Even by the standards of chess prodigies, Hou Yifan stood out. It wasnt so much the way she played the gamedynamically but not dazzlingly, with an aggressive but flexible style. It was that she was a girl. Thirteen years after she became a Grandmaster, at the age of fourteen, people still mention the two big barrettes that used to pin back her bobbed hair. I never felt restrictions or limitations, she told me recently, from her home in Shenzhen, China, where she is a professor at Shenzhen Universitys Faculty of Physical Education. (Last year, at twenty-six, she became the youngest full professor in the universitys history.) My parents never taught me that as a girl you should do this or that, she said. Teachers never shaped my views in that way. These days, her hair falls to her shoulders, and black cats-eye glasses frame her face. She speaks English quickly and precisely; she spent a year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, studying public policy. She is the only woman among the hundred best chess players in the world, at No. 82. The second-ranked woman, Aleksandra Goryachkina, a Russian in her early twenties, is outside the top two hundred.
Chess is not like basketball or soccer. Men and women face one another on equal terms, and no one can tell the gender of a player from the moves on a scorecard. Still, of the seventeen hundred and thirty-two Grandmasters in the world, just thirty-eight are women. Much of this gap stems from how many women compete, versus the number of men who do: around sixteen per cent of tournament players identify as female, and most of them are children. As a purely statistical matter, you would expect few, if any, women at the extremes of the rankings. Still, this appears to be an incomplete explanation of the disparity at the top of the game, about which Hou is blunt. You cannot deny it, you cannot pretend it doesnt happen, she told me, of the absence of women from chesss highest echelon. For years, she has been the only onewho stood a chance.
Hou was born in 1994 in Xinghua, a small city near Chinas coast. As a child, she spotted a chess set in a shopwindow, and liked the shapes of the pieces: the sturdy pawns and slender-necked bishops, the castellated rooks and horse-headed knights. When she was five, she started playing the game with other kids at the home of a chess teacher, and showed enough talent that her parents enrolled her a year early in the local school, which had a chess program. She and her classmates would consult a large chess dictionary and write out the first few moves of famous openingsthe Scotch, the Ruy Lopezon a sheet of paper. Then theyd set up their boards, dutifully execute their copied instructions, and launch their wild attacks.
Hou liked calculating how one move would provoke another, and started thinking in terms of sequences. She developed a sense of where to push and when to defend. Her coach at school could take her only so far, but, at a tournament, she met an International Master and former national champion named Tong Yuanming, who taught chess in Shandong Province, a few hours north. Tong said that he would consider taking her on. He sat Hou at a board and had her face his top pupils, all boys. They had studied chess theory; they knew how to checkmate with only, say, a bishop and a knight. Hou did not know endgames, but she beat most of them anyway. She was seven years old.
She moved to Shandong with her mother and attended chess classes. Two years later, she joined the national team, and her family moved to Beijing. Her parents told her that she could go back to normal life whenever she wanted, but she was not a normal talent. She won the girls under-ten championship in 2003, and, the next year, finished the boys under-ten tournament tied for first, placing third after tiebreaks. In 2005, she was the youngest player on the one female squad at the World Team Chess Championship, in Israel. She lost her first two games, and, while sulking, got thrashed in the third, despite starting with the white pieces. (The player with the white pieces always moves first, giving her a slight advantage.) The experience hardened her mind-set, making her more disciplined and professional. She was eleven.
Hous competitors started taking note not just of her performances but of her disposition. Irina Bulmaga, a contemporary of Hous who lives in Romania, said, My parents and coaches were always telling me, Look how focussed she is during the games. Bulmaga, like most young players, struggled to contain her emotions and to concentrate throughout games that could last for five hours and were sometimes played back-to-back. Hou was stoic. My personality wouldnt push me to an extreme, she told me. It is not that she never got emotional or distracted, or didnt feel pressure. It is that these experiences were so rare that she can cite each time they happened.
In some respects, China was a good place for a girl to pursue chess. The International Chess Federationknown by its French acronym, FIDEhas overseen a world championship for women since 1927. For years, it was dominated by the Soviets. Then, in 1991, a young Chinese player named Xie Jun qualified for the finals against Maia Chiburdanidze, of Georgia, who had held the title since 1978. China had never had a championship contender, and Xies preparation became a collective project. The countrys top male players helped coach her. She won, becoming a source of national pride and establishing a path followed by other womens chess champions. For a long time, the top Chinese men and women trained together in Beijingthough that has changed since China got two men into the top twenty.
