Chess-wiz Nadya Karolina Ortiz is Colombia’s first and only woman grandmaster.
Raised in a middle class family in the central Colombian city of Ibague in the Tolima department, Ortiz is one of Colombia’s lesser known success stories.
At the tender age of four, Ortiz asked her father, himself a chess enthusiast and Russophile, to teach her how to play. Within a week, she was supposedly making moves at a ten-year-old level.