Gisela Kahn Gresser (February 8, 1906 Detroit, Michigan – December 4, 2000) was an American chess player. She dominated women's chess in the United States, winning the U.S. Women's Chess Championship nine times from 1944 to 1969. Chess career Gresser learned chess at a very late age. On a cruise from France to New York in the late 1930s, she borrowed a chess manual from a fellow passenger and taught herself how to play. By the end of the cruise, she was hooked. In 1938, she was a spectator at the first U.S. Women's Chess Championship tournament, organized by Caroline Marshall (wife of US Champion Frank Marshall) and held at the Rockefeller Center in New York City (won by Adele Rivero). She first played in the championship in 1940, and in 1944 she won it with a perfect score. She won it again in 1948 (with Mona May Karff), 1955 (with Nancy Roos), 1957 (with Sonja Graf), 1962, 1965, 1966 (with Lisa Lane), 1967, and 1969 (at age 63). In addition to her repeated successes in the U.S. Women's Chess Championship, Gresser also played in the Women's World Chess Championship tournament of 1949-50, and subsequently in six Women's World Championship cycles: five Candidates' tournaments (1955, 1959, 1961, 1964, and 1967) and one Interzonal tournament (1971). She played for the U.S. team in three Women's Chess Olympiads (1957, 1963, and 1966). She won the 1954 U.S. Women's Open Championship. In April 1963, she became the first woman in the United States to gain a master title, with a rating of 2211. She also wrote an article for the October 1950 issue of Ladies Home Journal, entitled "I Went to Moscow". Mrs. Gresser (Mrs. was her preferred title) took lessons from International Master Hans Kmoch and Grandmaster Arthur Bisguier. She was (with Karff) one of the first three female chess players in the United States, and one of the first seventeen players in the world, to be awarded the title of Woman International Master in 1950 when FIDE created official titles. She was also the first woman to be inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame, which happened in 1992. Personal life Gresser studied classics at Radcliffe. She won a prestigious Charles Elliott Norton fellowship, which she used to continue her studies at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. In 1927, she returned to New York, where she