Russia-2 TV Nominates Natalia Pogonina “Girl of the Month”

A leading Russian TV channel, “Russia-2”, has a sports program called “All included”. Unsurprisingly, one of their most popular projects is the “Girl of the month” contest. Most nominees are well-known female athletes, while some artists are also invited from time to time.

The reigning Olympic women’s chess champion and Russian women’s chess champion Natalia Pogonina was recently featured in the program. Apart from the official images we are able to provide you with bonus material provided to us by Pogonina.com:

Photographer: Alexei Trunov

Natalia Pogonina (born March 9, 1985) is a chess woman grandmaster and one of the best female chess players in the world. Since 2004 she has been a member of Team Russia and is currently the Olympic Chess Champion and Russian Women's Chess Champion.

Woman Grandmaster (WGM), three-times European champion (U16, twice U18), bronze prize winner at the World Championship (U18) and European Women's Championship, winner of the gold medal at the 1st International Mind Sports Games, co-winner of the 2008 Student World Championship and Russian Superfinal-2010, and #1 at multiple prestigious international tournaments (2005 – Bykova Memorial, 2007 – Rudenko memorial, 2009 – Moscow Open, etc.). Ranked as 3rd most successful female chess player in the world in 2009 by the Association of Chess Professionals. In 2011 Natalia became the only chess player in the world to simultaneously win the Eurocup and European Team Chess Championship and in 2013 - the only person to hold the individual and team Russian Champion titles. She was runner-up at Women's World Team Chess Championship-2011 and earned the bronze medal in 2013.

Want to see the competition Natalia faced? Well, click on the banner above – at your own peril – and try to find our chess model among the beauties shown on the page. To make it easier for you here a tip: start from the bottom of the page and click on the thumbnails to get larger images, which you can examine with greater care. You can also go to this page, where you will find names and bios of the models. To our chagrin the videos do not seem to be currently working. We would be eternally grateful to anyone who tells us how to access them.