Anna-Maja Kazarian

She reached a rating of 1700 for the first time at 11 years old with a good performance in the under-20 girls' division at the 2011 Dutch Youth Chess Championships.

She finished in joint third place with a score of 5/8 against much stronger opponents with an average rating of 1891.

She built on that success later in the year in the under-12 division of the European Youth Chess Championships in Albena, finishing in joint fifth place with 6½/9.

Anna-Maja Kazarian (born 7 January 2000) is a Dutch chess player who holds the titles of FIDE Master (FM) and Woman International Master (WIM), and a Twitch live streamer.

Anna-Maja Kazarian was born on 7 January 2000 in Heerenveen in the northern part of the Netherlands.

Her family is originally from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.

She first became interested in chess at age six while on her summer holiday in Georgia.

Her grandfather taught her a variety of games and Kazarian chose chess as her favourite over draughts and backgammon.

Before leaving Georgia, her family sought out lessons from a local player Revaz Topuria, who recognized her talent for the game.

When she returned to the Netherlands, she joined the chess club in Sneek.

Kazarian competed in her first tournament at age seven in Waalwijk.

By the time she was 15 years old, she relocated to The Hague.

She has not had longterm professional coaching, instead working with her mother who has acted as her travelling coach.

Kazarian had a lot of success in Dutch youth and junior championships, winning a total of 25 national championships across many different divisions.

She has called Maaike Keetman, who has since become a Woman FIDE Master (WFM), her biggest rival in these youth competitions.

As one of just seven competitors in the 78-player field rated under 2000, she scored 4/9 against opponents with an average rating of 2138 to gain 37 rating points, her second-largest rating jump of the year behind only the Tata Steel tournament.

Kazarian's earliest FIDE-rated tournaments were youth national, continental, and world championships in 2010 and 2011.

She earned the Woman FIDE Master (WFM) title by finishing runner-up in the under-12 girls' division at the European Youth Chess Championships in 2012.

Three years later, Kazarian had a career-best performance rating of 2359 at the same tournament in 2015 when she won the under-16 girls' division and earned her first Woman International Master (WIM) norm.

To start 2012, Kazarian crossed a rating of 1800 after finishing in third place in the ten-player 3L group at the Tata Steel Chess Tournament.

Her other best results of 2012 came in the second half of the year.

At the European Youth Chess Championships in Prague, she improved on her success from the previous year by winning the silver medal in the under-12 division.

She finished in joint first with Anastasia Avramidou with 7½/9, but ended up in second place because of a weaker Sonneborn-Berger tiebreak.

She had also lost their head-to-head encounter in the penultimate round.

Nonetheless, with this result, she earned the Woman FIDE Master (WFM) title.

Kazarian also finished in the top ten in the same division of the World Youth Chess Championship at the end of the year.

She scored 8/11, placing her in sixth overall.

In between the European and World Championships, Kazarian also performed well at the much-higher-level 2012 Unive Open.

She finished 2012 with a rating of 1950.

Kazarian moved up to the under-14 girls' divisions of the European and World Youth Championships in 2013.

She finished in fifth place as the tenth seed at the former and in eleventh place as the twelfth seed at the latter.

After playing few events and thereby maintaining a steady rating in 2013, Kazarian had a more successful 2014.

She has performed well in national team competitions, earning her two remaining WIM norms in two of her three national appearances, one at the 2015 European Team Chess Championship where she also won an individual bronze medal and the other at the 2016 Chess Olympiad.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, she won the first Dutch Women's Internet Chess Championship by defeating Machteld van Foreest in the knockout final.

She was the 2020 Dutch Women's Internet Chess Champion and has also been an under-16 girls' European Youth Champion.

Kazarian has a peak FIDE rating of 2320, which she achieved in 2016.

She has represented the Netherlands at the Chess Olympiad and the European Team Chess Championship.

Kazarian began playing chess at age six after being introduced to the game by her grandfather in Georgia, and began competing a year later.

Kazarian began streaming on Twitch in early 2020, focusing on chess content.

She signed with the Alliance esports organization.