Alexandra Botez is an American-born Canadian chess prodigy, Twitch live streamer, and YouTuber who holds the title of Woman FIDE Master.
Contents
Wiki/Biography
Alexandra Botez was born on Sunday, September 24, 1995 (age 25 years; as in 2020), and hails from Dallas, Texas, United States. Her family fled from Bucharest, Romania to Vancouver, Canada when she was very young. Working as an engineer, her father began teaching chess to Alexandra when she was just six years old. Sharing her childhood memories, Alexandra said that once her father claimed that he could train Alexandra to play chess within just two weeks, after which she would be able to beat her mother. He said,
My mother just plays a little bit. So he bet that he could teach me how to play and, in just two weeks, I would be able to beat him.
Surprisingly, Alexandra actually managed to defeat her mother, causing her father to realize that she had some special skills at chess. Eventually, her father began taking Alexandra to local parks to challenge the older people. Later, his family moved to Oregon, United States, where he did his schooling at Clackamas High School. In school, she was a member of the CHS chess team, which was named overall first place winner in the varsity division of the Oregon High School Chess Team Association (OSHA) Championships. Subsequently, he pursued a Bachelor of Arts degree at Stanford University, California, where he studied International Relations, focusing on China. At Stanford, Alexandra was the first female president of the university’s chess club. In 2017, after graduating from Stanford, he began his journey as a chess streamer.
Physical Appearance
Height (Approx): 5′ 4″
Hair Color: Dark Brown
Eye colour: black
Family and ethnicity
Her parents, who were from Romania, fled the communist state and sought political asylum in Canada. , His father, Andrei Botez, is a former coach and International Arbiter, a title awarded by FIDE to individuals who are able to act as arbiters in important chess matches. Her sister, Andrea Botez, live streams games and personal content with Alexandra on the gaming platform ‘Twitch’.
Alexandra Botez with her family
livelihood
as a chess player
She was the winner of the Canadian Youth Chess Championship in the under 10 girls category.
Alexandra Botez holds the Canadian Youth Chess Championship trophy
At the age of ten, she began competing in Susan Polgar Foundation (SPF) events, and she twice represented Oregon at the prestigious SPF Girls Invitational. Alexandra has represented Canada in three Chess Olympiads. At the age of fifteen, she won the US Girls National Championship. In 2013, she won the Women’s FIDE title after qualifying for the North American Girls Under-18 Championships. She has played for the National Canadian Team and became Canadian National Girls Champion five times.
in the corporate sector
In June 2015, she joined Samsung Electronics in Beijing city, China as an analyst trainee. After interning at Samsung for three months, he worked at Genfund, Beijing for four months. During his internship in China, he founded various web portals, which are now obsolete. For a summer fellowship, she joined Lightspeed Venture Partners in California. In January 2016, he co-founded CrowdAmp, a social-media platform that uses artificial intelligence for more personalized communication between social media stars and their followers. Meanwhile, he also set up his YouTube channel ‘BotezzLive’. After running her startup for three years, Alexandra disbanded CrowdAmp, moved to Manhattan’s East Village, and took up chess streaming as her full-time profession.
As a live chess streamer
In 2017, Alexandra set up her own YouTube channel ‘BotezzLive’ and a show of the same name on Twitch, specializing in chess content. After failing to taste success in his startup CrowdAmp, he started streaming chess matches on Twitch. In September 2019, she moved to the East Village, a neighborhood in New York City, and dedicated herself to streaming and producing content for Chess.com. In 2020, Alexandra began streaming videos with her younger sister Andrea. Together, he frequently collaborated with other popular chess streamers such as GM Hikaru Nakamura and WGM Qiu Zhou on BotezLive.
Due to the coronavirus outbreak, people were forced to stay indoors without watching many competitive sports. Hence, chess became a crowd puller on Twitch. The pandemic turned out to be in Alexandra’s favor, becoming one of the top chess streamers on Twitch. He has over 300,000 followers on Instagram and his YouTube channel BotezLive has over 25 million views.
Salary and Net Worth
She earns a six-figure salary per year playing chess on Twitch.
Facts/General Knowledge
- Although Botez earned a full chess scholarship to the University of Texas at Dallas, he decided to study international relations, focusing on China, at Stanford University.
- As of September 2020, Botez is one of the top 10 Canadian female chess players with a FIDE Elo rating of “2020” in standard chess and “2059” in blitz.
- In April 2020, she became the eleventh member of SPF’s board of directors. In December 2020, he was signed by Team NV, an American esports franchise based in Dallas, Texas, owned by NV Gaming.
- Since Botez is a popular chess influencer, she is often compared to Beth Harmon, the chess prodigy character in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit.
- She can speak five different languages, English, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and German.
Categories: Biography
Source: vcmp.edu.vn