The camera was pointing at a chessboard, and Dina Belenkaya was explaining a knight outpost as if it were the most entertaining thing in the world — because, to her, it genuinely was. The year was 2020, the world was in lockdown, and chess was experiencing a cultural moment it had not seen since Bobby Fischer. Dina, already a Woman Grandmaster and three-time St. Petersburg Women's Champion, launched her YouTube channel with her sister Asya and began doing something that most serious chess players consider either beneath them or beyond them: making the game accessible, funny, personal, and joyful. Within months, the channel had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Within two years, she had crossed half a million. By any measure, Dina Belenkaya had built one of the most important chess media operations of her generation.

She was born on December 22, 1993, in St. Petersburg — a city of white nights and chess clubs and a tradition of serious play that runs through Russian culture like a river. Her mother, Asya Kovalyova, is a children's chess coach who has taught the game in St. Petersburg for more than thirty years. Kovalyova's most famous early student was not Dina but a Dutch boy named Anish Giri, who would go on to become one of the world's top grandmasters. Dina herself was taught chess at age three by her mother — not as an imposition but as an invitation into a world that the whole family inhabited. She accepted the invitation and never looked back.

Her chess career unfolded in the serious, competitive Russian women's circuit. She won the Russian First League in 2011 — a stepping-stone national title that opened doors to the top echelon of women's chess. She earned her Woman Grandmaster title in 2016 after achieving norms at open tournaments in France in three consecutive years starting in 2014 — a methodical accumulation that reflected a player who approached her chess career with the same patience and intelligence she would later bring to her content creation. She won the St. Petersburg Women's Championship three times: 2015, 2018, and 2020. Her peak FIDE rating of 2364 placed her solidly among the stronger WGMs in the world.

But the number that matters more to understanding Dina Belenkaya's impact is not 2364. It is 500,000. That is approximately the subscriber count on her YouTube channel — players and non-players alike who discovered chess through her videos, or discovered a new way of loving chess they already played. Her content spans serious instructional material on openings, tactics, and endgames to irreverent comedy videos that treat the absurdities of chess culture with affectionate mockery. She has done chessboxing segments. She has subjected herself to lie detector tests on the Chess.com platform. She has streamed over-the-board games from serious tournaments, bringing her audience into the pressurized world of professional chess in real time.

What distinguishes her from many chess content creators is that she never abandoned the competitive dimension of her career. She continued to play in serious tournaments — the Women's Bundesliga in Germany, national events, international opens — while building her media presence. This dual identity is rare: most strong players who enter content creation either reduce their tournament schedule dramatically or produce content that lacks genuine chess depth. Dina does neither. Her instructional videos are praised by serious players for their accuracy; her competitive results remain respectable at the elite women's level. She is, in the full sense of the term, a chess professional who also happens to communicate the game with extraordinary talent.

In 2025, she launched a chess school — an institution that reflects the full arc of her career. The girl who learned chess at three from her mother is now teaching chess to others, having first built an audience of half a million people who trust her voice. The St. Petersburg chess tradition, which runs through her mother's thirty years of teaching and through Dina's own career, has found in her its most creative and far-reaching contemporary expression.

She holds dual citizenship in Russia and Israel, a biographical fact that speaks to a life lived across borders, in a sport that has always been international in its deepest spirit. Dina Belenkaya has carried that spirit into the digital age with a particular grace: serious about the game, joyful in its communication, and entirely herself at every moment.