Rusudan Goletiani

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Rusudan ("Rusa") Goletiani was born on September 8, 1980 in Sukhumi, Abkhazia, Republic of Georgia. She won the 2005 U.S. Women's Chess Championship and the Woman's Chess Champion for the Americas Continents (North and South America combined). She has achieved the FIDE International Woman Grandmaster title. She now lives in Westchester County in New York state.

When Goletiani arrived in New York City on a direct flight from her Republic of Georgia on Friday May 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 in Hungary. In 1995, she won the World Championship for Girls Under-16 in Brazil. In 1997, she won the World Championship for Girls Under-18 In Yerevan, Armenia. Perhaps even more impressively, Goletiani won the Soviet 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 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

Goletiani qualified to the World Chess Championship, scheduled to begin on November 25, 2000 in New Delhi, India, by tying for first with Grandmaster Nino Khurtsidze in a zonal tournament in Georgia in May, 2000, with representatives of six countries including Yugoslavia and Turkey 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 of Abkhazia.

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 by Tom Brownscombe who was the USCF scholastic coordinator at the time. When Beatriz Marinello was first elected USCF 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, defeating Tatev Abrahamyan 2–0 in a playoff.