Aleksandra Goryachkina

Aleksandra Yuryevna Goryachkina (Russian: Александра Юрьевна Горячкина; born 28 September 1998) is a Russian chess grandmaster (GM). She is the highest rated Russian woman in chess history with a peak FIDE rating of 2611. Goryachkina was the challenger in the 2020 Women's World Championship match, which she lost in rapid tiebreaks to Ju Wenjun. She is also a three-time Russian Women's Chess Champion, which she achieved in 2015, 2017, and 2020. In August 2023, she won the Women's Chess World Cup after defeating Nurgyul Salimova in the finals. She won the Women's World Rapid Championship in 2025 after defeating Zhu Jiner in blitz playoff.

Goryachkina was born into a chess family; her father is a chess coach, and both of her parents have been rated above 2200. She quickly emerged as a chess prodigy, winning the under-10, under-14, and under-18 girls' divisions of the World Youth Chess Championship. She is also a two-time girls' World Junior Champion. At the age of 13, Goryachkina became the fifth-youngest Woman Grandmaster (WGM) in history. She then became the fifth-youngest woman to earn the Grandmaster title as a teenager in early 2018. She first entered the women's top 10 in the world later that year, and reached the top 3 with a dominant performance to win the 2019 Candidates Tournament and qualify for the 2020 World Championship match.

Some of Goryachkina's best performances have come in the open Russian Championship Higher League where she scored 5½/9 in both 2018 and 2020 for performance ratings of 2713 and 2656, and the Russian Team Championship Higher League where she scored 6/8 in 2019 for a performance rating of 2670. She also had a performance rating of 2666 when she won the 2019 Candidates Tournament with a score of 9½/14.