics_pgn_rating_chart.asp?username=Goletiani,Rusudan Statistics at ChessWorld.net]
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