Grandmaster Valentina Gunina from Russia won the European Women Chess Championship title in 2018.
Valentina supports the Smart Kids family and gave her signature for our certificates awarded in the first half of 2018.
She was also so kind to answer three questions as following:
1. Why do you consider chess as being useful for kids in their future lives?
Chess develops logical thinking and teaches to calculate the consequences of your action and to take responsibility for them. Thanks to chess we can communicate with people of different age from all parts of the world, thus it motivates us to learn foreign languages and to raise our cultural level.
2. What do you find the most exciting when being a professional chess player?
To play a nice game gives me enormous pleasure, let alone to win the tournament. But I also like to study chess. It is a fascinating game. Each day you can learn something new. Well, my big problem is to memorize it. An opportunity to visit many beautiful places is another advantage of being a professional chess player.
3. How would you recommend to support the woman chess in the future?
I would be glad to see more tournaments like Gibraltar Open where women play side by side with men but have special prizes. I think that various entertaining events like, for example, mixed double chess may contribute to promoting our game to a wider audience.
