Alexandra Botez


Alexandra Botez is an American-Canadian chess player and Twitch streamer. She holds the title Woman FIDE Master and runs a YouTube chess channel together with her sister, Andrea Botez.

Chess career

Botez was born in Dallas, Texas, to a Romanian family and then raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. She began playing chess at the age of 6 at the Romanian Community Center chess club Golden Knights with CM Valer Eugen Demian as a coach.
She played for the National Canadian Team and became the Canadian National Girls Champion five times. She has played in multiple Chess Olympiads. Botez won the U.S. Girls Nationals at the age of 15.
Botez has helped to cover the 2018 and 2019 PRO Chess League Finals with International Master Daniel Rensch, IM Anna Rudolf, and GM Robert Hess.
A "Botez Gambit" is a satirical honorific for accidentally losing one's queen.

Streaming

In 2017, Botez co-founded CrowdAmp, a social media company that used machine learning to reach multiple followers in a personalized manner. She said in a May 2019 Twitch broadcast that the company had since ceased operations.
In October 2019, Botez had a FIDE Elo rating of 2062 in standard chess and 2059 in blitz. After a three-year hiatus from playing competitive chess, she participated in a tournament held in Reykjavík, Iceland. She increased her FIDE rating by 7 points competing in the event.