A title claimed from 76th place
On the final afternoon in Batumi, Anastasiia Hnatyshyn sat behind the black pieces against Poland's Klaudia Kulon and needed only to hold. She held. The draw sealed the 2026 European Women's Chess Championship for a 15-year-old from Lviv who had begun the event as the 76th seed. Iconics logs this under Against All Odds. Few phrases fit more plainly.
The tournament ran across eleven classical rounds. Iconics notes the scale of the room she overcame: the field held 165 players from 32 European federations. Hnatyshyn opened with six straight wins and took the sole lead after the fifth round. Her rating of 2207 sat more than two hundred points below several of the grandmasters she was beating. The run did not stay clean. In the seventh round she lost to Georgia's Meri Arabidze, and Spain's Sabrina Vega moved ahead a round later.
Where it was decided
The answer came in the closing rounds. In the ninth she beat former European champion Ulviyya Fataliyeva to draw level again. In the tenth she took the White pieces against the Netherlands' Eline Roebers, pressed a small edge into a winning endgame, and stepped into the final round alone, half a point clear. The draw with Kulon finished the work. She scored nine points from eleven games — eight wins, two draws, one loss — and took the title outright, half a point ahead of Vega, Olga Badelka and Nurgyul Salimova.
