Nana Dzagnidze has played thousands of games across a long career at the top of women’s chess, and picking “the best” always means picking a few standout performances and results rather than a single move. We’re keeping this in prose and pointing you to reliable databases for the full move-by-move — so nothing here is a made-up score. What ties her greatest results together is a single thread: she wins by attacking.
The 2017 Women’s World Blitz Championship
If you want one result that captures Dzagnidze at her best, it’s Riyadh, December 2017. At the King Salman World Blitz Championship she finished in clear first place — a dominant run through a field of the world’s fastest players — to be crowned Women’s World Blitz Champion. She scored 16.5 out of 21, and the men’s title that same event went to Magnus Carlsen, so she shared the stage with the best speed player on the planet.
Blitz is where Dzagnidze’s style is deadliest. With only minutes on the clock, deep opening files matter less and raw chess instinct matters more — and her instinct is to attack. A championship won at blitz isn’t luck across a couple of games; it’s the reward for consistently out-calculating strong grandmasters under extreme time pressure, round after round. It’s the single result that best sums her up.
The Najdorf: her fighting arena
Many of Dzagnidze’s sharpest wins come from the Sicilian Defense as Black, especially the Najdorf. This is chess’s most combative response to 1.e4 — Black concedes some space and invites White to attack, then strikes back with fast, coordinated counterplay. It’s a system that rewards courage and precise calculation, which is exactly why it suits her.
You can replay her Sicilian games on Chess.com and databases like 365Chess and Chessgames to see the pattern up close: she doesn’t sit and defend, she looks for the moment to seize the initiative and turn the game into a fight on her terms. More on how that works in her playing style and her openings.
Olympiad board one, 2014: beating the whole field
Team events produce some of Dzagnidze’s most impressive performances, and the standout is the 2014 Chess Olympiad in Tromsø, Norway. Playing board one for Georgia — the toughest seat there is, where you face the opposing team’s strongest player round after round — she won the individual gold medal for the best score of any top board in the entire event. That means she out-performed every other nation’s number one, including Hou Yifan, who was then the highest-rated woman in the world by a distance.
Sustaining that level over an eleven-round team marathon, with a whole country counting on your board, is a completely different kind of pressure from a single brilliancy — and Dzagnidze thrived on it. It’s one of the clearest signals that, on her day, she can beat anyone in the women’s game.
The 2017 European Championship: a career-defining sweep
Her other 2017 triumph came in Riga, at the European Women’s Individual Championship, where she scored 8.5/11 to finish clear first and become the first Georgian ever to win the title. What makes it remarkable isn’t just the win — it’s that it happened in the same year as her World Blitz title. Winning a grueling, deep-preparation classical event and a lightning-fast blitz championship in a single season takes two very different skill sets, and she landed both. FIDE later recognized the run by naming her its best female player of 2017.
Grand Prix and Candidates: staying at the top
Dzagnidze’s résumé isn’t a single hot streak — it’s two decades of showing up at the sharp end. Back in July 2010 she won the FIDE Women’s Grand Prix leg in Jermuk, a result inside the official Women’s World Championship cycle, and in March 2020 she shared first at the Lausanne Grand Prix leg. That consistency in the world championship pipeline eventually carried her all the way to the 2024 FIDE Women’s Candidates Tournament in Toronto — the eight-player event that decides who challenges for the Women’s World Championship. Simply qualifying puts you among the elite handful of players with a real path to the crown.
A two-decade highlight reel
What’s striking about Dzagnidze’s best results is how spread out they are. Her first world youth title came in 1999; her Candidates appearance came in 2024 — a full quarter-century apart. In between, she racked up a Grandmaster title, two of 2017’s biggest women’s crowns, Olympiad medals of every color, and Grand Prix wins on multiple continents. Plenty of players have one brilliant season. Very few stay dangerous at the elite level for more than twenty years, reinventing their form again and again as a new generation rises. That durability — showing up, fighting, and winning across decades — is itself one of her greatest achievements, and it’s the reason her games span so many eras of the women’s game.
Why her games are worth studying
You don’t need to be a titled player to get a lot out of replaying Dzagnidze’s chess:
- Attack with a plan. Her wins show how to build an initiative and then convert it — not random aggression, but pressure that keeps growing until something breaks.
- Calculation under pressure. Her blitz success is a masterclass in trusting your calculation when the clock is screaming. Great practice material if you play fast time controls.
- Fight from both colors. She plays for a win as Black (the Sicilian) as readily as with White, a healthy, ambitious mindset for improving players.
- Composure in team chess. Her board-one Olympiad performances teach the underrated skill of playing your best when the stakes — and the audience — are highest.
Keep exploring
See the ideas behind the results in her playing style, tour her opening repertoire, trace her rating history, browse her key facts, or head back to the full Dzagnidze profile.
Written and fact-checked by the Chess Lab Academy Editorial Team · Facts verified against Wikipedia, the 2017 World Blitz report, and Chess.com, as of July 2026 · Game moves should be replayed from those databases · Last verified 2026-07-10 · How we verify content.