Ehn/Jungwirth/Ragger: Eva Moser - Imagination and precision on the chessboard

Eva Moser was a once-in-a-century talent in Austrian chess. Just a few months after she had discovered the game at the age of ten, she had already won the Austrian Youth National Championship. She repeated this seven times in the following years. In 1998, the young Carinthian was able to secure the Silver medal at the European Championship for girls under 16 in Mureck, Styria, gave her her first international presence. Her enthusiasm for chess knew no bounds and she plunged into the international tournament and open scene with great success.

In 2003, she was the first Austrian woman to be awarded the title of women's grandmaster, and in 2004 she was awarded the international men's championship. In the same year, she came second in the Austrian men's national championship, which had to be renamed the "general class", and moved up to 22nd place in the women's world rankings. Two years later, her renewed attempt to win the national championship title was crowned with success. Despite strong competition, she was the first woman in Austria to be crowned national champion in the general class at the 2006 national championship.

At the European Women's Championship in Dresden in 2007, she qualified for the Women's World Knockout Championship, where she was narrowly eliminated in the first round by Lilit Mkrtchian in 2008. Of her numerous tournament successes, the one that stands out in particular is the one in the Augsburg Grandmaster Tournament in 2013/14, where she achieved her first "male" grandmaster norm and played an immortal game with five queens on the board.

With all these successes, the way in which she achieved them was impressive. Despite her friendly, collegial nature, she was a "lioness" on the chessboard, who knew how to combine uncompromising, combative chess with excellent endgame knowledge; the number of her draws is very low. Studying opening theory was soon no longer enough for her; she began to go her own way early on and relied on her creativity. "Imagination instead of theory" was her motto.

In addition to her chess career, Eva Moser completed her studies in business administration and worked in the editorial department of the Austrian chess magazine "Schach Aktiv" until her untimely death.