Alexandra Botez

Alexandra Valeria Botez (/ˈboʊtɛz/ BOH-tez; born 1995) is an American-born Canadian chess player, poker player, online streamer and YouTuber. In chess, she holds the FIDE title of Woman FIDE Master (WFM) and has a peak FIDE rating of 2092. She is a five-time Canadian girls' national champion and one-time U.S. girls' national champion. Botez has represented Canada at three Women's Chess Olympiads in 2012, 2014, and 2016. Alexandra and her younger sister Andrea Botez host the BotezLive Twitch and YouTube channels, which each have over 1 million followers and are one of the largest chess channels on each platform.

Botez began playing chess in Canada at age six and won her first girls' national championship at age eight. She later moved back to the United States where she was born and won U.S. Girls Nationals at age 15. Botez began streaming chess content online in 2016 while she was a student at Stanford University. Her sister Andrea appeared occasionally and later joined full-time to run the channels together in 2020. Already one of the most prominent Twitch chess channels with over 50,000 followers before 2020, the BotezLive channel grew tenfold in size in a span of about a year as part of the 2020 chess boom associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the PogChamps internet celebrity chess tournaments, and Queen's Gambit series on Netflix. The Botez sisters regularly collaborate with other top chess streamers, such as akaNemsko. They also have collaborated with top chess players such as longtime World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen and regularly collaborate with high-profile streamers outside of the chess community, stemming from their involvement in PogChamps. Botez and her sister were formerly members of Envy Gaming and later OpTic Gaming after the organizations merged.

Botez is coached by Jon Ludvig Hammer, a former second to Magnus Carlsen. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Susan Polgar Foundation, which aims to promote chess to children in the United States, especially girls. Following her success as a chess streamer, Botez also began playing poker professionally. She has participated in the World Series of Poker as well as celebrity tournaments with other prominent streamers such as xQc and professional poker players such as Phil Hellmuth. Botez became an ambassador for GGPoker in 2024.

Botez was born to Romanian immigrant parents. Although she was born in Dallas, Texas, she was raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. Botez's father introduced her to chess and started training her when she was six. She eventually became a member of the Romanian Community Centre chess club, Golden Knights, coached by Chess Master Valer Eugen Demian.

Botez won her first Canadian girls' national championship in 2004 at age eight. She played for the Canadian national team in 2010 and later won four more Canadian youth national titles. After moving back to the United States, Botez won the U.S. Girls Nationals at age fifteen and twice represented the state of Oregon in the SPF Girls' Invitational established by Susan Polgar and her foundation. She participated in the World Youth Chess Championships four times, finishing as high as 31st place in 2009 in the girls' under-14 section while still unrated. In 2013, Botez earned the Woman FIDE Master (WFM) title by finishing in joint first place at the North American girls' U-16 national championship together with the winner Megan Lee.

While in high school in Oregon, Botez earned a full-ride chess scholarship to the University of Texas at Dallas by winning the 2011 Kasparov Chess Foundation All-Girls National Championship. She ultimately declined the scholarship to attend Stanford University, prioritizing academics over chess. At Stanford, she studied international relations with a focus on China. During her sophomore year in 2014, Botez became the second female president of the Stanford University Chess Club, after Cindy Tsai in 2005. She graduated in 2017.

Botez achieved her peak FIDE rating of 2092 in 2016, at the age of 20. She has regularly been ranked among the top ten Canadian female chess players. Botez has represented Canada at three Women's Chess Olympiads, playing on Board 4 in 2012, and Board 3 in 2014 and 2016. Her best performance at the Olympiad came in 2014, and Canada's best result with her on the team was 39th place in 2016. During 2014 and 2016, Botez played on the same team as fellow future prominent chess streamer Qiyu Zhou, also known as Nemo or akaNemsko.

At the 2024 Reykjavik Open, Botez defeated Jan Karsten, an International Master (IM) with a rating of 2323, which was the best win of her career by rating. Less than two months later in Orosei, Botez won the Sardinia World Chess Festival B-section for players rated under-2000 with a score of 8½/9, one-and-a-half points ahead of the field.