CHESS BITCH

Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport

by Jennifer Shahade

Two-time U. S. Women’s Chess Champion

“One woman’s fascinating true story of the life of a champion chess player. All women should take up the challenge and pick up a board! Chess anyone?”

—Yoko Ono

“With crisp prose and a hypnotic rhythm, Shahade runs us through a vast range of colorful, affirming characters. Chess Bitch is a worldwide trot in search of a common humanity, a precise critique and a wild ride that transcends its own subject.”

—J.C. Hallman, author of The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World’s Oldest Game

“She speaks playfully and provocatively on chess as meditation, as art and as philosophy …how passion can be more interesting than genius, and the importance of sexy.”

—The Philadelphia Independent

Copyright © 2005 by Jennifer Shahade

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

eBook ISBN: 978-1-890085-5-13

Cover design by Wade Lageose for Lageose Design

Cover photography by Gabrielle Revlock

Siles Press

www.silmanjamespress.com

Los Angeles, CA

Dedication

To my father Mike Shahade, for making me a chessplayer, my mother Sally Solomon for making me a writer, and in memory of my coach Victor frias, for making me a champion.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Preface to eBook Edition

Playing Like A Girl

War-Torn Pioneers: Vera Menchik and Sonja Graf

Building a Dynasty: The Women of Georgia

Be Like Judit!

Bringing Up Grandmasters: The Polgar Sisters

Women Only!

Chinese Style

Juno and Genius

European Divas

Checkmate Around the World

Playing for America

Gender Play: Angela from Texas

Worst to First

Glossary

Appendix — Games

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

Acknowledgements

This book would be impossible without the help of friends and family who advised and supported me at every phase. Two people in particular, my mother and Elizabeth Vicary exceeded all standards of generosity in every stage of the process. Without my mother’s stylistic advice, this would be a far inferior book. Many of the ideas discussed this book were developed and refined in conversations with Elizabeth.

Many thanks to Jeremy Silman, for sensing at the closing cocktail party of the 2003 U.S Championship that I had a book to write and convincing Gwen Feldman to take on this project. Thanks to Gwen for her advice, design work and taste. I am grateful to my editor Marjorie O’Hanlon for her thorough and thoughtful comments on the manuscript.

The following friends read various chapters and advised me along the way, saving me from many mistakes, and generally making Chess bitch a better book: Dr. Lewis Eisen, Chris Hallman, Paul Hoffman, Carrie Jones, Michael Le Grand, Jonathan Rowson and Greg Shahade.

Thanks to IM John Donaldson of the Mechanics Institute, Mark Ashland and Henk Chevret of the Hague Collection for sending me rare materials. Thanks to John also for suggesting to research Sonja Graf’s life. Thanks to Stephen Zeitz and Justin Phillips for supplying me with crucial materials on my visit to the John G.White collection in Cleveland, and to Nina Fried for collecting photographs.

Also thanks to Aarvind Aaron, Mig Greengard, Dirk Jan Ten Geuzendam, Jami Anson, Michael Klein, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, Mike Nolan, Yelena Dembo, Ella Baron, Michael Negele, Gregory Braylovsky, Erin Fogg, Diego Garces, Gabrielle Revlock, Laszlo Nagy, Ron Young, Viktoria Johansson, Paul Truong, The Kasparov Chess Foundation and The American Foundation for Chess.

And to all the people mentioned in the book, for their candor and their time.

Preface to eBook Edition

The most frequent question I get about Chess Bitch is, “Why the title?” I explain that behavior seen as bitchy by a woman is often considered aggressive or assertive by a man. Of course, the catchy title also drums up interest for the book. There were some sour notes of censorship, like The New York Times refusing to publish the title in the tagline to an op-ed I wrote about popularizing chess. However, most mainstream venues from The Wall Street Journal to NPR embraced the controversial title.

I profiled and interviewed dozens of female chess champions for Chess Bitch. Now, nearly eight years after its initial publication, I’ve included some notable updates.

Judit Polgár is still the strongest female player in history, and now a mother of two.

Chinese, Georgian, Ukrainian, and Russian women continue to dominate Olympiads and World Championships, though the United States is also a force. U.S. teams won silver medals in the 2004 Olympiad in Mallorca (where I was a team member), as well as bronze in the 2008 Olympiad in Dresden.

Grandmaster and fashion model Alexandra Kosteniuk won her first Women’s World Championship title in 2008. Coining herself the “Chess Queen,” Kosteniuk has even copyrighted the phrase and goes by chessqueen on her popular YouTube and Twitter accounts.

Elizabeth Vicary, now Elizabeth Spiegel, starred in Brooklyn Castle, a highly acclaimed documentary about the I.S. 318 middle-school chess team she coaches, which has captured more National Championships than any other school in the country. The tagline of the movie is “Imagine a school where the cool kids are the chess team.”

Irina Krush continues to win U.S. women’s championship titles, having just captured her fifth at the time of this writing.

Just weeks ago, Mona May Karff was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame and Nona Gaprindashvili entered the World Chess Hall of Fame.

Both Halls of Fame are housed in St. Louis, in a leafy, boutique-studded neighborhood called the Central West End. Across the street is the Saint Louis Chess Club, sandwiched between a trendy wine spot and a sports bar. Video art and grandmaster blitz games are displayed on dozens of flat screen monitors, while premiere chess events like the U.S. Chess Championships are hosted. The founders of the club and the Halls of Fame, Rex and Jeanne Sinquefield, are successful entrepreneurs and philanthropists. Widely considered the nicest chess club in America, the Saint Louis club is the centerpiece of what I judge to be the strongest American chess environment in my lifetime.

Chess apps on smartphones and the prevalence of “geek chic” have also promoted the game’s image, and chess.com has over seven million members.

Many of my own projects since Chess Bitch also broaden the appeal of our game. I edit the official website for the U.S. Chess Federation, Chess Life Online, where I post videos and edit blogs and tournaments reports. One of my goals is to make chess more glamorous and appealing.

I created a series of game related art projects such as Hula Chess, which was featured in galleries and museums, including the Guggenheim. With Daniel Meyrom and my dancer friend Gabrielle Revlock, we made a video installation merging chess and hula-hooping. The contrast between circles of hooping and the linear movements of chess are referenced in the finale, a potential perpetual check derived from a game by artist and chessmaster Marcel Duchamp.

In the even more provocative, Naked Chess, I reversed the famous photo of Marcel Duchamp playing against a naked woman. The resulting video was a promotion for Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, a book I co-authored. Following up on this, I played a simultaneous exhibition in Amsterdam against three naked opponents, a twist on the familiar chess exhibition in which a master walks in circles, checkmating dozens of opponents at once.

My prequel to Chess Bitch, Play Like a Girl: Tactics by 9 Queens is filled with tactical combinations and checkmates, all by female players. The first book of its kind, I hoped it would inspire young girls to stick with the game. I remember how important it was to me to play through Judit Polgar’s brilliancies, and imagine it was me delivering her beautiful queen sacrifices. The book was a project for 9 Queens, a non-profit I co-founded to promote chess to young people and women.

In the first few pages of Chess Bitch, I write that I don’t relate to gambling. And yet in 2006, my brother taught me poker and I was immediately drawn to the game. In the last few years, I became increasingly involved in the subculture. The lifestyle and the analytical approach required to succeed reminded me much of my first love, chess. I have played in poker tournaments all over the World, from Monaco to the Bahamas and also in thousands of online tournaments, where unveiling aggression is particularly easy for me. I’ve gotten a chance to watch the same sorts of gender issues play out with 52 cards just as I did in my teens and early 20s with chess. Many of the sexist tendencies I noted in Chess Bitch are even more extreme in the poker world.

I host my video art projects on the site Poker Fairytale, and I’ve joined a quartet of female poker players, The Grindettes, to help encourage more women to enter another male-dominated sphere.

Recently, I was unsure about my next career step, and my friends used my first book to remind me that I was a born risk-taker. I’m grateful that the world of chess armed me with the work ethic to attack other worlds fearlessly and with vigor. More than ever, I believe chess develops confidence and passion, the core of what “Chess Bitch” means to me.

May 2013

1

Playing Like A Girl

I am a woman who plays a man’s game, so I balance feminine emotions with masculine logic to become the strongest player possible.

— Zhu Chen, eighth Women’s World Champion

I was angry, overwrought, and couldn’t control my aggression and desire to win at any cost. It was the first time I had felt such intense killer instincts, and when I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face, I looked in the mirror and wondered, Is this what it means to play like a man?

It was Christmas in Las Vegas. Accompanied by my father, Michael, a now-inactive chessmaster, I was there playing in a chess tournament. As we walked through the hotel, the Paris Las Vegas, with its wide-carpeted boulevards, sky-painted ceilings, and beret-wearing waiters with fake French accents, my cheerful father ironically declared in a booming voice, “This is so authentic!” I was less enthusiastic. I don’t like gambling, unlike my father (who plays poker and blackjack), and I was baffled by the slot machine junkies and sad-eyed big-money losers. The hectic tournament schedule was set at two games a day. Each game would likely last between three to six hours. I was already exhausted and running on caffeine, sandwiches bolted in transit, and the adrenaline rush that accompanies an encounter as intense as a chess game.

The games were played far from Paris, in a sterile ballroom in Bally’s. I’d had a lukewarm tournament so far, winning two games against masters I was favored to beat, and losing two to grandmasters (the highest title in chess, other than that of world champion). My last-round opponent was a doughy, affable, completely inoffensive master. I wasn’t playing for any prize, so the source of my aggression was not lust for cash. Maybe it was the sharp attacking position that aroused my killer instinct. In any case, I was angry and playing like a man—or playing violently, which—for me—were the same. I was also playing badly: too many aggressive, but ineffective, moves. I sacrificed a Queen in a position where I saw that my opponent’s best response—rejecting my Queen sacrifice and fortifying his own position—would lead to a winning game for him. With just one minute on my clock, I was going to lose! My opponent offered me a draw. Riled up with all that masculine fire, I had the nerve to decline. With the next move, I came to my senses and renewed the draw offer: luckily my opponent, who by now had a clear advantage on the board, shook my hand in agreement. Did his lack of ruthless courage mean that he was playing like a girl?

It was time for me to find out what “playing like a man” meant. From open-air chess parks to professional tournament halls, “playing like a girl” has negative connotations, while “playing like a man” is a standard to be admired and emulated. It is no surprise that “playing like a boy” or “playing like a woman” are rarer phrases. Men and girls are on opposite ends of a continuum of strength and power. Boys and women, in between, are less-apt categories for generalizing skill level.

I decided to start by asking women chessplayers if there were any feminine qualities that contributed to their chess skill. Former European women’s champion Almira Skripchenko responded after a pause. “I don’t know. No one has ever asked me that before,” admitting that, to her, “The male standard is the highest standard.” Many women named advantages in being a chess-world minority: “I receive more invitations and recognition as a woman” or “Some men play badly against women.” Biology is often used to explain the supposed inferiority of women in chess, but the women I asked only named advantages peripherally related to being female.

At the moment of writing, the rate of female chess participation, especially at the adult level, is astonishingly low. In the United States, fewer than three percent of competitive adult-rated players are women, a number that has remained constant for the past five years. In the worldwide ranking system of FIDE (Federation International Des Eches) the situation is slightly more balanced. There, about six percent of active adult players are female.

Interpreting the data in such a male-dominated group is complex, but a good place to start is with Elo ratings, named after Professor Arpad Elo. In the 1960s, Elo developed the rating system now used by FIDE to estimate the relative strength of chessplayers based on previous results. After each tournament, ratings are revised to reflect a player’s performance. A master player’s rating ranges from 2200 to 2400, and an international master or a grandmaster is usually rated between 2401 up to 2851, the highest rating of all time earned by Garry Kasparov in July 1999.

The percentage of top female players is similar to the percentage of active female chessplayers. For instance, there is one woman, Judit Polgar, in the top twenty players in the world and about four or five women in the top one hundred players in America. So there is little evidence that women play worse than men. There are, however, clearly fewer women who play. It is typical to confuse the low rate of participation with poor performance, so much of the rhetoric on gender and chess assumes that women are weaker players.

Explanations abound as to why women are rarely drawn to competitive chess, including Freudian theories, studies on the importance of testosterone, and evolutionary theories. Garry Kasparov, who held the World Champion title from 1980 till 2000, thinks that the ability to concentrate is the most important quality in measuring chess talent, and argues that women are more easily distracted: “A women’s train of thought can be broken more easily by extraneous events, such as a baby crying upstairs.” Kasparov believes that women are more sensitive to external stimuli, so that even a childless woman has maternal impulses that make it harder for her to focus. To test Garry’s theory, I propose that a tournament with one hundred female and one hundred male participants be held underneath a baby nursery. It would then be possible to see how men and women react and adapt their play to the distracting cries of babies.

American Grandmaster Reuben Fine, Freudian psychologist and World Championship contender, links the desire to play chess with latent, unspeakable desires. In his 1956 treatise Psychoanalytic Observations on Chess and Chess Masters, Fine writes, “The unconscious motive actuating the players is not the mere love of pugnacity but the grimmer one of father-murder.” Women are less inclined to pick up the game, argues Fine, since they lack a “subconscious urge to kill their father(s).” Fine believes that the King attracts boys to the game because the piece is important (if it is trapped, the game is over), yet impotent (it can only move one square at a time.) He argues that adolescent males are in a similar state, because they are unable to express their budding social and sexual powers. In his view, the rules of chess mirror for boys the rules of sex. “Don’t touch your piece until you’re ready to move it” encodes to “Don’t masturbate.”

This outrageous Oedipal model is just one of many possible ways to decode the symbolism of chess. Fine’s theory of chess, admittedly provocative, is contrived and hard to apply. I prefer to think of chess in the spirit of Carl Jung, as a system of opposites, from the black and white colors of the pieces and squares to knowing when it is time to attack and when to defend.

A good chessplayer also strives to balance overconfidence and fear, practice and rest, and—in the game itself—tactical and strategic thinking. Tactics are short operations that force checkmate or a quick win of material (pieces or pawns) and require proficiency in calculating. When a good player calculates, she considers her possible moves, taking into account her opponent’s possible responses, and how she would play against each, and so on, until she is reasonably satisfied with her choice. Though many nonplayers and amateurs are fascinated by how many moves ahead a chessmaster can see, it can sometimes be easy to see twelve moves ahead if there are few pieces on the board, but extremely difficult to see three moves ahead if the opponent has a variety of responses, which lead to a dense web of variations. Strategic thinking requires long-term planning and maneuvering: when there are no tactics to watch out for or employ, masters play moves based on their intuition and experience, waiting for the time when the position will enable them to find more concrete answers. Even the very best players have difficulty with the tension, as Russian-American Grandmaster Gregory Kaidanov said to me: “I can play well tactically, I can play well strategically, but I have difficulty switching quickly between one mode of thinking to the other.”

During a tournament game, balancing intense concentration with relaxation is crucial, to save energy for critical moments. Many players get up between moves to pace, eat an energy bar, or glance at friends’ games. It is easy to go too far with this practice, slip into daydreams, and totally lose concentration—and the game. Some men claim that thinking about sex diverts their focus. A twenty-two-year-old male amateur told me jokingly, “I would be a grandmaster if only I could stop thinking about sex during the game for more than fifteen minutes. I think it would be easier if I were a woman.” According to the 2003 American Champion, Alexander Shabalov, professionals have not overcome that obstacle: he said that most men, regardless of their strength, are thinking about sex for most of the game. With characteristic candor, the Latvian-born grandmaster tells me, “In most games, I am thinking about girls for about fifty to seventy-five percent of the time, another fifteen percent goes to time management, and with what’s left over I am calculating.” When I mention that twenty-five percentage points is a big range, Alexander agrees. “You can tell if it’s closer to fifty or seventy-five percent by the quality of the game. Fifty percent is great chess, seventy-five percent I can play okay, but where it is really dangerous is when it slips up to ninety percent.”

Learning the rules of chess takes a few hours, but gaining competence in its intricacies and developing a personal style takes years of work. Playing a highly focused board game for four to six hours is difficult, and neither men nor women are born with the concentration and motivation to excel at it. For that reason, I find the emphasis on women’s biological inferiority absurd: when it comes to chess, we are all born inept.

The desire to find gender-based stylistic differences is based on a belief that if women and men are different, they ought to play chess differently as well. Indeed, women and men do tend to have different chess careers and get started in the game for different reasons. In my usage, the category of women’s chess does not refer to some intrinsically female way of playing chess but rather to being a minority in the chess world, which can affect the way a woman plays.

