16-Year-Old Alice Lee 1st Woman To Break 3000 Rating On Chess.com
Sixteen-year-old IM Alice Lee is the first female player to cross the 3000 rating mark on Chess.com in any time control—whether in bullet, blitz, or rapid. On March 17, she reached a bullet rating of 3002.
Lee started a 43-game session on March 16 with a bullet rating of 2927, ending the day with a rating of 2996. She logged in the next day to play two additional games against the anonymous account GMDragz, which pushed her to an all-time high rating of 3002, before logging back off.
This achievement came exactly a week after her tournament win at The Women's American Cup 2026 in St. Louis, a tournament that featured the top women players in the United States. She beat the highest-rated woman in the U.S., IM Carissa Yip, in the Grand Final to earn $49,000. It was also Lee's third time winning the event in a row.
She told Chess.com's FM Mike Klein that the event's format suited her well:
Both because you have the extra life [in double elimination, you can lose two matches before you're eliminated] and because it's in a match format means that even if you lose a game, it's possible to come back. Even if you lose a match, it's possible to come back. And I think I've been able to take advantage of that in quite a few of the American Cups that I've played in.
Previously, no female player had even crossed the 2950 threshold in bullet. GM Vaishali Rameshbabu, in second place now, peaked with a rating of 2948. Curiously, only one grandmaster is included in the top-10 list for bullet chess. Note that Chess.com only counts verified titled accounts, as we do not verify the identity of all other players.
Top 10 Women's Bullet Ratings On Chess.com
| # | Title | Player | Rating |
| 1 | IM | Alice Lee | 3002 |
| 2 | GM | Vaishali Rameshbabu | 2948 |
| 3 | WIM | Umida Omonova | 2934 |
| 4 | IM | Nurgyul Salimova | 2932 |
| 5 | FM | Anastasia Avramidou | 2927 |
| 6 | WGM | Aleksandra Maltsevskaya | 2926 |
| 7 | WIM | Melika Mohammadi | 2924 |
| 8 | WFM | Hoang Minh Tho Do | 2887 |
| 9 | WFM | Veronika Shubenkova | 2858 |
| 10 | FM | Liya Kurmangaliyeva | 2838 |
In blitz, IM Polina Shuvalova set the record just last month at 2980.
Top 10 Women's Blitz Ratings On Chess.com
| # | Title | Player | Rating |
| 1 | IM | Polina Shuvalova | 2980 |
| 2 | WGM | Narmin Mammadova | 2960 |
| 3 | GM | Bibisara Assaubayeva | 2951 |
| 4 | IM | Alice Lee | 2933 |
| 5 | IM | Eline Roebers | 2932 |
| 6 | WGM | Aleksandra Maltsevskaya | 2932 |
| 7 | GM | Kateryna Lagno | 2928 |
| 8 | IM | Meri Arabidze | 2896 |
| 9 | IM | Nurgyul Salimova | 2884 |
| 10 | GM | Ju Wenjun | 2882 |
Lee, who graduates high school in two months, is a child prodigy and a ChessKid ambassador who once hosted the show Alice's Pawn Palace. She is now the third highest-rated woman player in the U.S., behind only Yip and eight-time U.S. Champion GM Irina Krush. Lee is also world number-four among girls under the age of 20.
She and Yip are the two frontrunners for the $100,000 award, offered by Jeanne Cairns Sinquefield, to the next five U.S. women to earn the grandmaster title between 2024 and 2029, an award that Krush—the only U.S. woman to earn the title—received retroactively.
Lee told Klein that a large factor in her online rating improvement has been just playing:
I think a lot of factors definitely played into how I was able to break 3000, but a big one was just playing a lot. I think it's like if you throw enough darts at a dartboard.
She added that her over-the-board "experiences helped me with perseverance," while acknowledging that many games in bullet chess just end in winning on time or by checkmate. "I usually just try to flag my opponent if my position is bad."
I usually just try to flag my opponent if my position is bad.
—Alice Lee
Does classical chess have any connection to bullet? "I think definitely there's like a very slight link, but the correlation I think is less so than, say, between blitz and classical."
She plans on taking a gap year after graduating high school to focus on chess—approximately from June 2026 to September 2027. "I'll just be like playing in a lot of tournaments, getting some training in, and hopefully going for the grandmaster title and getting some norms."
She hopes to be invited to play in the 2026 Chess Olympiad later this year—she played her first one in 2024—and expects to play in the Cairns Cup as well as the U.S. Women's Championship. Besides that, "I have a string of events from August to then maybe December of 2026."
As for the upcoming 2026 FIDE Candidates Tournament and Women's Candidates, starting next week, she's rooting for GM Fabiano Caruana, though "of course it'd also be great to see Hikaru win. I'm just cheering for the Americans." In the Women's tournament, she's rooting for "one of the younger people," naming the youngest candidate, 20-year-old GM Divya Deshmukh.