When Hou was fourteen, she shared third place in the open section of the World Junior Chess Championship, in Turkey, and became the fifteenth-youngest person, to that point, to achieve the rank of Grandmaster. Later that year, she reached the finals of the Womens World Chess Championship, and finished second. She developed a reputation on tour for kindness, and for mental strength. In 2010, she returned to the finals, and came into her fourth game needing just a draw to winand lost. It was one of the rare occasions when a game got to her. That night, she walked with her mother and her coach around the garden of their hotel until she was calm. The next day, in tiebreaks, she overwhelmed her opponent and compatriot Ruan Lufei. At sixteen, Hou was the youngest-ever womens world champion, and among the worlds best teen-age players. It was possible to imagine other summits that she might climb. But Hou had her own ambitions.
The most famous female chess player in the world doesnt exist. Beth Harmon, the protagonist of The Queens Gambit, is a fictional character, invented by the novelist Walter Tevis, in 1983, and lately given new life in a Netflix miniseries. Harmon conquers the chess world of the nineteen-fifties and sixties and faces only the mildest sexism along the way. The Hollywood version of her story, though fanciful in many respects, evokes the glamour of Lisa Lane, who became a media sensation in the early sixties but quit the game in 1966, unhappy with the focus on her looks and her love life, and unable to make a comfortable living as a pro. Lane became the national womens champion twice, but never beat the best women in the world, let alone the top men. (Tevis seems also to have been inspired by Bobby Fischer, the eccentric American champion, who was a notorious chauvinist.)
Shortly after Teviss novel was published, three women emerged whose stories rivalled Harmons. They were sisters, from Hungary: Susan (ne Zsuzsa), the oldest; Sofia (ne Zsfia); and Judit, the baby of the family. Their father, Lszl Polgr, believed that geniuses are made, not born, and set out to prove it. He kept his daughters on a strict educational schedule that included studying chess for up to six hours a day. There was also a twenty-minute period dedicated to telling jokes.
In 1950, FIDE had regularized the titles applied to the best chess players, and created one title just for women: Woman International Master. The bar was set two hundred rating points lower than that for a standard International Master, the title below Grandmaster. Twenty-six years later, FIDE introduced the title of Woman Grandmaster, and placed that title, too, at a threshold lower than not only Grandmaster but also International Master. Polgr wanted to insulate his daughters from the damaging effects of low expectations: the sisters sought titles available to men, and, with a few exceptions, they avoided womens tournaments.
Some of the men they played wouldnt shake their hands. One, after losing to Susan, threw pieces in her direction. In 1986, when Susan was seventeen, she should have qualified for a regional tournament for the World Chess Championship, based on her result at the Hungarian national championship, but the Hungarian federation, angry about her insistence on playing men, refused to send her. FIDE eventually intervened, officially opening future world championships to female competitors. Susan became the third woman to earn the title of Grandmaster. Sofia, who, at the age of fourteen, won a tournament against respected Grandmasters in spectacular fashion, reached the level of International Master. Judit eclipsed them both.
A diminutive girl with long red hair and arresting gray eyes, Judit, by thirteen, had a shot at Bobby Fischers record for youngest-ever Grandmaster, and Sports Illustrated ran a story about her. Its inevitable that nature will work against her, and very soon, the world champion Garry Kasparov told the magazine. He added, She has fantastic chess talent, but she is, after all, a woman. Polgr beat Fischers record; two years later, she beat Boris Spassky, a former world champion. The first time she played Kasparov, in 1994, he changed his mind about moving a piece after lifting his hand, breaking the rules; Polgr looked questioningly at the arbiter, who seemed to see the infraction but did nothing. Kasparov won that match and, for seven years, every other game they played, except for a handful of draws. Then, in 2002, at a tournament in Moscow, she faced him in a game of rapid chess. The format gave each player about half an hour to complete their moves. By then, Polgr was ranked No. 19 in the world. Kasparov was still No. 1. Playing with the black pieces, he deployed a defense that was unusual for him, and Polgr, an aggressive and psychologically astute player, noted that he had opted for a line that his rival Vladimir Kramnik had once used against him. Seeing what was coming, Polgr seized control. With her rooks doubled on the seventh rank and hunting the Russians exposed king, Kasparov resigned.
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Hou Yifan and the Wait for Chess's First Woman World Champion - The New Yorker