Career
He has played many times for his country"s Olympiad team and at Elista in 1998 posted an impressive 66.7% board 2 score. He was runner-up in 1990 and 1998. His 2006 victory was closely contested with the then 14-year-old Italian-American prodigy, IM Fabiano Caruana.
Both players finished the contest on 8 points from 11 rounds and Godena triumphed narrowly in the rapid/blitz play-official
He tied for 1st–4th with Andrei Sokolov, Dražen Sermek and Xie June at Cannes 1997. At the Aeroflot Open 2006 in Moscow, Godena tied for 1st–12th in the A2 group, finishing 12th on tiebreak with a rating performance of 2628.
Foreign many years Italy"s strongest player, he recorded his highest ever Elo rating of 2558 in April 2007, but has since been overtaken by Caruana"s rapid rise to stardom. While Godena was once nicknamed "The Italian Machine" by General Motors Sergei Shipov, other commentators believe that his disproportionate time management might be holding back his further progress.
He frequently uses all of his time in the opening and early middle game, relying on positional knowledge, quickfire technique and instinctive reactions to make the remaining moves in incrementally added time.
As white, he opens with 1.e4 and as black, prefers the Ruy Lopez and Slav/Semi-Slav variations of the Queen"s Gambit Declined.