The development of my own style was affected by being one of the few girls in chess. My brother, Greg, and father, Michael, were both masters by the time I became serious about chess, in high school. My father has a sedate style. He is an excellent calculator, but his tendency to choose solid, positional set-ups, such as the English opening (starting the game with the c-pawn, commonly thought as the safest first-move option), surprises some people in the chess world. English Grandmaster Tony Miles, after taking in Michael’s iron-man physique, loud voice, and commanding presence, said, “I thought you would play more like a thug!” My brother has a balanced style, which favors tactics but is also flexible. He does employ solid systems against opponents when he thinks they will be uncomfortable with long strategic battles. Impressed by Greg’s psychological awareness, one master told me, “Greg has the most pragmatic style I’ve ever seen.”

Michael, Jennifer, and Greg Shahade. (Photo by Sylvia Plachy.)

As a teenager, I played the most dynamic openings in the family, and tended to win by executing ruthless attacks. I improved rapidly between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. Just before I turned sixteen in 1996, I entered the Insanity Tournament, an all-night chess marathon that began at nine at night and ended at nine the next morning. I won the tournament and also gained enough rating points to join my brother and father as national masters. I was euphoric. My father, who had ridden on the train with me to the tournament and stayed to watch my games, joked gleefully on the ride home, “No one could ever say you play like a girl.” At the time, I considered it a compliment. I didn’t see any reason for my violent style except that I liked attacking chess. However, I was aware of the stereotype that women were more patient and passive when men were supposedly braver, and I wanted to be a hero too. In retrospect, I see my chess style was loaded with meaning—to be aggressive was to renounce any stereotype of my play based on my gender. I was also emulating the attacking style of the top woman player in the world, Hungarian Judit Polgar.

For a while, I played recklessly, and at first I lost many games because of my one-dimensional style. Many opponents altered their strategies when playing against me, choosing quiet systems—such as the English opening—in order to derail the tactical melees at which I excelled. This resulted in my progress pursuing a zigzag course: I dipped below master, and back up again, and then under again. I realized that I needed to learn other aspects of the game, so I began to study strategy manuals and endgame theory to improve my standard of play.

I abandoned my absurd desire to subvert stereotypes by playing violently. By the time I was nineteen, I started to mingle in the higher ranks of international chess, playing in world championships and the biennial chess Olympiads. I realized that to play like a girl did not have the same meaning at the top as it did in parks and scholastic tournaments. It turned out that to play like a girl meant to play too aggressively! This was most vividly demonstrated to me when a Russian coach looked at some of my boldest games and said derisively, “I see women’s chess hasn’t changed. Women have no patience; they always want to attack immediately.”

Even women players sometimes join the chorus. German youth champion Elizabeth Paethz told me: “Women are mostly of the more aggressive category. They don’t want to sit for six hours, so they attack and try to get the game over with. Probably this is because men in the Stone Age had the more focused goal of hunting, while women had a variety of tasks.”

Grandmaster Susan Polgar also believes that women have difficulties in strategic thinking, although her reasoning is based on more recent history: “Women are rarely given the freedom to think abstractly. Men are often afforded the luxury of having their basic tasks, like laundry and cooking, taken care of. Women are usually compelled to focus on the details of life.” Susan concludes, “This is the root of why women are equal to men in tactics, but still lag behind men in strategy.”

Polgar and Paehtz attempt to explain aggressive female play by examining the nature of women, although Polgar leaves open the question of whether the division of labor according to gender is natural or cultural—without reference to the particular conditions of the contemporary chess world. A feature of the present standard of women’s chess is excessive aggression, a playing trait common for masters rated 2300-2500 Elo, the range in which professional women fall. Grandmasters tend to have more balanced styles. To determine whether women are more aggressive than men, one would have to compare the games of the top female players with the games of randomly selected male players rated 2300-2500.

In determining a feminine style, the conclusions are rarely based on statistical analyses of games. Playing like a girl, whether it is supposed to refer to passive or aggressive play, is usually intended as an insult. This devaluing of the feminine in chess dates back to the 1300s and the birth of modern chess rules.

The modern Queen is the most powerful piece on the chessboard, shuttling across ranks and files, checkmating lone Kings, and grabbing loose pieces on an open board. This was not always so.

In the Persian versions of the game, there was no Queen. The piece that stood by the King was the Ferz, or the adviser. Replacing this male counselor with the Queen, the female sexual partner of the King, occurred after Persian traders transported the game to Europe in approximately A.D. 1000. Chess historian H. J. R. Murray thinks that this change came about because of “the general symmetry of the arrangement of the pieces, which pointed to the pairing of the two central pieces.”

The Queen began as one of the weakest pieces on the board, only able to move one square diagonally, and her presence was not revered. In 1345, when the Queen could only inch along the diagonals, a medieval writer described her force: “[Her] move is aslant only because women are so greedy that they will take nothing except by rapine and injustice.”1 Diagonal lines were then seen as sinister and sneaky, in contrast to the honesty of straight lines. The connotation lingers in English phrases such as “crooks,” or “straight-up.” In Go, which originated in China, the pieces do not connect on the diagonals. In chess, blundering on diagonals has always been more common than on the straight lines of the ranks or files.

The old game was slower, since it was hard to deliver checkmate without the mighty Queen of today. Games were rarely recorded, and to quicken the pace, players often began the games with tabiyas, midgame starting positions.

Around 1500 the rules of chess underwent a sudden metamorphosis, and the Queen was given much greater powers. The Bishop acquired greater mobility at this time also. These changes made the play of chess quicker and set up a balance between strategy and tactics, or intuition and calculation, which makes the game tantalizing to this day. The alterations occurred during the time of Columbus’s voyages, Isabella’s reign, the spread of tobacco, and the invention of the printing press. No single individual is given credit for the changes; probably they were initiated as a result of collective experimentation, brought on by dissatisfaction with the old game. Chess literature spread the new rules, which were rapidly standardized. Chess with its radical new rules was at first called “The mad woman’s chess game.”

Emory Tate, one of America’s most entertaining and talented senior masters, humorously displayed his ambivalence toward powerful women as embodied by the Queen. Emory has a spectacular style, and at open tournaments he gives impromptu performances, his muscled body writhing as he shouts out the moves of his games. Emory reels off his accomplishments in rapid-fire diction, punctuated with vocabulary that is often profane. In one of these so-called post-mortems, I was among several dozen onlookers when Emory exclaimed, “And now I made a triple-force postal move—Bitch to g5!” The first part of this is nonsensical rhetorical flourish—there is no such thing as a triple-force postal move. As for calling the Queen a “bitch,” Emory knows she is central to his inspired checkmating attacks. The reception of the potent, sixteenth-century Queen also showed a negative association with female aggression. The new Queen was not described in a positive way as the super queen or power queen, but rather pathologized as the mad, crazy queen.

Women are too docile, claimed English Grandmaster Nigel Short, to enjoy the highest levels of chess competition. He said, “They just don’t have the killer instinct.” Reuben Fine was straightforward in defining chess as “quite obviously a play-substitute for war.” But is chess really so like war? In chess, both players begin with armies of precisely the same strength and use only their intellects to express their aggression; in this way, chess is antithetical to war. Women’s World Champion Susan Polgar said that when she was four years old, she pictured chess as a “fairy tale” because her father told her dramatic stories involving the King, the Queen, castles, and romance. If chess is a metaphor for war, it is not war as hell, but war where fairness, females, and rules matter above all.

The power of the Queen foreshadows the strength of the women champions in this book, but it also hints at something more sinister. Medieval historian Marilyn Yalom writes that the queen is an “ultimate female status, but one which is played out in life as in chess on a predominantly male playing field.” Empowered women are often called bitches, or mocked for their lack of femininity. Nearly every up-and-coming female in the history of women’s chess has had her femininity doubted, complimented not for being a strong woman but for “playing like a man.” Many great women players have been called Amazons, which means literally “without one breast.” It seems that female chessmasters being referred to as Amazons can be taken as praise for their warrior-like abilities. In reality, emphasizing the manly attributes of strong women players casts their successes in a deviant light—almost as if their efforts are a gender-bending circus act.

In February of 2003 I received a call from Susan Polgar, the eldest of the legendary Polgar trio from Hungary. She wanted to get together. I was excited, because Susan was one of my childhood heroines. Susan, along with her sisters Sofia and Judit, was a child prodigy, trained from infancy in chess tactics and strategies as most children are taught the alphabet. Susan is one of a handful of women to hold the overall grandmaster title and is a former world women’s champion. Born in Budapest, Susan has lived in New York since 1995, where she moved to be with her husband. She started a family and took a hiatus from competitive play. Susan, recently divorced, has renewed her professional ambitions.

Susan and I met in a bookstore in Manhattan, where I found her flipping through a cookbook. She greeted me warmly, but moved quickly onto business, telling me that she was distraught by the lowly status of chess in the United States. In Europe, chess is a respected sport. It occurred to Susan that the top women players in the United States, with some training, would be strong enough to compete with the best women’s Olympic teams in the world. She hoped that this would promote chess in the United States. Susan would come out of retirement in order to train the team and play board one (where the strongest players from each team face off) during the next Olympic games, set for Mallorca, Spain, in 2004.

The Dream Team: Jennifer Shahade, Irina Krush, Anna Zatonskih, Elina Kats, and Susan Polgar. (Photo by Paul Truong.)

Four months after our meeting, along with three other young women, I was invited for a one-week training session to be held at the Susan Polgar Chess Authority, a one-level community chess center and chess bookshop that Susan founded. The club is in Rego Park, deep in Queens where English is often a third language. It was to be the first of eight official training meetings for what team publicist Paul Truong termed The Dream Team.

Anna Zatonskih was the only non-New Yorker on the squad, so she stayed with me in my Brooklyn apartment. The twenty-five-year-old WGM (Woman Grandmaster) arrived at my place and shyly presented me with a box of chocolates from Ukraine, where Anna had been born and raised. Anna has a wide jawbone; silky, dark hair; and legs so long that she seems overwhelmed by her own stature. Anna was not yet fluent in English, so the first few hours between us were awkward, until we sat down at the chessboard set up in my living room. Anna quickly opened up and showed me one of her best games, giggling with childlike glee as she replayed the moves: “And now I sacrificed another exchange!”

The next morning Anna and I took the long subway ride to Rego Park for our first session. We were excited and nervous about training with the famous Susan Polgar. Anna and I were early, and we chatted awkwardly with Susan about her club and our upcoming tournaments as the other members arrived.

Irina Krush entered the club next, brown hair back in a ponytail, wearing a jean jacket, eating an apple. Irina became an international master at sixteen, and was the youngest player to win a U.S. championship as a fourteen-year-old. At the time of this session, Irina was enrolled as a full-time student at NYU, but her devotion to chess is constant. “For me every game of chess is a character test—such intense situations arise so rarely in real life.” Irina approaches life as she does chess, with a contagious intensity. Though chess is her first and deepest love, Irina cultivates what she calls “mini-passions,” such as ones for the French language and tennis.

Rusudan Goletiani, an energetic and rail-thin woman in her twenties, completed the squad. Rusudan is from the ex-Soviet Republic of Georgia, where the first great women’s chess tradition originated. In boring moments of endgame lectures, I sometimes stared at Rusa’s snazzy high-top sneakers and imagined her jumping over tall buildings. Rusudan’s buoyant presence belies a serious character. In 2000, Rusudan fled a grim economic situation in post-communist Georgia. Upon her arrival in the United States, she spent most of her time coaching chess to support herself—this also enabled her to send money back to friends and family in Georgia. Consequently, her chess activity abated, and she was the lowest-rated person on the team. However, by common consensus she may be the most talented player, often reeling off long variations (long strings of projected moves) and finding surprising ideas in analysis.

The training program was exhausting. Each day began at ten in the morning and ran until seven at night: grandmaster guests came, taught, and left. Conversations and lectures were conducted in a swirl of English, Russian, and chess. We analyzed complex endgames, investigated the weaknesses in our play by showing our worst games, and played training games against each other. This grueling work was rewarding for me as a chessplayer, but as a twenty-two-year-old woman, I was dismayed by a sexist idea that was forwarded during the session.

Michael Khodarkovsky, a Russian trainer who has worked with Garry Kasparov, is a sturdy, balding man with piercing blue eyes and confident diction. Michael began his session with us by saying, “I know that feminism is popular in the United States, but in Russia we understood that women and men play differently.” Michael advised us: “With this in mind, you should never be ashamed to tell your trainers most intimate details…or when you may not be able to play one hundred percent.” Paul Truong, a fuzzy-haired Vietnamese ball of energy with a tittering laugh, clarified Michael’s statement for the team: “Does everyone know what Michael is talking about?…Menstruation!”

I thought I had entered the twilight zone, an impression that was furthered when Susan Polgar, one of my childhood heroines, joined forces with Michael: “Now, menstruation may not require that someone take a day off, but it might affect, for instance, the choice of opening.” Michael mentioned a computer program that a Soviet friend of his had developed, which would determine how, at any given day, the menstrual cycle would affect play. I was too shocked to say much, though later that afternoon, I could not resist joking—after suggesting a poor move in analysis—that “It’s that time of month; can’t think straight.” The laughter that ensued made me hopeful that no one took the issue too seriously.

Periods were happily left undiscussed until a few days later when the whole team took a break from our formal training to visit the IBM headquarters in New Jersey. IBM, a sponsor of our team, generously donated computers to us, and allowed us to play against Deep Blue, the computer developed by IBM in 1997 that made history by defeating Kasparov in a match. Susan Polgar gave a talk about her career and lifestory to a group of computer programmers, many of whom were amateur chessplayers and many who had feminist views. Then Susan grappled with the question: “Why is only one woman, my sister Judit, among the top one hundred chessplayers in the world?” Susan argued that although many of the causes were social, “the ‘monthly problem’ gets in the way of the full development of many women chessplayers, since women may be menstruating during a crucial game.”

Susan is not the only luminary in the chess world to adhere to such a view. Other strong women chessplayers, such as GM Pia Cramling from Sweden, or fellow team member Irina Krush, also prefer not to play while menstruating. Even if I could not relate, never having had problems playing when bleeding, how could I contest the testimonies of my peers? Susan’s argument was not that all women suffer during menstruation. Indeed, she was quick to point out that “though many women cite no special problems playing during these times, others are barely able to get out of bed.” She concluded: “Over the wide spectrum, women suffer.”

Susan’s argument is not without evidence or merit, but it is dangerously circular. When a strong, powerful woman such as Susan is vocal in describing the deficiencies of the female body, she promotes such discourse as legitimate. Such statements could make female players more conscious of their periods, who would otherwise not even consider menstruation as a possible obstacle. In her doctoral dissertation from the California School of Professional Psychology, Los Angeles, psychologist and amateur chessplayer Linda Carol Gilbert details the sloppy methodology of previous writing on gender and chess. In her work, Chessplayers: Gender Expectations and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, she argues that the way we talk about women in chess influences the reality of women in chess. “A vicious cycle emerges when world-caliber chess celebrities voice their opinions on why women ‘don’t play as well as men’ and cite ‘science,’ perpetuating a disastrous self-fulfilling cycle that results in females being unfairly labeled as inferior.”

Talking about menstruation as a problem perpetuates menstruation as a problem. The argument is also a throwback to the days when women’s capabilities in politics and business were doubted: “How could we elect a female president, what if she were on the rag during a war?” The cultural depiction of menstruation is still oppressive—even the casual labeling of the natural female cycles as a “problem” is an example of how the female body is considered substandard. The way that pads and tampons are advertised—“’cause you’re the only one who has to know”—associates bleeding with a shameful secret. Teenage-girl magazines have special sections in which girls write in to tell humiliating stories of bleeding excessively in front of “hotties” or in a pool. The overall effect is to make girls feel an early shame associated with their natural bodily rhythms.

Susan concluded that the biological “problems” of motherhood and menstruation would explain the uneven ratio of men to women at the top of the chess world: “With equal social conditions between men and women, we could expect about thirty women in the top one hundred.” Susan strives for balance and consistency in both chess and life, always weighing both sides of an argument. Averaging feminism with sexism is a caricature of this quality. The logical premise that women are born with equal intellectual potential as men is marginalized by growing support for the moderate position that women have thirty percent of the world’s chess potential. Feminist writer Ellen Willis mimics delicate balancing acts such as Susan’s: “The feminist bias is that women are equal to men and the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior.” Willis concludes sarcastically, “The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between.”

