2017 U.S. Women's Championship

Maggie Feng lives in Ohio with her family.

At just 13 years of age, Carissa Yip has quickly become one of the top female players in America. Known for her creativity over the board, she enters the tournament with a rating of 2234.

Yip has been on a record-shattering pace ever since she learned how to play the game from her father at age 6. Three years later, at age 9, she became the youngest ever to reach the title of Expert.

Two years later she broke the record for youngest female to achieve the title of National Master at the age of 11 years, 5 months, and 18 days -- breaking the record previously held by Annie Wang. Along the way to Master, she set the record for youngest female player to beat a Grandmaster for her win against GM Alexander Ivanov in the New England Open a few days before her 11th birthday.

Emily Nguyen currently resides in Texas with her family.

For fun, Virkud enjoys playing the violin and piano, reading and spending time with friends. She is planning to go to college to study engineering, but will keep professional chess-playing in mind.  Her practice schedule is made up of one hour per day during the school year, and four hours per day over the summer. She currently lives in Michigan.

Yu was born in Ithaca, New York and started playing chess in first grade, attending an after-school chess class. After the school finished its chess sessions, Yu wanted to continue her interest and asked her parents to find a coach. This simple request launched Yu’s chess career. They took her to group chess lessons and tournaments for kids, but didn’t realize how talented she was until that coach informed them.

Today, the 15-year-old lives in Ashburn, Virginia and is a pretty typical tenth-grader, aside from her immense chess talent.  Her well-rounded interests include playing the flute and piano, listening to music, drawing, and playing sports. She becomes a better player through competition in tournaments where she can think through difficult challenges as she encounters them.

Yu holds a FIDE rating of 2196 and has participated in three World Youth Chess Championships. At age 10, she came in 11th place at the 2012 World Youth Championship in Slovenia, and in 2013 she placed fourth in the United Arab Emirates.

Sabina Foisor has been a chess dynamo since starting around age 4. While her parents have been her biggest chess influence, she says her favorite players are Gary Kasparov and the late Bobby Fischer. Like many players, she has traveled the globe playing in tournaments, and she has participated in each of the past four U.S. Women's Championships (2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009). 2013 will mark her fifth appearance. Her main goal in chess is to become one of the top 20 women players in the world.

When not playing or training for chess, she likes to travel, read books, watch movies and hang out with friends. "Of course I can manage to balance chess with other things," she says. She has many heroes outside of chess, including her family, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Sigmund Freud. After listing those three she added, "I will stop here because the list would be too large."

One of her biggest challenges was moving to the U.S. to study at University of Maryland at Baltimore County, which has a strong chess program. Indeed, UMBC won the 2009 U.S. national collegiate title. At UMBC Foisor studies psychology, modern language and linguistics.

WGM Katerina Nemcova is a Prague-born, Czech chess champion who attends the University of Texas-Brownsville as a senior in Communications. Learning to play at age four, she won her national youth championship in eight different age categories on her ascent, topping out in 2008 as the Czech Women’s Champion and earning the title again in 2010.

Nemcova is the product of a complete chess-playing family, the third of seven siblings, all of whom were taught chess and fueled by chess-playing parents.  Four Nemcova girls, including Katerina, have earned Czech youth champion titles.

“My father always had us all practice together, it was always a nice family moment - not just like ‘practice,’ but always a lot of fun with my siblings,” Nemcova said. “I’ve always had my best performances in team events - I just feel like more people is more fun, the collectiveness of the whole event. I’m used to fighting together with my siblings; I like people around.”

She has represented the Czech Republic in a team event every year since 2007, a three-time Olympic (2008, 2010, 2012) player, and a gold-medalist as the second board at the European Women's Team Championship in 2007. There, she earned 7.5 out of 9 points, the highest score of the event and her highest performance rating ever: 2548.

Individually, Nemcova found her international stride after a second-place showing in the 2007 World Youth Championship (Kemer-Antalya, Turkey), following up with a win at the 2008 European Youth Chess Championship after entering as the highest-rated girl U18. She also earned her WGM title in 2008.

Nemcova joined the chess team at UT-Brownsville in 2011 where she has since competed as a collegiate player. She switched federations in 2013 and enters the 2014 U.S. Women’s Championship as the 11th-ranked female player in the nation. The 24-year-old is a dangerous addition to the field: With six norms already collected toward her IM title, but struggling to find the consistency to surpass the 2400 rating barrier, Nemcova is a consistent lurker who several times in her career has exploded out of plateaus with dramatic performances. She is currently attending Webster Universtiy where she is a member of the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence program.

Tatev Abrahamyan started playing chess at 8 after her father took her to the Chess Olympiad games in 1996. There she met Grandmaster Judit Polgar, arguably the greatest woman player of all time and the only woman in the tournament. "I was in complete awe," Tatev said. "My first thought was, 'I want to be just like her.'" She was soon playing competitively among the top players her age in Europe and has played in the U.S. Women's Chess Championship eight times.

But becoming a top chess player has not been easy. "The main problem is balancing school with chess. Even though college is the number one priority for me, I usually take time off to play in major events, like this one." When she is not studying or playing chess, she likes to read, play tennis, travel, watch movies and hang out with friends.

Another big challege for Tatev was moving to the U.S. rom Armenia in 2001. In fact, she said: "It was the biggest change in my life, and it happened in a very short period of time. Everything in my life changed in a matter of few months. I had to give up everything I knew and start a new life. Even though I have lived here for some time now, it was a very big adjustment, and I think a continuous one."

Tatev is a formidable competitor. At the 2010 U.S. Women's Championship she played her heart out to a fantastic 7/9 score, which would usually be enough to net first place, but actually put her in a tie for second place, half a point behind Irina Krush. Tatev's strong play and fighting qualities in 2010 earned her the 9 Queens/goddess chess fighting spirit award, which was selected by former Women's World Champion, Alexandra Kosteniuk.

At the 2011 U.S. Women's Championship, Tatev turned in a remarkable performance, falling just short to Anna Zatonskih in the playoff finals to finish in second place. That same year, Abrahamyan graduated from California State University Long Beach with a double-major in psychology and political science.