Jessica T. Lauser /LAWser/ is a visually-impaired American chess player and the current/reigning, 3-time U.S. Blind Champion. Born at just 24 weeks’ gestation, she experienced a common complication affecting micro-preemies, called Retinopathy of Prematurity, causing permanent vision-loss in her first few months of life. ROP (and subsequent Cataracts) left Lauser effectively blind in one eye, with limited usable sight in the other, and is the same eye condition affecting famous musician, Stevie Wonder.

E.T.A.-Hoffmann-Theater is a theatre in Bamberg, Bavaria, Germany.
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Jessica T. Lauser /LAWser/ is a visually-impaired American chess player and the current/reigning, 3-time U.S. Blind Champion. Born at just 24 weeks’ gestation, she experienced a common complication affecting micro-preemies, called Retinopathy of Prematurity, causing permanent vision-loss in her first few months of life. ROP (and subsequent Cataracts) left Lauser effectively blind in one eye, with limited usable sight in the other, and is the same eye condition affecting famous musician, Stevie Wonder. First learning chess, at age 7, Lauser became more involved with it, at age 12, earning her the nickname, “Chessica”, before going on to distinguish herself, over the years, in formal tournament play. Most notably making history by becoming the first-ever (and so far only) woman to win the national chess championship for blind and visually-impaired, she’s done so, three years in a row (2018, 2019, and 2020. Along the way, Lauser received undergraduate degrees from San Francisco State University and the University of Alaska Anchorage, while working various jobs, predominantly clerical in nature. Likewise, she has qualified, seven times out of seven attempts, to play for medals and titles representing the United States, in world events for the blind, overseas. In November 2020, she joined Team USA which took part in the 1st FIDE Online Olympiad for People with Disabilities. The team, initially seeded 39th in this event, finished tied for tenth in the world, placing sixteenth on tiebreaks. An avid competitor, having played 291 USCF-rated tournaments, so far, Lauser presently enjoys current rankings on ten Top 100 lists, in the U.S.—among the exclusively fully-sighted—while regularly frequenting chess sites, including Chess.com, Lichess, ICC, and the FIDE Online Arena. She resides in Columbia, Missouri, where she is taking graduate courses online.