That Susan voices such an idea is ironic, as she is a pioneer in chess, the first woman ever to compete at the highest level alongside male professionals. Her life had shown that with the same work ethic, women could be the players that top men could, but now she was doubting that women had equal potential. Such a contradiction between a woman chessplayer’s words and accomplishments is not atypical partly because, as the top British woman player, Harriet Hunt, notices, “Most of the best female chessplayers just play, without knowing too much about feminist theory. Most feminists in chess don’t have enough time to work on the game.”

I was happy to train with the top female players and coaches in America, but I was offended by the discussion of menstruation. That week symbolized my ambivalence toward the larger chess world, which is the driving force behind this book. I love the passion, diversity, and intelligence in the chess world, but am often frustrated by the sexist views I encounter there.

I confided in a few IBM women that I did not agree with Susan’s arguments, which elicited huge sighs of relief and an indignant comment from one worker: “I loved the talk till she brought up periods. Why? Why did she have to go there?” Focusing on supposed impediments such as menstruation distracts us from the fact that there are many women for whom chess is a profession and still others for whom it is an important and essential part of their lives. I reject the negative tone that wraps itself around women’s place in chess. Instead, I will turn my attention to the variety of strong and passionate women who do play chess.

2

War-Torn Pioneers:

Vera Menchik and Sonja Graf

Vera Menchik was the first woman to play chess like a man.

— Grandmaster Salo Flohr

Sonja Graf has written a book! We must be in the presence of something singular.

—Roberto Grau, chess writer from Argentina

Vera Menchik and Sonja Graf played in the first head-to-head match for the world women’s chess title in the summer of 1937, in Semmering, a winter sports resort in Austria. The contrast in their chess styles predicted exciting chess: Sonja attacked with ruthless abandon, while Vera excelled in positional play. Physically, they differed even more radically. Sonja was an expressive blond with a confident stride, while Menchik had a sweet round face and was impassive and modest. A British reporter wrote, “Sonja smokes without end, and during breaks eats candies. Between moves, she paces and talks with observers. Menchik is heavy-set and sits all game with her hands in front without even moving a muscle in her face.”1

Vera Menchik defeated Sonja Graf, ending up with 11.5 points out of a possible 15. Vera’s overwhelming victory was not surprising. Just over thirty at the time of her victory over Sonja, Vera had already won six world titles. It was the last time the two would face off in a match. World War II altered the trajectory of both their lives, and the history of women’s chess.

In photographs, Vera Menchik is pictured smiling sweetly with nary a mean bone in her body. But her tournament records and game scores depict a different Vera—beneath this gentle veneer was a trailblazer who raised the bar for women’s chess. Vera Menchik was the first woman to compete seriously against top male professionals.

Born in Moscow in 1906 to a Czech father and a British mother, Vera learned chess from her father when she was nine years old. Early on she played in a club tournament among boys and finished in third place, which she later said “gave birth to my sporting spirit.” Despite this early show of chess talent, Vera’s main passions were for literature and theater, not chess.

Vera came from a comfortable family and shared a six-room apartment with her father, mother, and sister, Olga. Vera was eleven years old at the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution, an event that profoundly affected everyday life for Vera and her family as they were forced to share their ample space with neighbors. A friend of Vera’s described what happened: “People from below came up, bringing their goats and fowls with them. Below was a forbidden land to her sister and herself and of course extra fascinating on that account…people lived in these basements in great poverty; they had earth floors and the children were terribly dirty and ill-cared for.”2

Unhappy with these changes in lifestyle, the Menchik family decided to emigrate. The family settled in Hastings, a seaside city in England. Teenaged Vera, shy by nature and struggling to become fluent in English, found her interest in chess flourishing as her loneliness deepened. “Chess is a quiet game,” she pointed out, “a perfect activity for someone who does not speak the language.” Vera began to play regularly, in spite of the critics who were concerned that “the deep silence and smoke is not appropriate for a young woman.”

Hastings was a lucky place for Vera to settle. The Hastings Chess Club was one of the most well established in England, founded in 1882. International tournaments were held there each year, attracting some of the best players on the continent and in England. Vera joined the club in 1923 and soon caught the attention of a Hungarian player, Geza Maroczy (1870-1951). Maroczy began to train her. It was a good match because Maroczy had a fine understanding of the game, and Vera improved rapidly, developing a patient style similar to Maroczy’s.

Vera Menchik. (Photo courtesy Cleveland Public Library)

Unlike Vera, most women players were not systematically trained at the time; therefore, Vera Menchik soon became dominant among women. By 1925 she was unquestionably the strongest female player in England, having defeated the second-best player, Edith Price, in two matches.

In 1927 she got a chance to test herself on the world stage. The first-ever Women’s World Championship was to be held in London. Sixteen women from seven countries would participate in the round-robin (everybody plays everybody) event, which was scheduled in conjunction with the first men’s world team competition. Vera swept through the tournament, ceding only one draw. She won the next six Women’s World Championships held in Hamburg, Prague, Folkestone, Warsaw, Stockholm, and Buenos Aires. Out of the sixty-nine games she played in these championships, she won sixty-four, drew four, and lost only one. Vera was miles ahead of the competition in women’s chess, but thirsty for more distinctions: “Victories over women don’t satisfy me anymore. I want to drink men’s blood.”

This 1969 issue of Chess Review celebrates Vera Menchik, shown here as she appeared in 1927 soon after she won the Women’s World Championship. (Photo courtesy USCF.)

Vera Menchik’s first chance to prove herself against men came in 1929 in a tournament in Ramsgate, an English seaside resort. Menchik represented Czechoslovakia on a team composed entirely of foreigners, giving her an opportunity to play against the best male players in England. The Englishmen were trounced, most notably by Vera, who shared the second highest score with Pole Akiba Rubinstein (1882–1961). The winner by half a point was the Cuban World Champion Jose Capablanca (1888-1942). Vera’s own coach, Grandmaster Geza Maroczy, also played with the foreign team under the flag of Hungary. Training Vera helped more than coach Geza could have counted on—his young pupil finished ahead of him. Her result was described as “outstanding,” and her ability “to come out unscathed” against such opposition astounded the chess world, particularly in view of Vera’s youth.

After Ramsgate, Vera was welcomed into the elite chess arena and given opportunities to compete against the top men in the world in tournaments all over Europe. During the summer of 1929, Vera was invited to a particularly strong round-robin event in Karlsbad, a small town in Czechoslovakia. An Austrian participant, Albert Becker, was so shocked by her inclusion that he devised a humiliating plan. Anyone who lost to her would receive a lifetime membership in the Vera Menchik Club. In comic retribution, he was the first to lose to Menchik, and thus became a charter member of the club. Aside from that satisfying incident, Menchik’s overall performance in the tournament was not good. She came in last, scoring just three points out of a possible fifteen.

Also in 1929, Menchik traveled to Paris for her first international tournament. She didn’t fare well there either, scoring only three points out of twelve. One notable opponent was Marcel Duchamp, the celebrated conceptual artist and painter, who for some time gave up art to pursue his passion for chess. Born in France, Marcel spent most of his life in New York City, as well as a year in Buenos Aires when his interest in chess was most intense. Marcel’s position in the chess world was similar to Vera’s. Both were superstars at their world-class events—Duchamp because of his fame as an artist, and Vera because of her gender—even though they were weaker than most of their opponents.

The most famous game played between Duchamp and a woman remains the one chronicled in a much-celebrated photograph; in it he is playing against a completely naked Eve Babitz. Babitz had just started taking birth-control pills, which made her breasts swell to the size of bowling balls. She was a novice in chess and Duchamp won the first game in four moves. Against Vera, Marcel found a tactic, netting two pawns for nothing. With careful play, he should have easily won, but after a few mistakes by Duchamp, Menchik fought back to earn a draw. Menchik ended in eleventh place in the tournament, with Duchamp right behind in twelfth place.

In the next decade Menchik played in tournaments with the world’s top players, sometimes defeating the best in the world. The Vera Menchik Club grew, adding two particularly distinguished members to its ranks: future World Champion Max Euwe (1901-1981) and future U.S. Champion Samuel Reshevsky (1911-1992). Vera’s willingness to participate in top-flight events and her occasional competence within them was admired.

However, the cold numbers of the scorecards revealed that Vera’s percentages against the world elite were generally poor. Some of her results were humiliating. In Moscow in 1935, she played in a tournament attended by luminaries such as World Champions Mikhail Botvinnik and Emanuel Lasker. Some Soviet organizers, who worried that her standard of play was too weak, had discouraged Menchik’s participation. It was finally decided that Vera could play since she might provide a positive example for rising women players in the USSR. She finished last with a horrendous score of 1.5 out of 19.

Vera was active in British chess politics and journalism. She met Rufus Stevenson, editor of the British Chess Magazine and later secretary of the British Chess Federation. Rudolf married Vera in 1937 and the couple moved to London. From then on, coverage on women’s chess was expanded in the magazine. Annual updates on the state of women’s chess in addition to frequent coverage of women’s events now filled the previously male-dominated pages. Vera later became the games editor and opening columnist for another British publication, the monthly magazine Chess. Vera also gave lessons, and, according to one student, was a “splendid and pleasant teacher.”

People rarely had an ill word against Vera. British player H.M. Golombek suggested that she was kind to a fault, choosing the word complacent to describe her—not exactly a compliment for a chessplayer or any intellectual for that matter. Golombek, speculating that Vera’s kindness and modesty held back her chess results, proposed that “the defect in her play was the inevitable reflection of her character.”

In my opinion, this conclusion is oversimplified. The styles of many chessplayers clash with their personalities, such as that of top woman player Ketevan Arakhamia, a frail, quiet woman with a hyperactive style. Judging from Vera’s approach and erratic results—sometimes she played decently, other times very poorly—she suffered from mythologizing stronger players as unbeatable, a judgment that reduced her already-small chances to win. I am often victim to this debilitating lack of confidence against certain players also. I considered rated masters and experts out of my league until I began to participate in all-night-marathon blitz (chess games played at extremely fast time limits, usually five minutes per player) sessions after tournaments. I remember playing dozens of games with two expert—the category just beneath master—players, one a female blackjack dealer and the other a middle-aged businessman. At first I lost every game, but by the third day, I won several games in a row, and as the night went on I continued to hold my own. It was an important step on my road to becoming an expert.

Jennifer and Greg.

But there was one player, no matter how often I played him, who remained stubbornly in the category of the unbeatable: my brother. In the many blitz games we played, I would, from time to time, get a winning position, but then my brother would pound the moves down faster and start to trash-talk. A spectator might find Greg’s behavior confusing as he would act out in inverse proportion to the strength of his position. If he were up a Knight, he would calmly defeat me, but if his King were in danger of being checkmated, he would bang down the moves and chatter about how slow I was.

As a fourteen-year-old, in a tournament at the end of a summer chess clinic in central Pennsylvania, I had a breakthrough tournament by beating one of the coaches, veteran Grandmaster Arthur Bisguier, and drawing against another coach. Then I was paired against my brother. He was white. At the master level, having the white pieces and playing the first move is a big edge. I responded strongly against his relatively tame opening choice, and as lots of pieces were quickly traded off, the position was equal. Greg offered me a draw. Nowadays I would think little of such a game, but at the time it was key to breaking a myth—my brother and coaches were somehow fallible, as we all are. To this day Greg continues to use intimidation tactics when I achieve better positions against him in blitz. It’s a running joke.

Remnants of my childhood chess inferiority complex creep up even today: I am still sometimes struck in disbelief for some seconds when gaining a winning position against a grandmaster. These self-doubts are balanced, though, by another force from an even deeper source, which I suspect many chessplayers share. When I sit down to play, there is a visceral level in which I believe I should win because I am who I am. When this physical confidence comes, and it tends to come in waves when I’m under pressure, it trumps all.

Like me, Vera also struggled with these issues, never completely solving them.

“In chess it is far better to err on the side of overconfidence than underconfidence,” as Grandmaster Gregory Kaidanov told me in a training session. The danger in being overconfident is that a player will not scrutinize her weaknesses closely enough, but underconfidence is even more perilous because a player risks being paralyzed, playing slowly, and/or shying away from critical variations. Women who show brazen self-confidence are sometimes criticized for behavior that would be seen as normal for boys. After a quick victory, talented eighteen-year-old junior champion from Georgia Nana Dzagnidze glowed with self-assurance. “She won in twenty moves with black and thinks she is a great player,” one spectator noted, puffing out his chest with an exaggerated look of arrogance, “and now she is walking around like a man.”

Vera was often too passive against strong opposition. Chess writer Reuben Fine used a particularly uninspiring showing by Menchik against World Champion Jose Capablanca to criticize her for not paying attention to the maxim “When playing for a draw, play for a win!” Vera played against Capablanca nine times, losing each and every game. In one of these games, held in Hastings in 1930, Vera seemed particularly determined to hold Capablanca to a draw (nobody wins, each player earns half a point). She traded off all the pieces, hoping that Capablanca would not have enough firepower left to defeat her. However, he calmly converted his small advantage into a win. Vera’s spineless strategy was ineffective.

Against weaker players, Vera was much more aggressive, often showing off a tactical flair. In a match game against Sonja Graf, Vera Menchik placed a Rook on an empty square. Sonja took it with her Queen, and Vera sacrificed her own Queen. The game was over. If Sonja accepted this second sacrifice, she would be mated instantly. The brilliant combination is still published in tactic books around the world.

Vera was the first woman to play consistently, and sometimes defeat, the best players in the world. She may have exceeded the standards of her time by an even larger margin if she had used against men the fearless, confident style she exhibited against women.

Vera Menchik’s nearest female rival was Sonja Graf. Sonja was born in December 1908 in Munich, Germany. (She claimed that her birthdate was 1914, and historians repeated this date as gospel. However, her passport was recently unearthed in Germany and it seems she was lying about her age!) A copious source for details of Sonja’s life is the hundreds of pages from her two books. Impressions of a Woman Chessplayer deals mainly with Sonja’s chess career and concepts of the game. The second is a memoir, recalling Sonja’s life in and outside of chess. This autobiographical account focuses on a character “Susann,” whom Sonja reveals to be herself by titling the book I Am Susann.3 This tactic allowed for a more self-aggrandizing tone, evident by glancing at the book cover, in which a muscular woman with clenched fists stands victoriously on top of the globe.

According to I Am Susann, Sonja had a traumatic childhood. Her parents were both from wealthy White Russian (Belarusian) families. Her father was a priest in Russia, but when he fell in love with Sonja’s mother, the two eloped to Munich, Germany, where Sonja’s father became a painter—moderately successful, but never earning enough to feed his large family. While Sonja respected her father’s artistic talent, she abhorred his sentimental but selfish character, telling how “an injured parrot brought tears to his eyes, but he had no sympathy for his hungry children.” She pitied and disliked her mother, a woman Sonja saw as confined to the home and blindly devoted to her husband. The first sentence of Sonja’s memoir is, “My mother’s destiny was, undoubtedly, housework,” a fate that the young Sonja would avoid at all costs.

I Am Susan book jacket (1946).

In I Am Susann, there are harrowing accounts of parental abuse, both physical and emotional. In one case, Sonja receives a toy car as a present from a neighbor. Curious as to the mechanics of the gift, she takes it apart. Her mother calls her ungrateful for destroying a present and her father beats her mercilessly in punishment. Another time, her mother wakes up in the morning and loudly recounts a dream she had the night before in which God demands that she give up one of her daughters. Her mother is adamant in her decision to sacrifice Susann, calling her “ugly and stupid.” After describing each such incident, Susann repeats, “I don’t understand the world.”

Sonja directs rare words of praise to her father for teaching her the rules of chess at a young age. She started by playing casually with her brothers. When she began to sneak away to a chess café at twelve years old, she fell in love with the “insomnia brought on by the chaos of variations. [Chess] is happiness, deep emotion, a full and intimate vibration of all our being.”

She became a regular at the chess cafés of Munich, where her talent for the game impressed a tournament player, who arranged for her to meet Grandmaster Seigbert Tarrasch (1862-1934). He had a gang of admirers who would watch as he analyzed variations for hours.

Sonja was transfixed by Tarrasch, describing him as funny, indefatigable, and also reflective. And like Sonja he had a way with words. His ode to chess is often quoted: “Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy.” He was eloquent and funny on lighter subjects, like his berating of gambiteers (players who favor gambit openings, in which players give up material, usually pawns, in the hopes of winning with a quick attack), whose ambition he said was “to acquire a reputation of being a dashing player at the cost of losing a game.”

