Rusudan Goletiani

Rusudan Goletiani

at the Dresden Olympiad, 2008
Full name Rusudan Goletiani
Country  United States
Born September 8, 1980
Sukhumi , Abkhazian ASSR, Georgian SSR, Soviet Union
Title Woman Grandmaster
International Master
FIDE rating 2311 (April 2015)
Peak rating 2403 (October 2006)

Rusudan ("Rusa") Goletiani (Georgian: რუსუდან გოლეთიანი) (born September 8, 1980 in Sukhumi, Abkhaz ASSR, Georgian SSR, Soviet Union) is a Georgian-American chess player. 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.

Goletiani won the Soviet Junior Championship for Girls Under-12 in 1990 when she was nine years old. In 1990, she was the Soviet Representative in the World Youth Chess tournament for Peace in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. 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.

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. However, there were lengthy times when she was not able to compete in chess events because of the Georgian civil war at the beginning of the nineties and the 1992-1993 war in Abkhazia, where she was born.

After her arrival in the United States in May, 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 elected USCF President in August 2003, her very first act as president was to fire Brownscombe. As a result, Goletiani was allowed to compete for the U.S. Championship for the first time and she promptly won the Woman's Championship, defeating Tatev Abrahamyan 2–0 in a playoff.

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