Nana Dzagnidze: Profile, Career & Playing Style

Nana Dzagnidze is the Georgian grandmaster who has spent years among the world's top female players — Women's World Blitz Champion, European Women's Champion, and one of the most exciting attackers in the women's game. Here's her story.

Nana Dzagnidze is the Georgian grandmaster who has spent the better part of two decades among the very best female players in the world. She’s a full Grandmaster (GM), the 2017 Women’s World Blitz Champion, and the 2017 European Women’s Champion — and she plays the kind of sharp, attacking chess that makes her games a genuine joy to watch. If you like fireworks, she’s your player.

Quick facts

Full name: Nana Dzagnidze · Born: 1 January 1987, Kutaisi, Georgia (then part of the Soviet Union)

Title: Grandmaster (GM) — the full open title, earned in 2008

Peak rating: 2573 (2015)

Big titles: Women’s World Blitz Champion (2017), European Women’s Champion (2017), Olympiad team gold with Georgia (2008)

Style: aggressive, tactical, attacking — plays for the initiative

Who is Nana Dzagnidze?

Born on New Year’s Day, 1 January 1987, in Kutaisi — a city in a country with one of the richest women’s chess traditions on Earth — Dzagnidze was a prodigy who announced herself young. She won the World Girls Under-12 Championship in 1999 and the World Girls Under-20 Championship in 2003, the latter by a commanding two-point margin. The titles piled up quickly after that: Woman Grandmaster in 2003, the (open) International Master title in 2004, and finally the full Grandmaster title in 2008 — a title held by only a small number of women in history.

Georgia has produced two Women’s World Champions before her — Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze — so Dzagnidze grew up in a chess culture where women winning at the highest level was simply normal. She carried that tradition forward, becoming one of the faces of Georgian chess and a mainstay of the world’s top-ranked women for many years. As of July 2026 she remains an active, world-class grandmaster.

What is Dzagnidze’s playing style?

In a word: aggressive. Dzagnidze is a natural attacker and a sharp tactician who loves the initiative. She’s happiest in complicated, double-edged positions where both sides are swinging — the kind of game where calculation and nerve decide the point, not slow maneuvering. That fearless, attacking instinct is exactly why she’s so dangerous in fast time controls, and it’s a big part of how she became World Blitz Champion.

We break it all down, with example positions, in Dzagnidze’s playing style.

What openings does Nana Dzagnidze play?

Her repertoire matches her personality. As Black she’s a lifelong Sicilian player, comfortable in sharp systems like the Najdorf and the Taimanov, and she also handles the strategically rich Nimzo-Indian. As White she leans on the flexible English Opening and classical 1.d4 structures. These are fighting openings — nothing that offers her opponents an easy, quiet life.

The Najdorf Sicilian — the sharp, double-edged battleground Dzagnidze knows inside out as Black.

See the full picture in Dzagnidze’s openings.

Career highlights

1999: wins the World Girls Under-12 Championship.
2003: wins the World Girls Under-20 Championship by two clear points; earns the Woman Grandmaster title.
2008: earns the full Grandmaster (GM) title and wins team gold with Georgia at the Dresden Chess Olympiad.
2010: wins the FIDE Women’s Grand Prix leg in Jermuk, part of the Women’s World Championship cycle.
2014: takes individual gold on board one at the Tromsø Olympiad — the best score of any top-board player, ahead of then-world-#1 Hou Yifan.
2017: wins both the European Women’s Championship (Riga) — the first Georgian to do so — and the Women’s World Blitz Championship (Riyadh). A career year.

The best games

Dzagnidze’s best work is full of energetic attacks and clean tactical finishes — the reward for a lifetime of playing ambitious, fighting chess. We’ve collected the highlights, described in plain prose with reliable databases to replay from, in Nana Dzagnidze’s best games.

Fun facts

She was born on 1 January — a New Year’s Day baby.
In 2017 she pulled off a rare double: European champion and World Blitz champion in the same year.
At the 2014 Olympiad she out-scored the entire top-board field — including Hou Yifan, the highest-rated woman in the world at the time.
FIDE named her the recipient of the Caissa Award as the best female player of 2017.
She hails from Georgia, a small country that has produced more women’s world champions than almost anywhere on Earth.

FAQ

Is Nana Dzagnidze a grandmaster? Yes. She holds the full Grandmaster (GM) title — not just the Woman Grandmaster title — which she earned in 2008. It’s the same title held by the top male players, and only a small number of women have achieved it.

What is Nana Dzagnidze’s highest rating? Her peak classical FIDE rating was 2573, reached in 2015.

What has Nana Dzagnidze won? Among many results, she won the Women’s World Blitz Championship (2017), the European Women’s Championship (2017), team gold with Georgia at the 2008 Olympiad, and individual gold on board one at the 2014 Olympiad.

Where is Nana Dzagnidze from? She’s Georgian, born in Kutaisi in 1987, and represents Georgia — a country famous for its women’s chess tradition.

What openings does she play? Sharp, fighting ones: the Sicilian (Najdorf and Taimanov) and Nimzo-Indian as Black, the English Opening and 1.d4 as White.

Keep exploring

Go deeper: her best games · her playing style · her opening repertoire · her rating history · her key facts · or 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.