Tarrasch’s personality and play appealed to Sonja, who admitted that ,before meeting Tarrasch, “my play was rather primitive.”

Sonja vividly recalled the day she decided that she would transfer her love for the game into a career and become a professional chessplayer. She was seventeen and had just become the female champion of Munich. Pointing out “without false modesty” that she had “strength in many areas,” she decided to dedicate her life to chess, “glimpsing through to a future interesting life: a panorama of travels, independence, magnificent liberty…and a means to know well this large, cruel, and beautiful world.”

From Sweden to Poland, Sonja traveled all over Europe with chess. Sonja’s euphoric reaction upon receiving an invitation to Ireland was typical: “…to have the joyous opportunity to visit a new country. Fantastic!” Curious and brave, Sonja records her impressions of people, parties, and drinks, always on the lookout for an amusing anecdote or character portrayal. She was wide-eyed and optimistic, even when initially disenchanted, as on her first trip to England. At first frustrated with reserved British manners, Sonja’s impression of coldness is reversed on a train trip, when she pulls out a cigarette, rummages in her bag for a light, then looks up to see that half the men in the car are offering her a match.

There was another reason Sonja traveled so much. Her hometown, Munich, had become a headquarters of the Nazis, a regime that Sonja was strongly opposed to. For a while, she relocated to the more liberal city of Hamburg, but for the most part, Sonja lived as a “gypsy fated to roam the world,” jumping on and off trains, staying until she ran out of money (which Sonja once called “a vile metal”), and pursuing one love affair after another.

Sonja enjoyed her burgeoning fame as one of the few strong females in the chess world. Of one large crowd of admirers she wrote, “Public applause infiltrated each part of my body like honey.” Giving autographs years later, “just like a movie star,” made her feel “famous and loved.” Sonja’s high opinion of herself comes up in her books again and again. She has a sixth sense, her presence is magical, and her teachers proclaim her poetry as the work of a genius. She even writes “her kisses ranked among the best possible.” Such boasting is at turns funny and unsettling. Sometimes it seems to damage the otherwise high quality of her expression and jeopardize her credibility. Was Graf not self-aware enough to realize how arrogant she would appear? Another possibility, which I began to accept as I delved more deeply into her works, is that for Sonja to live as freely as she did, she needed a shell of confidence harder than a woman today could imagine.

Sonja loved to shock men who underestimated her. In cafés all over Europe, Sonja would humiliate unsuspecting coffeehouse players (invariably men) by winning game after game before revealing that she was a professional player. Sonja describes her first serious game against a man memorably: “From this moment I had played only with women. How my poor heart beat remembering all the things I had heard about the stronger sex! I

began to feel a bit…overwhelmed.” But Sonja soon concluded that in chess, gender was all in the mind: “The complications of the fight dissipated all my fears. And as the game went on, I began to forget the difference between the strong and weak sex. Here I was obliged to play like a man, although, to the majority, I was only a little girl. I really felt like a man. And in this hard fight, I found strengths that were hidden inside me, and I won.”

(Photo courtesy Chess Magazine.)

Sonja sought after moments of heightened intensity in her personal life as well as her chess career. “To have experiences is to have lived,” Sonja wrote. She wanted “all life’s stimuli,” rejecting the ideal that women should abstain from sex until marriage. On special occasions, Sonja got really wild. In Barcelona, she went to a costume party as a man, wearing a suit and donning a fake goatee. Sonja danced with several of the ladies at the party and chuckled to herself about tricking them. Then, a male friend of hers recognized her face. He asked her for a dance. Sonja consented. The guests were outraged, informing her that “here, two men are not permitted to dance together.” Sonja stopped dancing with him, and, not to horrify the women she had danced with earlier, “I continued acting as a man for the rest of the night.”

Sonja portrayed in detail the alcoholic delights and nightlife at each place she visited in Europe. But she grappled with balancing fun with serious chessplay, pointing out that “alcohol is a great enemy of chess.” Post-match bar-hopping is common among even the best players in the world. The intensity of tournament play, as well as the erratic, precarious lifestyle of a professional player, has driven more than a few grandmasters to alcoholism. Perhaps another factor is that many grandmasters are of Eastern European and Russian origin, areas with high rates of alcoholism. The capacity of some grandmasters is so formidable that admiring amateurs joke that there should be a publication called Drink Like a Grandmaster. Other top players have more athletic approaches, avoiding alcohol, or at least abstaining until after a tournament. Some players can party and play well, but for most, like Sonja, there is a stark choice between bringing her A-game and enjoying herself. As my coach Victor Frias advised me, “You have a choice, Jen: either have fun at a tournament or play well.” In my experience, this advice rings true. I often extend my stays at tournaments in faraway destinations so that I can have the time to explore and enjoy the place without the demands of competition. Sonja did the same, but was still convinced that her zest for life interfered with reaching her full chess potential. Sonja used chess to set up a good life, rather than setting up her life to maximize her chess results.

Sonja had a particular passion for Spain, which she explored at the beginning of 1936, just a couple of months before the Spanish Civil War would have prevented such an adventure. Sonja was immediately infatuated with the freewheeling, nocturnal lifestyle she encountered there. Rhapsodizing about Spanish food, bullfights, and nightlife, Sonja was convinced that in Spain “the sun shines brighter and more intensely than anywhere else in the world.” The late hours suited her zest for nightlife; Sonja described giving simultaneous exhibitions (in which a strong player is invited to take on many opponents at once) that began at eleven in the evening and didn’t end until dawn.

Frequent travel left Sonja little time to style her hair, so she chopped most of it off. When walking through the streets in Burgos, a city in northern Spain, she writes that bystanders were shocked by “my hair cut very short, my sex appeal, my frankness, the vigorous line of my features, my strong profile, and my impulsive gestures. Many times I had to contain myself from making faces when listening to the absurd expressions and commentaries from people who could not be pointed out for their intellectual qualities.”

Despite her confident prose, presence, and style, Sonja was still intimidated by the top players in the world. She was invited to play in a strong round-robin tournament in Prague. She scored only 2.5 of 11, but her tournament still had some bright spots, including a draw against the great Estonian Grandmaster Paul Keres.

Sonja’s writings give the impression of a brilliant, egotistic woman who was proud of her intelligence, rather than her looks. Sonja believed that her presence transcended physical beauty. She was intolerant of women who obsessed over makeup and clothing. “I have never felt shame not to be an exceptional beauty, like so many women who live with this as their only preoccupation, because I consider physical beauty secondary.”

By all accounts Sonja was beautiful in a more conventional sense than she describes. Photographs of Sonja show a svelte woman with striking eyes and classic features. Sonja was nonchalant, even defiant, about her good looks, but fiercely proud of her mental qualities. Sixty years later, her message is still subversive.

In late July 1939, the Periapolis set sail from Antwerp, Belgium, for Buenos Aires. The World Team Championship and Women’s World Championship was set for the first time ever in the Americas. Several dozen chessplayers were among the passengers, including Vera Menchik, Paul Keres, and Mikhail Najdorf. The three-week long voyage was great fun, with constant game-playing and socialization on board along with tourist stops in Montevideo and Rio. According to British editor B.H. Wood, “The masters take their responsibility with a light heart. In fact, one might assume it is a bridge tournament they are to play!” Upon docking in Buenos Aires, B.H. Wood noted a mad practice, perhaps a sinister omen: “We were all assaulted by an official who twisted back our eyelids in search for Negro blood. The reactions of various members of our team to this ordeal are entirely unprintable.”4

Sonja set sail on the Highland Patriot a few days later, and was the sole chessplayer on her boat. Sonja was characteristically thrilled to cross the Atlantic for the first time, dismissing racist comments by Europeans who warned her of the primitive, savage customs of South Americans. Sonja, vocal against the Nazi regime, espoused the virtues of equality and liberty. Upon arriving in Buenos Aires, she was promptly punished for her views. Sonja was told that Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda, had removed her from the list of German participants. She played anyway, switching allegiance to the international flag of Liberty. Her new flag was not contested by the organizers or her opponents.

Germany declared war on Poland on the first of September, midway though the tournament. Play went on, despite agony and panic among the participants. The flags of all the nations except Argentina were taken down in order to ward off disputes. Some players returned immediately to Europe, including the British men’s team. Sonja described how some players from the Axis nations stopped speaking with Allied players. The top two scoring teams, Germany and Poland, refused to play their match, so they agreed to a 2-2 forfeit/draw. Politics did not interfere with the completion of the women’s games. Sonja Graf and Vera Menchik played nineteen games each, with no forfeits. They both strung together victories: Sonja won sixteen games; Vera, seventeen. But while Vera drew her two remaining games, Sonja suffered three losses. In the crucial encounter between the two women, Sonja played excellently, gaining a position she could have won in various ways. But she collapsed. She played two terrible moves in a row, first throwing away the win, and then also the chance to salvage a draw. Once again, Vera Menchik was champion of the world. Sonja Graf was second. The two women never met again. World War II interrupted the organization of Women’s World Championships for an entire decade.

Vera Menchik played in one tournament in Montevideo, Uruguay, before returning to Britain. Vera and her husband now lived in London, where they oversaw the National Chess Center. During the war years Vera remained active in chess, though international tournaments on continental Europe were infrequent. She earned money and passed the time by playing, teaching, and writing. She won a match against Jacques Mieses—who was later awarded the grandmaster title—by a wide margin (4.5-1.5). It was a prestigious victory, though Mieses, at seventy-five, was admittedly past his prime.

The first in a series of calamities for Vera Menchik came in 1940, when the Chess Center was bombed. Luckily, the bombing took place at night, so the building was empty. A fund was set up to raise money for what was lost, but money was short and little was raised. The Menchiks survived the London Blitz (1940-1941) in the basement of their large house on Gauden Road. Menchik’s husband, Rufus, fell ill in 1940, and his health was never very good until his death in 1943. The loss almost debilitated Vera. “It was the bravest thing she could do to go on with her life,” said a friend of Vera’s.

Sonja Graf and Max Euwe.

On June 27, 1944, a crumbling Nazi regime dropped bombs over London. Vera, along with her sister and mother, was among the victims. They hid out in the bomb shelter in their basement, which was instantly demolished by the direct hit. Across their street was a subway bomb shelter, which remained intact. Their home, which contained Vera’s papers, letters, and game scores, was destroyed.

Chessplayers in Britain reacted violently to Vera’s death, calling it “an unspeakable tragedy,” and describing the event as “a robot action taken by a robot people.”5

Sonja stayed in Buenos Aires after the tournament, rather than return to the continental bloodbath. She explained that she had become smitten with Argentina upon seeing the Argentinean flag with its two hands clasped in a decidedly anti-war gesture. Sonja was enamored with the culture of Buenos Aires, which she compared to that of Spain: It was “not only for the style of the buildings, but for the ways of the people” that she was smitten. The Spanish language suited Sonja’s romantic views, and she loved the Argentinean zest for life. The only thing she couldn’t comprehend was the Argentinean “mania for makeup,” which according to Sonja, afflicted many of the women.

Sonja was not the only chessplayer to make such a drastic life decision. Many great European players stayed in Argentina after the event, most notably Grandmaster Moishe Najdorf, a Polish Jew, who escaped the Holocaust by staying on in Argentina. In the hopes of contacting his family still in Poland, Najdorf performed blindfold exhibitions, in which he played many opponents at once, without sight of the board. In 1941, he broke the former world record by playing forty-one at once. He hoped that this outstanding feat would gain international press and that his family in Poland would contact him. After the war had ended, he discovered that his entire family (wife, parents, child, and four brothers) had died in concentration camps. He then came back to Argentina, started calling himself Miguel, remarried, and made Buenos Aires his home till the day he died. It must have been overwhelming for a chess trip to turn into a permanent relocation. I can only suspect that the vivacious Sonja took it all in stride. She certainly mastered the Spanish language quickly. In fact, Sonja published both of her books in her new language.

Some of the best tournaments held during the forties were hosted in Buenos Aires, due to the influx of strong Jewish European players. Graf played, usually finishing at the bottom of the cross-table, with Najdorf often at the top.

During the spring of 1947, FIDE president and former World Champion Max Euwe was in Buenos Aires to play in the yearly Mar Del Plata round-robin. In placing a phone call, he got misconnected to a Mr. Vernon Stevenson, an American sailor. Stevenson happened to be fascinated by chess and in this misdirected phone call arranged a meeting that same afternoon with Euwe, who already had an appointment with his old friend Sonja Graf.6 So the three met. According to Euwe, there were sparks right away between Vernon and Sonja, who fell in love and shortly made plans to marry. The two moved to Hollywood, California, and Sonja became Mrs. Graf-Stevenson. Coincidentally, Sonja and Vera both married Mr. Stevensons. Sonja disappeared from the chess world for several years while she raised her son Alexander. She came out of retirement with a bang in 1957 by winning the U.S. Women’s Chess Championship. Sonja had not lost her dramatic flair, and New Yorker Allen Kaufman, who was a rising young player at the time, remembers playing casual games with her. “Sonja used to enter tournaments with two bulldogs. She would play chess with me, banging down the pieces and shouting, ‘It’s your move, boobee.’ You could tell that Sonja had made a decision to present a masculine persona.”

Sonja and her family later moved to New York City, and in 1964 she won her second U.S. Women’s Chess Championship. Shortly thereafter, in an interview with The New Yorker, Sonja spoke of her regrets over her world championship game twenty-five years earlier against Vera Menchik. “I had a won game...I played the three stupidest moves.” Less than a year later, on March 7, 1965, Sonja died of a liver ailment. She was just over fifty-five, and one can only speculate as to the extent thst her intense lifestyle exhausted her. In Sonja’s own words, she was “an artist of life.” She never wrote any books in English, and because her career garnered only moderate attention in the press, the last years of her life are unfortunately unrecorded.

The lives of Menchik and Graf show what chess can do for women. Chess allowed the shy Menchik the opportunity to come out of her shell, to achieve greatness, and to make a name for herself. It gave Graf a chance to express her passion for life, while affording her the freedom to travel the world. Sonja Graf was drawn to the intensity of the game, observing that chessplayers have “their gazes locked to the board… hypnotized, forgetting the world.” “To the chessplayer, of what importance is World War I, Hitler’s regime, or the League of Nations?” As it happened, Hitler’s regime and World War II were of major importance to Sonja Graf, resulting in a whirlwind life in which she would live on three different continents. For Vera Menchik and her family, the war brought tragedy.

The chess world values, above all, quantifiable achievements. Vera is still (and rightly) hailed as a chess pioneer, while the poetic bon vivant Sonja Graf has faded into obscurity. Her books are scarcely available and have never been translated into English or German. Maybe Sonja would be remembered if she had won her game against Vera Menchik in Buenos Aires along with the crown of Women’s World Champion.

It was Vera Menchik who served as the inspiration for women players worldwide: she was the first to be called the queen of women’s chess. The Vera Menchik cups are awarded to the winning women’s teams at the biennial Chess Olympiads.

Though Menchik lived and played mainly in England, because she was born in Moscow and spoke Russian, the Soviet Union decided to claim Vera as their own—a Soviet champion, both by birth and inclination. Mikhail Botvinnik, who won the first world title after World War II and was a patriotic Soviet, said of Vera: “This Czech woman playing under the English flag is in her essence…Russian.”

The focal point of post-war women’s chess was Moscow, where world championships were held in 1950, 1952, and 1955. In the first event, Ludmilla Rudenko (1904-1986), an economist and former swimming champion, won first place among sixteen participants. In 1952, Elizaveta Bykova (1913-1989) defeated Rudenko in a match for the title. Bykova lost the title to another Russian, Olga Rubtsova (1909-1994), in 1956, but regained her title in 1958. World Champion Elizaveta Bykova was chosen to write a biography of Vera Menchik to reflect glory onto the Soviet Union. Published in 1957, the book outlines the triumphs of Vera’s career. Bykova takes pains to claim Menchik as a Russian in an effort to extend the Russian champion tradition to the beginnings of professional women’s chess.

