Abdumalik Zhansaya

Born: January 12, 2000 | Federation: Kazakhstan | Rating: 2503

Zhansaya Abdumalik is the latest woman to have attained the Grandmaster title, the 39th in history, securing it thanks to her victory in the last leg of the Women’s Grand Prix 2019-21 in Gibraltar. A very popular sports figure in her country, where she is not only the top female player but also the top fifth 5th ranked player overall, Zhansaya will play the first of the events on home turf.

A young prodigy, she learned the game from his father, Daniyar Ashirov, who was her first coach and still occasionally accompanies her to events. She demonstrated a huge talent for chess very quickly, and only two years after starting to play, she qualified for the World Youth Championships, where she got 4th place in her very first participation at seven years old. The next year, she would repeat participation in the U-18 category, but this time she got the gold. She became the first Kazakhstani to win a world championship in chess, a success that made headlines across the country and surely contributed to the rise in popularity that chess has experienced in Kazakhstan in recent years. 

That would be just the first of many victories to come in youth events for Zhansaya. In 2010, she won a silver medal in the under-10 girls' division at the 2010 World Youth Championship in Greece. In 2011, Abdumalik won her second World Championship title in Brazil, in the under-12 girls' division, scoring 8/9, and with a full point margin. The result was hardly a surprise as it followed several participations in open tournaments where she consistently beat higher-rated players.

In 2012 she had to content herself with the silver medal at the U-12 World Championship among girls, scoring 8½/11, half a point behind the winner, Vaishali Rameshbabu, who was the only player to defeat her during the event. He also took part for the first time in the World Junior Championship for players U-20, where she scored a 7/13, a remarkable result considering she was competing with players 7 or 8 years older and more experienced than her.

“This stage was hard. My parents made many sacrifices, as they borrowed money, and we even sold our apartment to invest in me. It is necessary to take risks”, she said in an interview. These sacrifices allowed her to work with prestigious trainers, such as Zhang Zhong, Chuchelov, and Efimenko, big names who are truly champion makers.

The hard work paid off very soon. A breakthrough result came at the World Junior Championships 2013 in Turkey, where she won the silver medal as a 13-year-old with a score of 9½/13, a point behind Aleksandra Goryachkina. She would win the Bronze in 2015, and finally, in 2017, already as the top-seed player, she clinched the gold in the World Junior Championship in Italy.

In 2018, Abdumalik entered her first Women's World Chess Championship, then played as a 64-player knockout tournament. She was the 15th seed, but she made it all the way to quarterfinals, knocking out Padmini Rout, Zhao Xue, and Jolanta Zawadzka. Only Mariya Muzychuk could stop the young Kazakh star after a though fight that reached a blitz tie-break.

Abdumalik made her first GM norm at the World Open in the United States in 2017, and in spring 2018 she made two consecutive norms at the Karpos Open (Macedonia) and the Budapest Spring Festival (Hungary). The last requirement needed for the title -reaching a rating of 2500- had to wait a little bit, mostly because the pandemic put chess activity to a halt. However, at the earliest opportunity, Abdumalik got the few extra points she needed, thanks to her victory at the WGP tournament in Gibraltar 2021.

Abdumalik and her parents opened the Zhansaya Abdumalik Chess Academy in 2014, a successful venture that has grown and has now three branches with over 700 students. Apart from her sporting career, Zhansaya is very interested in politics. She is the President of the Almaty Chess Federation, but she has also run for the primaries, the intra-party elections of the ruling party in Kazakhstan. "In the future, I plan to become the Minister of Sports. I’m sure I have good chances", she said in an interview with FIDE.