Alexandra Botez

Profile Overview

Alexandra Valeria Botez ( BOH-tez; born 1995) is an American-born Canadian chess player, poker player, online streamer and YouTuber. She holds the chess 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; each has over 1 million followers and is one of the largest chess channels on its respective 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 are former 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.