Bykova was born a peasant in the Russian village, Bolugubov, and was an ideal symbol for the intellectual victory of the working class. Bykova’s devotion to communism gives a propagandistic tone to her biography on Vera. Bykova dwells on Vera’s trip to Moscow, conjecturing that Menchik may have played badly in Moscow because she was awestruck by the utopian conditions. She quotes Menchik: “You couldn’t recognize the city—the change was too huge and great.” Menchik had loved to go to the theater as a young girl, and Bykova reports how Vera marveled at the improvements in the theaters: “What a pleasure to sit in a wonderful theater, to see a happy and content crowd, and remember that in 1919, I sat here shivering.” Later, Bykova has Menchik sum up her affections for her birthplace: “Nowhere but in the Soviet Union was equality achieved, not just formal, but material.” This comment seems inconsistent with Vera’s quote from British Chess Magazine: “The thing that struck me most about England was that people leave the milk bottles outside. In Russia, they would immediately be stolen.”

Menchik, who finished the 1935 Moscow tournament with an abysmal record (1.5-19), is quoted by Bykova: “In the West, a person who doesn’t succeed professionally is nobody. Despite all my failures I still feel warm attention here. This is only possible in the USSR.”

As Bykova does not mention the sources of her quotes (she was not present at the tournament), it is reasonable to question both their sincerity and veracity. Maybe the quotes are real, maybe they are entirely fabricated, but most likely the truth is somewhere in between. It is possible that Vera was interviewed while playing and was encouraged, or felt it polite, to speak well of the host country.

Despite Soviet women’s dominance in chess, Soviet authorities were not happy with the state of women’s chess. A paper published in 1953, “On the State of Chess Work in Physical Culture Organization and Means of Improving It,” stated, “The All-Union Committee considers the state of work in chess among women to be unsatisfactory. The number of women regularly playing chess is insignificant.”7

The Soviet authorities focused on the number of female participants, but British writer John Graham, author of Women in Chess, focused on the playing standard of the Soviet champions: “[Rudenko, Bykova, and Rubtsova] were curators of the title, making no strides toward equality.” Unlike Vera Menchik or Sonja Graf, the Soviet women rarely competed against men and did not raise the standard or rhetoric of women’s chess. The players who were to elevate women’s chess to the next level were from the USSR, but from farther south than anyone would have predicted.

3

Building a Dynasty:

The Women of Georgia

Georgian women have such difficult characters! They don’t ever listen to men.

— Georgian Master Variam Vepkhvishvili

It is two o’clock in the a.m., and five-time Women’s World Champion Georgian Nona Gaprindashvili has been at the blackjack table for hours, her dark eyes still focusing intently on the cards. It is the autumn of 2002, and the thirty-second biennial Olympiad is being held in Bled, Slovenia, a picturesque mountain resort town in the former Yugoslavia. Outside the casino in Bled, the view across Lake Bled is a stunning backdrop of a castle situated in mountains. During breaks from the tournament, chess players, coaches, and officials stroll the perimeter of Lake Bled, resplendent with turning leaves of autumn. Sixty-one-year-old Nona Gaprindashvili prefers the confines of the casino to the mountain scenery. “Fierce, strong, and obsessive,” said one fan. “For Nona it doesn’t matter what else is going on. She won’t stop, she’ll keep studying, keep throwing dice.”

Forty years earlier, Nona won her first world championship match, bringing her fame and unprecedented accolades, while galvanizing a women’s chess revolution in Georgia. Georgia, a small country with five million inhabitants, lies in the Caucasus Mountains on the southeastern shores of the Black Sea. The tiny Eurasian country dominated women’s chess for nearly thirty years, producing two world champions, winning three Olympiads, and training dozens of talented young girls to be masters.

Female chess talent in Georgia exploded in an environment where traditional values were the norm. Georgian women usually got married between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two. Rusudan Goletiani, the young Georgian women’s grandmaster now living in the U.S., tells me that, even today, “If you are a twenty-five-year-old girl in Georgia and not yet married, it is very strange.” Dowries of Georgian women included chess sets, because Georgian women were encouraged to play chess as a hobby. Gennady Zaitchik, a grandmaster from Georgia who now lives near Philadelphia, told me, “In Georgia it was the job of the man to do work and put bread on the table. It was good for women to cook, clean, and play chess at home.”

Nona Gaprindashvili was born in the spring of 1941 in Zugdidi, a small town near the Black Sea, where she grew up among five older brothers. Her intense brown eyes, dark hair, and strong features give her a confident presence that can be witnessed even in photographs of her as a young girl. Nona’s father taught her the rules of chess when she was five. In family tournaments her brothers beat her regularly, and it is likely that this youthful competition against male peers shaped her tough, fearless character and promoted her high standard of play. Karledazde, a renowned chess trainer visiting Zugdidi, spotted Nona’s talent immediately and persuaded her parents to allow their twelve-year-old daughter to move to the capital, Tbilisi, where she could live with her aunt and train with experienced coaches.

Throughout her teens, various Georgian grandmasters were called upon to instruct her. One of them, Gennady Zaitchik, describes how difficult it was to train her. “She wanted me to analyze some hopeless opening variation for hours. She was always so stubborn. She wouldn’t respect my opinion as a grandmaster.”

Nona Gaprindashvili (1982).

Nona’s competitive character was also witnessed by players: Nona had—and still has—a reputation as an ungracious loser. A talented young Georgian girl joked to me that she hoped not to be paired against Nona because she was afraid of an angry reaction if Nona were to lose. After a crucial victory against Nona, one British grandmaster told me that he’d made the mistake of complimenting Nona by mentioning that a friend of his had named his daughter in her honor. Unimpressed by this story, Nona walked off in an angry huff.

In 1961 Nona won the Women’s Candidates Tournament held in Vrnjacka Banja, a mountain town in the then Yugoslavia. With this victory, Nona earned the right to challenge the reigning World Champion, Russian Elizabeth Bykova. At the match held in Moscow one year later Nona was merciless. She amassed nine points to Bykova’s two—a landslide victory. Many players might have thrown a few draws in the mix, in order to rest a little and prepare for the next game, but this was not in Nona’s aggressive, fearless character. According to one of her fans, “Nona always plays for one result: Win.”

After winning her first world title, the young Nona became an instant celebrity in Georgia. Salo Flohr, a candidate for the world championship in the 1930s, described her return home: “Young and old, great and small, mobbed to see her, shake her hand, embrace her, and kiss her.”

John Graham, in Women in Chess, suggests that Nona’s reception “as a conquering hero” may have been partly rooted in patriotism piqued by regional racism. He writes that Georgians were often “the victim[s] of cruel ethnic jokes.” Georgian people tend to have dark complexions and strong features, like neighboring Armenian and Azerbaijani people. Their distinct looks have often incited racism from the mainland, where the blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned Russians were (and still are) the ideal of most. Estonian Grandmaster Jan Ehlvest joked in an interview that, above all qualities, he values “blonde hair and blue eyes.”1 In Moscow I witnessed two darker-skinned women from Central Republics being denied admission to a rock show. The girls were told that they were too drunk to enter, even though they looked and smelled perfectly sober to me. The swarthy Garry Kasparov, born in the Azerbaijani capital Baku, complained that “Russia is the most racist country in the world.”

During the sixties and seventies, as Nona was winning championships, national pride in the ancient country of Georgia was never greater. From 1921 until 1991, when Georgia was an official republic of the Soviet Union, the Georgian people studied Russian in school, but continued to speak Georgian, which has a thirty-three character alphabet and is a unique language unrelated to any other in the world. In 1978, massive public protests struck down Soviet attempts to establish Russian as the official language of the Republic of Georgia. More than being a woman champion or a Soviet champion, Nona Gaprindashvili was a Georgian champion.

Nona spent her twenties and thirties winning one world championship match after another, three in a row against Moscow-born Alla Kushnir, her major competitor at the time. By 1975 her influence on women’s chess in Georgia was at its peak. Her next challenger, Nana Alexandria, was another Georgian. Alexandria, born in 1952 in Tbilisi, worked with Karledazde, the same coach who had noticed the young Nona years earlier. The “in-house” world championship match thrilled the Georgian public. A perfumery even developed a scent—Nona and Nana—to celebrate the event. Patriotic camaraderie between the two combatants disappeared quickly over the board, where a brutal slugfest unfolded. Of the twelve games, Nona won eight; Nana, only three. There was just one draw. The final 8.5-3.5 score was a great triumph for Nona, who, at thirty-four, was at the top of her game.

Nona played rarely, but successfully, against male opposition. According to International Master Victor Frias, “Nona was the first woman who could sit down against anyone and play.” Nona’s most impressive result among men was in 1976 in a tournament held in Lone Pine, a mountain resort town in California. She tied for first, defeating four male grandmasters. Nona’s strength of character must have helped her endure unflattering comments, such as the one in The Lone Pine Bulletin that wrote Nona was “constructed more like a bricklayer than a woman.” In this unkind description is the implication that a real woman could not have won the tournament.

Despite such isolated sexist slurs, Nona was widely respected in the chess world as a pioneer in women’s chess. The FIDE congress, held in Buenos Aires in conjunction with the 1978 Olympiad, decided to award Nona the title of grandmaster based on her result in Lone Pine, her overall high level of play, and her sixteen-year reign as world champion. She was the first woman to hold this title, the most prestigious in chess, for which many players strive their entire lives. The decision to make her a grandmaster was not without controversy. Nona had not strictly met the requirements that would normally merit a grandmaster title. To become a grandmaster, a player must earn three norms, meaning that they have to perform over the 2600 level at three different events while maintaining an overall minimum rating of 2500. Grandmaster Pal Benko wrote at the time, “She is the only woman ever to have deserved it [the title]. It is regrettable that she did not earn the title in the regular way. In my opinion, this historic occasion should not have been allowed to carry even this slight tarnish.”2

The timing of Nona’s acquiring the GM title was bittersweet. Nona had just encountered the first major disappointment of her chess career, one from which she would never bounce back. In October of 1978, Nona was scheduled to defend her title against another Georgian, the seventeen-year-old Maya Chiburdanidze.

Maya learned chess from her eldest brother when she was a child of six or seven. She improved rapidly at her local club, catching the eye of Grandmaster Eduard Gufeld. Eduard played a few casual games with Maya and was immediately impressed by the focus and passion of the child: “Before me sat a girl of nine who was not in the least perturbed by an international grandmaster. I remember her resourcefulness, surprising for someone of her age, with which she tried to reorganize her reduced forces after she had lost a pawn in the middlegame. We played another game and it was clear that she had great natural chess talents and an all-absorbing love for our ancient game.”3 Between the opening (the first phase of the game in which the pieces are developed) and the endgame (where the material is reduced and the result often settled) is the middlegame. Professional players have usually spent countless hours studying their opening set-ups prior to the game and memorizing the most common endgames. Middlegames are the least theoretical phase of the game, where a player must rely on creativity, intuition, and calculating abilities.

Maya Chiburdanidze (1982).

Maya is often called the first prodigy of women’s chess. Prodigies are common to chess, math, and music, all abstract endeavors in which competence does not require adult experience. In chess, the energy of youth often balances the wisdom of older players. The young are also more likely to have the time and inclination to spend countless hours studying and weeks competing in tournaments.

When Maya was ten, her family moved to Tbilisi, where Maya would be able to improve her skills and face better competition. She played incessantly. As an eleven-year-old, she competed in twelve different week-long events in one year. The intensive training and playing program was effective. At just fifteen, Maya won the USSR championship, ahead of two former world-champion candidates (Kushnir and Alexandria). The victory was not only a remarkable achievement in itself, but also gave Maya the opportunity to challenge Nona two years later.

The World Championship match was held in Pitsunda, Georgia, a resort town on the coast of the Black Sea. Despite Chiburdanidze’s obvious talent, the experienced, determined Nona was still the favorite. Three tense draws began the match. In the fourth round, Maya won in thirty-four moves with the black pieces, punishing Nona harshly for an ineffective opening strategy followed by very poor middlegame decisions. Nona was shell-shocked. An energized Maya won the next game as well. In the latter half of the match, Nona narrowed Maya’s lead by winning three games to Maya’s two. In the final game Maya had the white pieces and needed only a draw to dethrone Nona. The course of the last round game could not have been more dramatic. Maya, under tremendous pressure, played too passively and Nona won a pawn and simplified into an endgame. After a ninety-four-move struggle, Nona was forced to yield a draw to Maya’s determined defensive fortress, bringing to an end the reign of Nona, de facto Queen of Georgia.

By defeating Nona, Maya became, at the age of seventeen, the youngest world champion in history, too young to fully understand her victory. One observer remarked, “Maya was pure genius. She just loved the game, but had no idea of the historical import of what she had done. After she won the match, she went to her room to play with dolls.”

There is no prototype for the temperament of a champion. Maya and Nona are very different from each other. While Nona’s energy emanates outward, Maya’s is more introspective, giving her a meditative glow. She is deeply religious. Like many Georgian Orthodox Christians, she often wears a headscarf. Romanian IM Corina Peptan admires Maya’s modest demeanor: “She is not concerned with her image, and prefers to stay in the corner. She is a star in chess, but she does not need or want attention.”

Maya Chiburdanidze, Erevan Olympiad (1996).

The personalities of the two women carry over into their chess styles. Nona is aggressive, even ruthless, while the mysterious Maya is patient and strategically minded. “You could never predict Maya’s moves” said one contemporary, “Nona—you could be sure she would choose the most aggressive option.” Nona pushed too hard in the Pitsunda match, and it was her hasty, overwrought decisions that cost her points. Judging from the style of the games, a master would surely guess that Maya was the veteran and the impetuous, aggressive Nona the youngster.

Maya defended her title four times. In 1981 she played against Nana Alexandria, who’d previously lost in the battle of the Georgians, Nana versus Nona. This time Alexandria played very well and managed to tie the match. But the rules state that in the case of a tie, the champion retains her title. Maya’s next successful defense was against Irina Levitina from Russia, who now lives in the United States and is a professional bridge player. With two rounds to go the women were even, then Maya rallied and won both games. Her third and fourth world-championship victories—in 1986 against Siberian Elena Akmilovskaya and in 1988 versus compatriot Nona Ioseliani—went more smoothly. Elena (now Donaldson) has dismal memories of her games against Maya. “When I first played Maya, I was fourteen years old and she was just a chubby little girl of eleven years old who stared at the ceiling for most of the game. But staring at the ceiling, she began to make spectacular moves and it became clear to me immediately that she was a genius. I could never get over this young loss to her, and my lifetime record against her has been horrendous. The match was a catastrophe.”

Maya’s own reign finally ended in 1991, in a surprise upset at the hands of the Chinese player Xie Jun. According to Maya, losing her world title made her hungry to reclaim it. In the past decade, she has come close, but failed to regain her title in six attempts.

Nona Gaprindashvili and Maya Chiburdanidze were the only two Georgian women to achieve the ultimate women’s title of World Champion. Nona and Maya inspired many players, and the Georgian women’s chess culture grew. Nana Alexandria and Nana Ioseliani both lost world championship matches by narrow margins. Although they never enjoyed the fame or success that Maya and Nona did, they helped to establish the great tradition and international reputation of women’s chess in the tiny country of Georgia.

Every two years players and fans look forward to the most prestigious chess team event, the Olympiad. The first Olympiad was held in London in 1927, but fielded only male teams, while women played individually in the first ever Women’s World Championship. Starting from 1957, the Women’s World Championship was organized separately, and women’s teams entered the Olympiad. Each participating nation selects four players for its women’s Olympic team, three of whom play at any given time while the fourth sits out.4 The team result is derived from the individuals’ combined records. Georgian women were selected most often for the Soviet team, but there were talented contenders from other parts of the USSR, including Elena Akmilovskaya, who played for the 1986 world title, losing to Maya.

Elena Donaldson, 2004 U.S. Championship. (Photo by Quinn Hubbard.)

Elena was born in Leningrad, in 1957. Although chess was not popular in Siberia, Elena’s mother, Lidia, was a strong player and taught her eight-year-old daughter the rules. Elena says, “My mom was everything in my chess development. We played blitz every day and I got mad when I lost.” When she turned twelve, Elena had the opportunity to be introduced to the wider chess community. Twice a year, the most talented young players in the USSR met in Moscow to spend a week at a special training academy, run by World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik. Among the students of the school was a future champion, Garry Kasparov, who later wrote glowingly of his experiences there. Elena’s own experience was abruptly interrupted. At the age of sixteen, she was not invited back, because of her recent mediocre results.

Temporarily disenchanted with chess, Elena turned her attention to her university studies, which were biophysics and mathematics. She did continue to play, however, and to her surprise, had a breakthrough tournament in the 1975 Soviet Women’s Championship. Elena gave up biophysics and math and switched to law in order to devote more time to studying and playing chess. “Chess never came easily to me. I always had to train very hard for good results.”

