Let’s set expectations honestly. Andrea Botez is a chess content creator, not a tournament professional — so this isn’t a page of immortal grandmaster masterpieces annotated move by move. She’s a club-level player, and her chess lives on stream, in front of huge live audiences. That’s exactly what makes her “best games” so fun: they’re memorable moments, not textbook classics — bullet scrambles, cheeky upsets, and the drama of playing chess with a chat of thousands watching every move.
We’re describing these in prose rather than replaying exact move lists. Casual online games rarely have a single, canonical, verified score floating around, and we’d rather tell you honestly what made a moment great than risk quoting a garbled game. So here are the kinds of moments that define Andrea’s chess.
The 25-second takedown of a grandmaster
One of Andrea’s most-shared clips is a bullet game in which she beat Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky — a genuinely titled, world-class player — in roughly 25 seconds. Now, context matters and Andrea is refreshingly honest about it: bullet chess with that little time is a different beast from classical play, and beating a GM in a one-minute blitz sprint is a world away from beating one in a serious tournament game. Titled players lose bullet games to amateurs all the time when the clock is the real opponent.
But that’s what makes the clip so fun. In the chaos of bullet, anything can happen — and Andrea, playing fast and aggressively, grabbed her chance. It’s the perfect encapsulation of her chess: not deep, quiet strategy, but quick hands, sharp instincts, and the nerve to go for it. It’s also a great reminder for improving players that speed chess is its own game, where hesitation loses more often than a slightly wrong move.
The PogChamps era
If you followed the chess boom of the early 2020s, you saw Andrea at the center of it through PogChamps — Chess.com’s celebrity tournament where streamers and internet personalities (mostly beginners) compete while commentators and coaches guide the audience. Andrea served as a commentator across multiple PogChamps editions, and as a coach in PogChamps 3, where she helped prepare fellow creators for their games.
These weren’t her own competitive games, but they were some of her most important chess moments, because this is where her real talent shines: making chess make sense to newcomers. Explaining why a knight fork is scary, or why hanging your queen is bad, in a way that’s funny and warm rather than intimidating — that’s a skill, and it converted a lot of viewers into players. The best “moment” of PogChamps for Andrea wasn’t a brilliancy; it was helping a total beginner suddenly get the game on live TV-style broadcasts.
Sibling showdowns on BotezLive
You can’t talk about Andrea’s memorable chess without the sister rivalry. Games against Alexandra Botez — a Woman FIDE Master and the stronger player of the two — are a recurring highlight of the BotezLive channel. Alexandra usually has the edge, and Andrea knows it, but the fun is in the trash talk, the upsets, and the genuine competitive fire between two sisters who grew up battling over the board.
Those matches are entertainment first and chess second, and that’s the point. Millions of people have watched the Botez sisters play precisely because it feels like real family competition, not a sterile grandmaster draw. It’s chess as it actually feels at the kitchen table — just with a much bigger audience.
Fast, aggressive, watchable chess
The common thread through Andrea’s best moments is aggression. She plays for attacks and material grabs, and in the fast time controls that dominate her streams, that go-for-it style produces exactly the kind of swings audiences love: a game that looks lost, then a sudden tactic, then a scramble to the finish. The Italian Game below is a good picture of that spirit — bishops and knights pointed straight at the enemy king, ready for an early fight.
We break down the mechanics of her aggressive approach on her playing style page.
Beyond the board: chessboxing
Some of Andrea’s most talked-about “chess” moments barely happened on a chessboard. She’s competed in chessboxing-style creator events — alternating rounds of chess and boxing — including a bout at the Mogul Chessboxing Championship in December 2022. It’s a wild, spectacle-driven format, and win or lose, it’s pure Andrea: leaning into the fun, the showmanship, and the crossover appeal that brings non-chess audiences to the game.
Why prose, not move-by-move replays?
You’ll notice we don’t embed exact game scores here. That’s intentional. Andrea’s games are mostly fast online games without a single authoritative, verified transcript — and we’d rather be honest about a great moment than paste a move list we can’t fully verify. Accuracy first. If you want to watch the real thing, the BotezLive archives on Twitch and YouTube are the place to relive these clips in full.
The bigger picture
Here’s the honest takeaway: Andrea’s legacy isn’t a folder of brilliancies. It’s the millions of people she helped bring to chess. The single most important “game” she ever played might be the very ordinary one that a new viewer watched, thought “I could try that,” and opened a board for the first time. For a content creator, that’s the real masterpiece.
Keep exploring
Understand the style behind the moments in her playing style, learn her openings, trace her rating journey, or head back to the Andrea Botez profile. You can also browse all chess players.
Written and fact-checked by the Chess Lab Academy Editorial Team · Facts verified against Wikipedia, her FIDE profile, and Chess.com, as of July 2026 · Last verified 2026-07-10 · How we verify content.