Elena’s renewed confidence and personal motivation gave her the strength she needed to confront the Georgians. To them, Elena was something of an outsider, and was not readily welcomed into their circle. At the Candidates Tournament in 1978, held in Tbilisi, the Georgians went to extraordinary lengths to slow Elena’s progress. A Georgian man, “incredibly gorgeous” by all accounts, showed up at the tournament. The man, Vladimir Petukhov, showered Elena with flowers and presents. Elena suspected he was a plant to distract her from her games, so that the Georgian women would prevail. “It may have been a distraction,” noted an observer, “but they fell in love and got married, and Elena ended up playing Maya for the world championship anyway, so it must have been a positive distraction!” Vladmir lived in Tbilisi. Elena transferred to the university there and married him. She divorced him in 1986 after seven years of marriage and one child, Dana.

At the time, another romanance was burgeoning for Elena, with American John Donaldson, an intelligent and affable international master from Seattle. They met at a tournament in 1985 in Cuba, where Elena was playing and John was coaching. Their contact should have been limited because of the scrutiny of the Soviet authorities; however, “As luck would have it,” John recalled, “Soviet security was very lax.” The two spoke cautiously about uncontroversial topics such as opening variations. “We felt severely constrained in saying what we wanted to say,” John explained. “We didn’t want to attract a lot of attention.”5

Elena and John continued to see each other at tournaments around the world. At the 1986 Olympiad in Dubai, they met at a disco every night. Their behavior was noted by the Soviet authorities, one of whom gave Elena an official censure for associating with a Westerner. Elena was warned that if it happened again, she would be barred from playing outside the Soviet Union.

In the 1988 Thessaloniki Olympiad, Elena’s romantic and professional ambitions were destined to collide. The Soviet team had to contend with a formidable Hungarian team’s rising stars: Susan, Judit, and Sofia Polgar. Maya Chiburdanidze was first-board on the Soviet squad, the sole Georgian on the team—the first time in years that the Soviet team was not dominated by Georgian women. The contest between the Hungarian and Soviet teams was tight throughout the event. Judit Polgar and Elena Donaldson were the high-scoring stars of their respective teams. With three rounds to go, both women were playing at the grandmaster level with staggering performance ratings of more than 2600. On the day of the eleventh round, Elena failed to appear for her game. That morning she left her team to elope with John Donaldson, who was there as captain of the United States team. American players cheered on the couple, and it became the fairy-tale story of the tournament. The darker side is that Elena did desert her team, a move that would likely be harshly criticized if it were made by a man. She had performed brilliantly, earning 8.5 points from nine games. In the final three rounds, the now-weakened Soviet team lost to Hungary by just half a point.

This loss was symbolic of the end of Soviet domination of women’s chess. Elena’s abrupt departure foreshadowed a great migration of Soviet players to various corners of the world, especially that of Russian Jews to the United States and Israel. Fifteen year later, remarried to IM Georgi Orlov and still living in Seattle, Elena continues to regret her decision to leave in the middle of the tournament: “I cried when I read the news that the Polgars ended up winning the gold medals. Now, it is clear that with the disintegration of the Soviet Union soon after the Thessaloniki Olympiad, I could have left the country easily without abandoning my team. But at the time, there were still KGB spies traveling with us, and I had no idea whether I would get another chance to escape the country.”

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, the economy in Georgia has suffered enormously as a result of corruption, damaged infrastructure, and an economy that relied heavily on imports from other Soviet republics. In 1994 the unemployment rate was estimated at 1.5 million, nearly half of the Georgian working-age population. As a result, one million Georgians, almost a fifth of the population, have emigrated. The situation for Georgian sportspeople, who were well supported under the Soviets, has also deteriorated, and among the one million émigrés are several prominent chessplayers. This exodus has naturally loosened Georgia’s stronghold in women’s chess. In the 1992, 1994, and 1996 Olympiads, the Polgar squad had dissolved, and Georgia won each Olympiad impressively—the same players who had dominated a decade earlier, including Maya and Nona, were still playing successfully. But countries such as China and Russia, with younger squads, were closing in on the Georgian dominance.

The economic problems in Georgia have resulted in the departure of some of the most talented young players—those who had fewer personal and professional roots in Georgia. Among those who emigrated are youth champions Tea Bosmoon-Lanchava and Rusudan Goletiani, who moved to Holland and the United States, respectively.

I have become friendly with Rusudan throughout our meetings as members of the U.S. Women’s Olympic Team. Rusudan calmly told me about her dramatic childhood. She grew up in Abkhazia, a region in northwest Georgia where civil war erupted in 1992. Tipped off by a KGB agent of the upcoming civil chaos, Rusa and her family fled the region for Tbilisi with only the clothes on their backs. “It was awful; the plane was crammed full of people and everyone was crying.” Rusudan was one of more than 200,000 ethnic Georgian refugees to flee from Abkhazia in the years 1992-1993. Rusa and her family slowly built up a life in Tbilisi, but making money in Georgia was difficult, and in 2000, Rusa jumped at a chance to move to the United States.

Rusudan Goletiani. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)

Friendly and magnetic, Rusudan had no problem fitting in New York, especially not in Brooklyn, where she first landed: “I was shocked to see how many Georgians are living in New York. When I first moved here to Brighton Beach, I would constantly hear people speaking Georgian.” Her heart is still in Georgia, but the economic situation keeps her in the United States. “Ever since the break-up of the Soviet Union, there has been no government support for chessplayers. So if you want any money to play in tournaments, you have to go to private sponsors and you have to self-promote, and this is not for me.” Rusudan sends a large part of her monthly take-home pay back to family and friends in Georgia: “I would rather that a friend has money for food than to have a new pair of jeans.”

Rusa began her life in the United States living in Coney Island and baby-sitting. When her English improved, she moved to Westchester, New York, where she now teaches chess. Goletiani makes in an hour what she could make in a month in Georgia by giving lessons in posh homes, but she does not feel that Americans respect chess. “In Georgia, if I was training for a tournament, the teacher would allow me to concentrate all my efforts on chess, but here in America nobody takes chess seriously. They see it just as a game, whereas for me it is like a small model of life—the middlegame in chess is like being middle-aged and you have to decide on the right plan.”

Tea Bosmoon-Lanchava is six years older than Rusa and shares Rusa’s ambivalence about leaving her beloved Georgia. Tea’s first years as a chessplayer were like those in a fairy tale. Her role model, Nona Gaprindashvili, discovered her at the age of nine when she was brought by her uncle to play against Nona in a simultaneous exhibition. Nona recognized Tea’s talent and instructed her parents that she should move to Tbilisi in order to train. Tea describes those days as the best of her life. “Nona and I would train for hours and she would tell me stories until I would look at the window and notice that it was getting dark. I would forget hunger, time, thirst.” Tea won two World Youth Championships for the Soviet Union. “I’m really nostalgic for the Soviet days. I was lucky to see the last days of how much support you could get as a Soviet sportsperson.” Now Tea lives in Holland with her husband and child; she still plays chess, insisting that she will never quit “because it is in my blood. Everyone is always asking me about how frequently I travel, when I have a husband and child. Sometimes I feel like telling them to shut up and allow me to live my life. I love chess and I can’t quit.”

Most of the older players have remained in Georgia, including Nona and Maya, who still enjoy celebrity status. Nona Gaprindashvili, now in her sixties, has lost a couple hundred rating points since her peak, but she keeps playing. She takes her games very seriously, and if she loses she still becomes visibly upset. At the 2003 European Women’s Championship in Istanbul, she would play Yahtzee for hours. I hung around the table watching her play for a while, hoping to ask her a few questions, but Nona was totally wrapped up in the dice.

In the 2002 Olympiad in Bled, Slovenia, the Georgian team was poised to recapture the gold medals, which had fallen into Chinese hands for the past four years. After ten rounds Georgia was ahead by three full points and, under normal conditions, would be able to glide gracefully into first place. But disaster struck. Ketevan Arakhamia had “never seen anything like it. It was as if nobody could win a single game.” The terrible performance of the Georgian women in the last few rounds left them off the podium, and allowed the Chinese to gain top honors for the third time in a row. Judging only by the Olympic team members, three of whom were over thirty-five, you’d think that Georgian women’s chess was a tradition of the past. In reality, Georgia is still producing many great talents, including the 2003 World Girls’ Champion, Nana Dzagnidze, along with Maia Lomineishvili and Ana Matnadze. These women, all in their teens and early twenties, often have to take backseats to the more experienced and higher-ranked Georgian women at the prestigious tournaments. But the energy of youth can trump higher ranking, especially at long and exhausting tournaments. Nino Gurieli, president of the Georgian Chess Federation and past member of winning Georgian women’s Olympic teams, is dedicated to promoting the younger generation: “The team that played in Bled was the Georgian women’s team of the twentieth century. From now on we need to support the team of the twentieth-first century.”

In the fall of 2003 I called Nana Alexandria, the former world championship candidate turned chess politician, who is fluent in English. She answered her phone in Georgia and, though courteous, was short with me. “Can’t talk now,” she said, “there is a revolution going on outside.”

In November 2003 the bloodless Revolution of Roses ousted president Eduard Shevardnadze, who had led Georgia since the Soviet era. He was replaced by opposition leader Mikheil Saakahsvili, a thirty-nine-year-old progressive. The next time I saw Rusudan Goletiani in New York, she was beaming. “All my friends and family are thrilled,” she said. Rusudan is cautious about predicting how Saakahsvili’s election will affect her future, but she hopes for political reforms that will allow her to return one day to Georgia, where both her family and her husband’s remain.

4

Be Like Judit!

When I first found out that the J in J. Polgar stood for Judit, I was so excited. I didn’t even know she was a woman, just that she smashed her opponents like mashed potatoes. After that, I put her games up on my bedroom wall.

— Linda Nangwale from Zambia

Nona’s successes and character influenced the younger women of Georgia, many of whom cite her as a role model. “It all just kept rolling after Nona won the title. She was the first, and many followed,” says Rusudan Goletiani. Nona’s fame was unprecedented: girls took up chess instead of enrolling in ballet school; fans would wait to greet Nona at the airport; people would stop her on the street for her autograph; many even named their girl children after her. A statue of Nona was erected in her hometown, Zugdidi. On her sixtieth birthday, the Georgian government awarded her two cars.

Stretching the limits of what was possible for Georgian women, Nona’s influence extended outside chess. “Nona began an intellectual revolution.” said Rusudan “She turned everything upside down. She was always beating men. If women could be good at chess, they could be good at anything. Nowadays Georgian women are more involved in politics, science, and art. They do not like to sit at home anymore. It used to be more common for women in Georgia to get married as young as seventeen or eighteen, but now they are encouraged to become professionals before getting married and starting a family.”

Rusudan Goletiani’s father used to show her newspaper clippings about Nona, Nana, and Maya, which she would read hoping “that one day I would become a great player myself!”

The stars of women’s chess in Georgia were particularly powerful role models because they were both accessible and exceptional. Georgian girls could read about them in dailies, meet them at exhibitions, or go to tournaments to watch them play. At the same time Georgian women were international heroes, breaking records and winning championships. Tea Bosmoon-Lanchava laments that trying to develop women’s chess in Holland is not easy because the girls do not have such national role models to follow.

When Linda Gilbert, a doctor in psychology, surveyed American chessplayers, she found that the most influential role models were accessible figures such as coaches, teachers, and parents. According to her study, when fathers were highly educated, only the sons excelled in chess, but when the mothers were highly educated, both girls and boys excelled. Whether the mothers were chessplayers made no difference. Successful mothers seemed to transfer their professional ambition to their daughters.

My own experience meshes with Gilbert’s findings. My father taught me the basic moves and rules of the game at an early age, later advising me on the intricacies. My mother’s role in my development as a chessplayer, though less direct, was just as crucial. She was a professor of chemistry (Dr. Solomon), an avid games-player, a skilled writer, and a gourmet cook. My mom always seemed to be excelling at three or four things at once, all the while having a great time. My mother once claimed that her birth year—1940—made her the perfect age to enjoy the sixties to their fullest. Still, she was more serious than many of her peers—despite participating in the protests and the parties she wanted a stable career and financial independence.

She never put too much direct pressure on me, but I understood from an early age that to her, succeeding in male-dominated endeavors, being independent, and having the means to be generous were important values. Still, there were things I rejected. The main point of contention between us was my more-relaxed view toward money and a stable future. The tension settled suddenly as my fame in the chess world increased. I appeared on the cover of chess magazines and was profiled in Smithsonian magazine. My mother, as well as many friends of the family and relatives, suddenly stopped asking me when I was planning to apply to law school. This delighted me, though I sensed it was based on a misconception that media recognition was lucrative—as if magazine spreads could be endorsed and cashed.

Asking interview subjects about role models is complicated because the concept of a role model is both semantic and deeply personal. When questioned about role models, many of the women I interviewed seemed uncomfortable with the idea and declined to name any. Rebuffed again and again, I began to see that role models to them carried with it a negative connotation, equivalent to idol worship. If I wanted answers, I needed to find a different way to ask my question. Almira Skripchenko had already denied having a role model, but when I asked her which women she admired, she had no problem coming up with tennis player Steffi Graf, philosopher Ayn Rand, and Grandmaster Judit Polgar.

The women who were willing to name a role model gave a diversity of answers, often choosing someone they had never met. Some cited men, such as Anna Hahn, who chose a fellow Latvian player, World Champion Mikhail Tal. Zhu Chen told me her role model was Wu Zeitan, the Chinese empress from the sixteenth century. There was only one person, a chessplayer, who was named again and again.

Hungarian Judit Polgar, the best woman player by a wide margin, has had a global impact that extends to girls from five continents. Ecuadorian Evelyn Moncayo said, “I have admired Judit since I was nine years old and saw her beating up on all the boys in the World Youth Championships in Wisconsin.” Judit made her realize she could compete against boys.

Irina Krush, like Evelyn, began her chess career at the time that Judit Polgar was cementing her position as one of the world’s best players, female or male. I remember a twelve-year-old Irina telling me once, “What I would give to be Judit Polgar, for just a day.” Recalling this declaration, I was surprised when in response to my question about role models, Irina understated Judit’s influence on her: “I admire Judit Polgar, but not in a different way than Karpov.” Perhaps Irina had honestly forgotten how she had once felt about Judit Polgar. Irina may also have realized that having Judit as her role model would interfere with her own ambition. Irina, on her way to becoming a world-class player, must only want to be Irina. Alexandra Kosteniuk, the young Russian grandmaster, articulated it best: “I have no heroes in chess. Maybe that’s because I want to become a hero myself.”

Free-spirited Bulgarian Grandmaster Antoaneta Stefanova cites no role models, although she does describe having a youthful fascination with Bobby Fischer, as did fans all over the world, especially young men. Fischer’s victorious match with Spassky in 1972 caused an enormous increase in the popularity of chess in the United States as the general public—not just chessplayers—eagerly awaited the results of their every game. Fischer became a symbol for the superiority of individualistic American ingenuity over systematic Soviet training methods. Fischer’s skills as well as his good looks and quirkiness were admired, while his poor manners and bizarre demands were accepted as part of the package that made him great. Fischer’s awesome feats in chess made it too easy to underestimate his early signs of madness. His descent from American hero into a raving, uncouth anti-Semite was chronicled by journalist Rene Chun in “Bobby Fischer’s Pathetic Endgame,” published in 2002 in The Atlantic Monthly. The danger in equating achievements with character is exemplified by Bobby Fischer; his worshipers were forced to shed their admiration for the man himself.

For women it is often problematic to have male role models, since the desire to be like a great man can easily be confused with the desire to be with a great man. As a teenager and rising chessplayer, I remember trying to distinguish between the two. At the time I found strong chess players sexy, but wrote in a journal that more than having crushes on them, I wanted to crush them!

Such paradoxes seem to abound in the chess world. Indian-born American chessplayer and coach Shernaz Kennedy was inspired by Bobby at a young age. The first book she picked up was Fischer’s My 60 Memorable Games, and she was immediately intrigued by his clear-cut victories and lucid writing style. She began to carry a picture of Fischer in her wallet. (At the time of writing, coincidentally, there is a photograph of artist and master chessplayer Marcel Duchamp in my wallet.) Later Shernaz even became a close friend and confidante of Fischer’s. Shernaz played competitively for years, until settling into her current job as a high-end chess coach. I met Shernaz, her arms overflowing with shopping bags from ritzy boutiques, at a café on Park Avenue. As we chatted over iced cappuccinos, raven-haired Shernaz joked to me: “When I was young, I only wanted to date guys who looked like Fischer!”

Many women chessplayers find the prospect of dating a player weaker than they unpalatable. “I would just as soon date someone from outside the chess world than a weaker player than I,” said Anna Hahn, who likes “men who are good at what they do.” Young German star Elisabeth Paehtz also told me she is attracted to strong chessplayers, though she would be reluctant to date anyone too good. “A player over 2700 is likely to be crazy!” she jokes.

There is nothing unusual about wanting to be with a man who is good at what he does. Elizabeth Vicary, a chess expert and coach from Brooklyn, has always been attracted to strong chessplayers and is unapologetic about it. “There must be some reason to be initially attracted to someone, and I admire people who are good at what they do. Liking someone for their chess strength is not as superficial as liking them for their appearance or money.” Elizabeth says chessplayers are often “intelligent, imaginative, and hard-working,” and also less likely to be “entranced by fame and money.”

In chess, the Elo rating system clearly delineates worth. Top British woman player Harriet Hunt says that very early she realized that her chess rating was an important part of who she was. Until recently the international rating system has assigned ratings that ranged from 2200 to 2800. In 2000 the system was amended, and international ratings, as they do in the United States Federation, go as low as 100. Rating denotes value to such a large extent that one grandmaster compared losing ten rating points at the top level to losing ten liters of blood. A high chess rating is a status symbol. Many people refer to opponents not by their names but by their ratings: “I am playing a 2250, or I lost to some 1500,” since the number becomes a more crucial mark of identity than a name. At the highest levels, names are obviously used, and no chessplayer would say, “I am paired against some 2700.” After all, there are fewer than twenty players rated over 2700, and part of the deal in becoming that strong is that you do get your name enshrined.

That the chess rating system presents value in such a stark, numerical way leads to some difficult questions for women. Does the desire to be with a strong man conflict with the desire for a woman to be strong herself? Is sleeping with someone who is a great player a consolation for not being a great player oneself? Elizabeth Vicary thinks that her own motivation was squashed, partly because as an attractive woman, she was already a star in the chess world. “As a young female 1900 in the chess world, I got so much attention—which seemed like respect—from all the best players that my incentives to improve were less. If I were a guy, the only way I could have gotten such attention would be to study all the time.” Proximity to greatness becomes a substitute for greatness itself.

There are countless examples of chess relationships in which a male grandmaster is with a talented, but weaker, partner: beginning with U.S. Women’s Champion Mona Karff and International Master Dr. Edward Lasker up to and including today’s couplings between elite Grandmaster Alexei Shirov (2730^1) and Victoria Cmilyte (2450), or the now-broken marriages between Almira Skripchenko (2500) and Joel Lautier (2700) and Alisa Galliamova (2500) and Vassily Ivanchuk (2750). And these are only the high-profile examples, where the talent in the relationship is phenomenal and the female players are chess stars in their own right. The tendency for women to choose the top male players is partly because of the skewed female/male ratio at chess tournaments—so few women play chess that they usually have a choice between many suitors. “Why not pick the strongest?” asked American player Diana Lanni. This phenomenon also occurs in less male-dominated subcultures. My mother, Sally Solomon, pointed out that at bridge tournaments—where the male-female ratio is far more balanced—“whenever you see a weaker woman player with a top man player, everyone begins to whisper that they are sleeping together. And most of the time they are!”

Victoria Cmilyte’s marriage with Alexei Shirov is the strongest and tallest union in chess history (both are over six feet tall). The two met at the 2000 Istanbul Olympiad in which Shirov was immediately taken in by the smiling, radiant woman. In the tournament, she won game after game, earning a gold medal on board one. At the time, she was only eighteen years old, and had already won the mixed Lithuanian Championship. She was one of the best young players in the world of either gender, and naturally she had already studied the games of Shirov, one of the most thrilling figures in modern chess, a brilliant tactician and fighter. (His book of games is titled Fire on Board.)

Cmilyte said that her initial attraction to Shirov was largely based on his stature in the chess world. However, she insists that after a few weeks something more “substantial” such as love is needed to sustain a relationship. A few weeks after meeting in Istanbul, Cmilyte and Shirov both played in the 2000 World Championship in New Delhi, India. Cmilyte got knocked out first, but she stayed on to support Shirov, who proposed to her during this tournament. A few months later, Cmilyte and Shirov were married and they soon had two children, Dmitri (2002) and Alexander (2004). I caught up with the young mother recently, who told me that she does not study chess too often with her husband, but he does help her at tournaments with her opening preparations. Still, it is clear when talking with Victoria that the focus in the family is on Alexei’s chess career: “It’s very hard to maintain his level at the top of the chess world.”

Men are sometimes also attracted to powerful and intelligent women. In the chess world there are examples of couples in which the strength of the players is equal, as in the marriage between Mohamad Al-Modiahki and Zhu Chen, both of whom are rated about 2500. Or the young couple Irina Krush and Pascal Charbonneau. The generally amiable International Master Almira Skripchenko was clearly annoyed when I asked her whether women had less incentive to get strong for fear of intimidating men. Attractive, charming, and confident, Almira has always received attention, but she does not believe that her chess strength detracts from this. “Guys are impressed by chess skill; it’s ridiculous to think they’d be turned off by it.”

Other women players maintain that men are intimidated by smart women. Olga Alexandrova, a grandmaster from Russia, ranked as the thirtieth woman in the world, declared in an interview that the worst thing about being professional women players is that “men are afraid of us!” When she meets a man, she keeps her profession secret for as long as possible. She finds it unusual for a man “to appreciate intelligence. . . there is a common stereotype that if a woman plays chess she is either abstruse or crazy.”2 This reminds me of an episode of Sex in the City where the powerful law partner Miranda, beautiful but luckless in love, guesses that her power as a law partner is intimidating men. So she starts lying to guys, telling them that she is a flight attendant. Lo and behold, their interest multiplies. Such anecdotes are supported by serious psychological studies, one of which showed that men found female geniuses to be unattractive.

Underlying such male fear of smart women is the ideal that men ought to hold the dominant role. The British Master Susan Arkell (now Lalic), who married an even stronger player, Grandmaster Keith Arkell, was asked by her compatriot Cathy Forbes if she wanted to become a stronger player than her husband. Susan responded, “How could a man still be a man after being beaten by his wife?” As outrageous as this quote is, in a way, it goes to the heart of how complex it can be for men to accept powerful women as role models or influences. It is common, on the other hand, for women to identify with the accomplishments of men, as the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir pointed out in The Second Sex. “[T]he adolescent girl wishes at first

to identify with males; when she gives that up, she then seeks to share in their masculinity by having one of them in love with her,” writes de Beauvoir. “Normally she is looking for a man who represents male superiority.”3

My intermingling feelings of envy of and desire for men became clear one Valentine’s Day, which I spent in my apartment with my friend Bonnie. Both of us were single at the time, and our intimate conversation eased the holiday’s shrill celebration of romance and happy couples. We stayed up late discussing relationships and drinking hot chocolate. We realized that we were both attracted most of all to the men who we might like to be. When encountering such a man, I often am cautious, fearing that my own identity and creativity will unravel, replaced by mere admiration for my lover’s brilliance. Realizing all this brings me solace when crushes don’t work out. I know that my desire for some particular man often masks a deeper urge to experience the world in another skin; preferably as a man as I am envious and curious about the more direct way men seem to approach life; ideally a super-talented man, with a high chess rating or fantastic prose style.

“Chess is so heteronormative,” said my friend Martha, upon learning that it is illegal for two Kings to rest on adjacent squares. Although Martha was joking, the sexual symbolism in chess is a rich topic. Chess is an intellectually intimate game in which two players sit for hours, both gazing at each other as well as at the chessboard. The erotic connotations of chessplay were at a peak in Medieval Europe, where Marilyn Yalom, author of Birth of the Chess Queen, points out, “The Queen sent out vibrations that were responsible for sexualizing the playing field.” In a chapter on “Chess and the Cult of Love,” Yalom describes an engraving of a chessgame from a fifteenth-century text: “The chess match was considered sufficient to tell prospective readers that the poems would be about love.” Yalom despondently concludes that today the romantic aspects of chess have mostly faded. There are still remnants of a more sexy chess. At a cocktail party I met a woman who told me she shunned chess as a child, but recently took up the game after she realized that it was a great way to meet guys “who aren’t stupid!” An ironic scene in Austin Powers II: The Spy Who Shagged Me depicts chess as erotica. In it, dopey spy comedian Austin Powers sits down to play chess with a buxom, barely clad opponent. The competition quickly turns to foreplay, with chess pieces used as props.

A common charge is that women chessplayers often win against stronger male opponents, because men are distracted during the play. In one case, a man from Australia who lost to a young woman complained to organizers and journalists that her low-cut shirt had distracted him and caused him to lose.4 But an attractive opponent can also inspire great play, as one male chessplayer confided in me: “Guys play better against women, because they want to impress them.” My own motivation spikes when I play against men I admire or find attractive. I find it fun to play against someone I like, and therefore I work harder at the board. At the 1999 World Girls’ Championship held in the capital of Armenia, Yerevan, I realized that I could also experience heightened concentration against women I admire.

Armenia borders Georgia, and the people of Armenia share the strong features, ancient history, and patriotic fervor of the Georgians. Irina Krush and I were roommates at the championship, both representing the United States. The conditions at the tournament ranged from shabby to grand. The food, often inedible, caused many players to lose ten pounds at the event. (Even with heartier fare, it is typical for chessplayers to slim down at events; playing is a physical strain, and nerves contribute to long stretches of fasting.) Irina and I subsisted on bread and fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, eschewing the daily mystery meats. We slept on tiny beds with stiff mattresses in rooms with a kind of exotic post-communist charm. Our balconies did open onto Yerevan’s central square, an inspirational setting reminiscent of James Bond movies.

The tournament itself began with a dramatic upset on board one, in which Greek player Maria Kouvatsou was paired against top-seeded Rusudan Goletiani, then playing for Georgia. After Maria sacrificed two pawns in the opening, Rusudan was unable to shield herself from Maria’s onslaught. She resigned, still not castled. Charged by this first-round victory, Maria steam-rolled through the rest of the field, beating four players over 2200. Not in the top half of the field, Maria was expected to lose more games than she won. She hadn’t planned to play in the tournament, but when she went to the Greek Federation to inform them of her decision to cancel, there was no one at the office. “I took this as a sign that I should play.”

The movie-like narrative of Maria’s charge drew me in; it was hard for me to stop looking at this hip woman from Athens, who wore a nose ring and stylish outfits in bright colors. She had a nearly sublime focus while playing. Her long hair tucked behind her ears, she placed her hands on her temples and stared at the board, immobile for hours.

In the last round, I was paired against Maria. I had no chance of winning the tournament myself, but if I beat her, there was a possibility that my roommate, Irina Krush, would tie for first and earn a medal. I traveled to Yerevan right in the middle of a semester at NYU, and sometimes I found it hard to focus on the chess; while playing my thoughts would drift to the possibility of drug legalization or existentialist literature. I had no such problems in concentrating against Kouvatsou. I became aware before the game of a certain amount of attraction that I felt toward Maria. I thought she was beautiful and cool and I wanted to impress her. This newfound clarity allowed me to play my best. I did win, in my best game of the tournament. Maria still won the tournament on tiebreak. In the end, I tied for fifth place, just a half a point out of the four-way tie for first, which did include Irina Krush.

There is a wide range of ways for a woman to react to another powerful woman in the same field. The range can span everything from accepting her as a role model to feeling envy or even to feeling attraction. Too often, the admiration of one girl for another is completely displaced by jealousy. A heterosexual woman ought to be able to recognize and embrace the feelings of respect, admiration, and even attraction for a female peer. And the complicated admiration that a woman can have for a man is too often displaced by attraction. It should be possible to be attracted to and competitive with a great man—to want to be with him and to beat him. Judith Butler, gender theorist, says, “Desire and identification can coexist.” I would add that they should, and if we are aware of this peaceful coexistence, sexual relations will improve.

The first time I saw my childhood idol, Judit Polgar, in person is imprinted on my memory. As a teenager I read voraciously about the Polgars and played through all of Judit’s major tournament games. Her style even influenced my choice of openings—I switched from the relatively restrained c3 Sicilian to the riskiest lines of the Open Sicilian, as championed by Judit.

I was spending a couple of days in Holland, where Judit was playing in an elite grandmaster event. Sightseeing would wait for another trip. I traveled to Tilburg, an hour away from Amsterdam, to the world-class event Judit was playing in, where she was the only woman among twelve men. That day she was playing a strong Dutch Grandmaster, Jereon Piket, and I studied how she looked at the board with a focused but calm gaze. In the post-mortem, she joked around and assertively waved away a smoker. After the analysis, a friend introduced me to Judit, who was friendly, though she declined to join us for dinner, explaining that she was tired and wanted to study for her game the next day. This disappointed me, but I also admired her decisiveness. In the next few years, I realized how hard it can sometimes be, especially for a woman, to say no when asked to join friends for parties or socializing.

I didn’t need to know Judit personally—she was already very powerful to me. Since I didn’t know her, my image of her reflected what I wanted to be just as much as it reflected what she was actually like, which is perhaps the essence of a role model.

5

Bringing Up Grandmasters:

The Polgar Sisters

From Greek mythology to fairy tales to Chekhov all the way up to Sherwood Schwartz and Woody Allen, Western culture has evoked sisters times three to personify the forces that bewitch and buffet humankind.

— Melissa Morrison in Bitch magazine

Whenever Garry Kasparov, the top-ranked man in the world since 1980, plays Judit Polgar, the top-ranked woman in the world since 1988, the crowd is transfixed. Garry, with his good looks and confident swagger, fits into his glamorous Armani suits as easily as he fits into his larger-than-life role as the best chessplayer ever. Judit stands just over five feet tall, and—aside from her fiery red hair—her appearance is understated; she is possessed of a calm presence both on and off the board. The drama of the war of the sexes is heightened by Kasparov’s outrageous remarks. “Chess is a mixture of sport, psychological warfare, science, and art,” he said to the Times of London in 2002. He continued, “When you look at all these components, man dominates. Every single component of chess belongs to the areas of male domination.”

The two stars were paired in Moscow in a 2002 match featuring Russia Against the Rest of the World. Judit, as always, opened with her King pawn. Garry chose the Berlin defense, a solid system that usually results in a trade of Queens on move seven. It was a surprising choice for Garry, who prefers complicated positions with the Queens on the board. Moreover, he had recently been defeated by the Berlin system when Vladimir Kramnik used it in their 2002 world-championship match, ending Kasparov’s fifteen-year-long world reign. Judit Polgar tends to be even more aggressive than Kasparov, favoring the most violent variations in nearly every opening. “In analysis, I will sometimes suggest to Judit to trade Queens and she will look at me and chant ‘no, no, no,’” recalls her trainer, Polish Grandmaster Bartek Macieja. “She knows she will have more chances to trick her opponent with Queens on the board.” Talk of Judit’s aggressive style can be misleading. She is a world-class player who often wins in long, strategic battles, or in the endgame. Trading Queens against the Berlin defense is, according to theory, the only challenging option. So Judit did just that, calmly maintaining her advantage. In a cool performance, she dominated the play throughout the entire game, forcing Kasparov’s resignation on move forty-two.

This was Garry’s first loss to a woman, and the first time that the strongest woman in the world defeated the strongest man. It was a monumental encounter, moving the once-hypothetical notion that a female could become world champion one step closer to reality. The milestone, many might argue, could have been reached nearly a decade earlier when Judit played Garry for the first time in a game marred by controversy.

Their first contest was in 1993 in Linares, Spain, where the strongest players in the world meet each year for a round-robin tournament. Judit, who was seventeen at the time, had the white pieces against Kasparov. He replied energetically to her opening and was able to establish a strong position. Just when he was about to finish off the game, Kasparov picked up his Knight and placed it on c5, a losing square. Noticing that this move would be a grave error, Garry lifted the Knight and put it elsewhere. The question would arise as to whether he had taken his hand off the piece. Judit said nothing at the time, and Kasparov won the game. Afterward Judit said that she believed Kasparov might have let go of the Knight on the fatal square. If so, according to the strictly enforced “touch-move” rule, he would be forced to leave it there. After examining the videotapes of the match, it was clear that Kasparov did, if only for a fraction of a second, take his hand off the piece. If Garry had realized that he had released the piece, he was morally obliged to abide by the rules. On the other hand, Judit should have reacted when it happened. It is unorthodox to make a claim once a game has been completed and lost. Nevertheless, Judit was furious with Kasparov, accosting him at the end of the tournament, asking, “How could you do this to me?” For two years Judit and Garry did not speak to each other.

After this loss, Judit dropped eight more games to Kasparov, including a heartbreaking one in which she lost a drawn endgame. She had only a Rook, to Kasparov’s Rook and Knight, which theoretically is a dead-draw. But Judit was in time pressure, meaning that she had to play several moves in a short time period, sharply increasing the chance that she would make a mistake. Kasparov did trick her, reeling in yet another win.

Judit’s victory in Moscow was long overdue. When I asked her about beating Kasparov, she recognized that “it was a historic moment,” but she was not very enthusiastic about the game, saying “it didn’t feel so special to win, because besides that game, I had a terrible tournament.” Judit’s response to her landmark victory was characteristically low-key. Busy studying chess and working on her game, she prefers to leave the discussion of her accomplishments to fans and journalists.

Before the Polgars arrived on the scene, male chauvinism in chess circles was more widespread and virulent. “The Polgar sisters changed everything,” says master Ivona Jezierska, originally from Poland, who played women’s chess both pre- and post-Polgar. “I am so grateful for what they did.” Judit, along with her two older sisters, Sofia and Susan, was responsible for altering the course of women’s progress in chess. The old questions “Could women ever be grandmasters?” or “Could women defeat the best players in the world?” were dismissed by Judit Polgar’s success. New questions took their place: “In general, can women be as good as men?” or “Will a woman ever be world champion?”

Laszlo Polgar was determined to turn his children into geniuses, a project he planned before they were born. In Bring Up Genius!, he maintains that with dedication, any parent can raise a genius, writing, “It is much easier to blame differences in ability on inheritance than to investigate the intricate social roots.” Laszlo was also convinced that girls, if raised shielded from sexist cultural biases, could achieve at the same level as men.

Susan, Judit, Sofia

Sofia, Susan, Judit

Judit, Sofia, Susan. (Photos courtesy Susan Polgar.)

Laszlo married a fellow teacher, Klara Alberger, a union that would eventually produce three daughters. Fortunately for him, Klara was willing to be part of her husband’s experiment. All the members of the Polgar family would function as a single unit with Laszlo as the mastermind, and his children the flesh-and-blood subjects.

The Polgars’ first child, Susan, found a chess set in an old rusted trunk in 1972 when she was three. The little girl was immediately attracted to the game, mesmerized by the pieces and the stories her father told about them as he taught her the rules. Although he himself was not a skilled player, Laszlo, who had always loved chess, was thrilled by Susan’s interest in the game. Just half a year later at the age of four, she won her first tournament, the Budapest Girls’ Under 11 Championship, with an astonishing 10-0 score. “I was just a little munchkin. I had to sit on pillows to reach the chessboard.”1 Recognizing her potential, Laszlo began to organize an intensive chess-training program for her. Six-year-old Susan devoted time to an alternate intellectual course, advanced math. Laszlo thought she could be a prodigy in either area, but wanted her to choose between the two. “It was an easy decision,” she now recalls: “I hated math.” After abandoning math, she began to devote twice as much time to chess, studying it for six to eight hours a day.

She progressed rapidly and became the strongest girl in Hungary when she was only twelve years old, making her eligible to represent her country in international youth competitions. Susan traveled to the West in 1981 when she played in the World Girls’ Under 16 Championship in England. Years later Susan vividly remembers her first impressions of the West: “It was amazing to be in London. Nowadays you can get anything anywhere, but then, the variety of goods and services was astonishing in comparison to Communist Hungary.” Not that the family could afford to buy much at that time. The Polgars were not well off, so Klara and Susan were traveling on a tight budget.

Susan, who was only twelve, won the gold medal with five wins and two draws. In retrospect, Susan sees this victory as a crucial moment of her career: “The name Susan Polgar would now be a name to be reckoned with.”2

One of Susan’s draws in England was against American player Baraka Shabazz, the first African-American to represent the United States internationally. Unlike Susan, whose tournament in England was at the start of an illustrious career, this was destined to be Baraka’s final international foray.

Baraka’s father, like Susan’s, pushed her to study chess for long hours, sometimes from seven in the morning until late at night. The entire Shabazz family moved from Alaska to San Francisco so that Baraka could train with the best coaches. Her father’s control over his daughter was even more intense than that of Laszlo Polgar. One coach reports that after asking Baraka if she wanted something to eat, she replied, “If I accept, my father would be very angry.” Baraka got some media attention for her successes, including a lengthy profile in the Los Angeles Times. Her father predicted in the article that exhibitions, books, and tournament prizes would make their whole family rich—he even envisioned a Baraka doll. Baraka did become an expert—the category just before master, the first African-American woman to do so. She faded from the game before becoming a master, maybe burnt out from the pressure brought by her father. In contrast to the inspirational chronicle of the Polgars, the short-lived career of Baraka Shabazz is a cautionary tale. Excessively pushy parents are likely to guide their children not to greatness but into early retirement. Why wasn’t this so with the Polgars? It may have been because of the genuine love that was shared within the family, the girls’ quick successes and financial rewards, as well as the deep passion the girls had for the game itself.

By July of 1984 the name Susan Polgar appeared at the top of the ratings list for women. Susan at fifteen was already higher ranked than the world champion, Maya Chiburdanidze. Susan was ready to play stronger opposition and made it clear that she wanted to compete against the best men. In the fall of 1984 she was awarded the prestigious international master title, becoming the youngest woman ever to receive it. “At this time in my career, it felt as though the sky was the limit,” said Susan.

Susan’s appearance fees, prize money, and endorsements significantly improved the economic status of the family. They moved out of their one-room flat in Budapest into a much larger apartment. Laszlo and Klara quit their teaching jobs to concentrate on training Susan and her sisters, Sofia and Judit, who were born in 1974 and 1976. From their experiences with Susan, Laszlo and Klara had gained invaluable knowledge.

Although his daughters were able to beat him quite easily, Laszlo’s role in their training was integral. Laszlo could now afford to hire trainers to coach the girls. He made sure that the girls had access to all the best books and latest periodicals. He laboriously collected and organized games from all over the world—a task that today would take minutes with an Internet connection.

The Polgar routine was rigorous and structured. They awoke at six and started the day with three hours of table tennis. The sisters were home-schooled by Laszlo and Klara, who were using their savings to support the girls’ full-time education. Laszlo warns that school is “very dangerous for talented children because leveling out happens at a low standard.”3 Glad to have escaped the daily grind of the classroom, middle sister Sofia says, “To go to school is a major waste of time. You could study a textbook for a year that it is possible to read and absorb in a week or two.” The parents made sure to cover subjects outside chess, compiling very full daily schedules, including the study of many languages: English, Russian, Spanish, and Esperanto. Laszlo was a supporter of the Esperanto movement, whose goal was to unite post-war Europe with a common language. There are only one million Esperanto speakers today, among them Laszlo, Susan, and Klara. In the afternoon and evening they spent up to eight hours on chess. There was even a designated block of time for telling jokes.

Defending himself against the many critics who have accused Laszlo of robbing his daughters of normal lives, he says, “They did have a real childhood, because they are not building sand castles, but real castles, castles of knowledge.”4 When questioned about her structured upbringing, Susan answers with a balanced view. “My sisters and I traveled to forty countries and had the chance to see things that most children could only read about in National Geographic. On the other hand, we missed out on doing some of the typical things that young people do, like going to the movies or hanging out with friends.” When I ask Susan what she regrets missing in particular, she seems at first to have trouble finding the words, then simply replies, “Goofing off!”

Susan’s battles were not with her parents. From a very young age she had disagreements with the Hungarian Chess Federation, which thought that she should play in the Hungarian Women’s Championship in order to prove herself as a top woman player. Susan refused, worried that playing against weaker opposition would be a waste of time and an impediment to her progress. She thought that the only way to earn her own grandmaster title was a steady diet of male grandmaster opponents. As punishment, she was barred from playing in tournaments in the West for the three years between 1982-85. Susan complained that this “crippled my career at a time when I had peak interest.”

When the ban on traveling was finally lifted, Susan and Sofia went to the United States with their mother, Klara, to play in the 1985 New York Open. From the start Susan fell in love with the city: “I used to sit on the subway and marvel that each person was a different color. That kind of diversity was unheard of in Communist Hungary. I knew I really wanted to live in New York City.” Susan’s wanderlust, evident from her first trips to London and New York, combined with her rocky history with the Hungarian authorities, foreshadowed the move that would come a decade later.

Even more painful for Susan than the ban on traveling was the ratings fiasco of 1986. FIDE made a controversial decision to increase the ratings of all female players by 100 points. The thinking behind this strange move was that the ratings of women were kept artificially low since they played only amongst themselves. Adding the rating points was thought to be an appropriate countermeasure. Since Susan, at this point, played exclusively against men, FIDE refused to add the points to her rating, making her the only woman who did not reap the benefits of the bonus points. As a result, Susan lost her first-place ranking among women: Maya Chiburdanidze leap-frogged over her. Susan told me, “I was heartbroken. My parents always taught me that in chess, if I study and work harder than my opponents, I would beat them. It felt like good results were not enough anymore. I got really depressed.”

While Susan was fighting the chess bureaucracy, younger sisters Sofia and Judit were being intensively trained to follow in her footsteps. In 1986 when Susan returned to play in the New York Open, her younger sisters accompanied her. Their results were incredible. Ten-year-old Judit won the unrated section with 7.5/8, while Sofia tied for first in a reserve section. In the following year they returned to New York, where both Sofia and Judit defeated their first grandmasters. Judit’s strength was particularly impressive, drawing glowing praise from the British daily The Guardian: “She is the best eleven-year-old of either sex in the entire history of chess.”

The threesome was a sensation. Here were three sisters who were possibly the strongest women players in the world. The Hungarian public and the chess world wanted the Polgars to prove themselves against the mighty Soviets, who until then had been resting on their laurels, unchallenged as the top women players.

The Polgars abandoned their usual refusal to compete in women’s events by accepting an invitation to play in the 1988 Olympiad in Thessaloniki, an old port city in Greece, enclosed on one side by the sea and on the other by mountains. American Grandmaster Larry Christiansen describes rough conditions in Thessaloniki: “The traffic noise outside our hotel extended to the early hours. The playing hall was utterly smoke-filled and the restrooms were primitive. Pollution was bad.” Still, Larry says the players had a great time, at after-game parties concentrated in a bustling hotel in the downtown. The Polgars did not socialize at all, devoting their free days and evenings to preparation. I asked Susan if her father forbade his daughters from going to the big dance held before a free day. “It was not recommended,” she said.

The Hungarian team was composed of Susan, nineteen; Judit, twelve; Sofia, fourteen; and Idliko Madl, eighteen, another promising junior player. The Olympiad competition is structured according to the Swiss system, in which teams are paired in the first round based on ratings. If there are ten players, the first-ranked would play the sixth-ranked, the second would play the seventh-ranked, and so on. Starting from the second round, teams with the same scores play one another.

Top teams such as the Soviets and the Hungarians tend to be paired near the middle of the tournament. This time they were paired together in the fifth round, dubbed by the tournament bulletins as “The Clash of the Amazons.” In the three games of the round, Judit and Susan both drew and Madl won (Sofia sat out), giving Hungary a crucial 2-1 victory over the Soviets. But it wasn’t over. Teams can only play each other one time, meaning that the winner of the entire event hinged on which team routed their opposition more harshly in the final rounds.

Twelve-year-old Judit finished with 12.5 points out of 13, the half coming from her draw in the Soviet match. The way she won her games was just as memorable as her awesome score. Her quick seventeen-move victory against the Bulgarian player, Pavlina Angelova, introduced the world to Judit’s inspired style, which featured graceful development, a subtle Bishop sacrifice, followed by a Queen sacrifice that forced her opponent’s King into an inescapable trap. The game was over: it was checkmate. Judit’s style was already becoming legendary. Just winning was not enough for her—she had to tear her opponents to pieces.

It was this tournament in which Elena Akmilovskaya made her sudden unannounced departure to marry John Donaldson, paving the way for a Hungarian triumph. The young squad composed of teenagers and preteens broke Soviet dominance of women’s Olympiads, which dated back to the inception of the events in 1957. “We were euphoric,” says Susan.

The chess world was impressed, while the Hungarian press hailed the Polgars as national heroines. Susan recalls how “the victory changed our lives completely.” Judit said, “Everybody now wants to help us who before were against us.” Judit sarcastically mocks these fair-weather friends. “Oh, yes, you are very nice.”5

Two years later the Polgars attended the 1990 Olympiad in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, hoping to repeat their gold-medal performances. This time the three Polgars played on the top three boards: Susan, first; Judit, second; and Sofia, third; with Idliko Madl as the reserve player. The Polgars had improved in the past two years, but so had the Soviet squad. Women’s World Champion Chiburdanidze was joined by former champion Nona Gaprindihasvilli along with two younger players, Russian Alisa Galliamova and Georgian Ketevan Arakhamia. The crucial match between Hungary and the Soviets did not go well for the Polgars—Judit and Sofia both lost, while Susan managed to narrow the margin to 2-1 by defeating Chiburdanidze on the first board.

The final rounds decided the contest, just as they had in Thessaloniki. This time the Soviet and Hungarian teams had accumulated the same number of points. The gold medals would have to be determined by the first tiebreak, the strength of their respective fields, which would be judged by adding up and comparing the results of all the teams Russia and Hungary had played throughout the event. The Polgars won by a hair. The medal for the top performance rating in the Olympiad went to Georgian Ketevan Arakhamia, whose spectacular score of 12-0 exceeded Judit Polgar’s 10-2—not a bad result for anyone, but with Judit’s astronomical FIDE rating of 2555 her fans expected even more.

After the Novi Sad Olympiad, the three girls never again played together as a team. Judit, in fact, never played in another women’s tournament. The paths of sisters Sofia, Susan, and Judit were about to diverge, both geographically and professionally.

Her sisters overshadowed middle child Sofia, sandwiched between pioneer Susan and prodigy Judit. She became less focused on chess and more interested in exploring life outside of chess. Although Sofia generally had the lowest rating in the family, she had no shortage of talent. An old trainer wrote, “I believe Sofia had a comparable talent [to Judit] and with some luck in the mid-eighties she might have had a similarly astonishing career.”6 When she was fourteen years old, Sofia had the result of a lifetime in an open tournament in Rome. Out of the nine rounds, Sofia won eight games and drew the last. Five of her opponents were grandmasters, and seven had higher ratings than Sofia, whose rating was 2295 at the time. This was one of the best performances of all time, enough not only for her to win the tournament ahead of top grandmasters, but strong enough to earn her the first of three norms required for the title of grandmaster. Her success caught the attention of the chess press—one headline screamed, “Super Sofia! Third Polgar sister lashes out in Rome.”

Over a decade later I asked Sofia about Rome. “It was a great performance on the heels of our victory of Thessaloniki, and my interest in chess was then at its peak,” Sofia recalled. “At the same time, my result in Rome was difficult to live up to, and it may have been too much, too soon.” Sofia’s triumph in Rome was to be her one and only great result. She never came closer to becoming a grandmaster. She grew out of her status as a child prodigy, and was uninterested in continuing her career by playing in women’s tournaments. Her level was not quite high enough to compete with the top male players.

Sofia met her future husband, Yona Kosashvili, a grandmaster and also a medical doctor, at a chess tournament. They married and moved to Tel Aviv, Israel. That Sofia, who was interested in so many things besides chess, married “someone involved with chess at all” was a surprise to older sister Susan. Living so far from both of her sisters and her beloved hometown was difficult for Sofia. “I miss Budapest, the architecture, and my own language. And most of all, I miss being together with my family.”

Sofia has never felt resentful or unhappy about her chess position in her family. Her other interests are important to her; she studies interior design and has a love for art and literature. Her favorites are Vincent Van Gogh and Czech writer Milan Kundera. “In other fields, just like in chess,” says Sofia, “women have not been allowed to rise to the top because of cultural constraints.” There is only one woman whom she truly admires: “I don’t really have any female role models besides Judit. When growing up, our parents taught us to believe in ourselves.” When I ask her if she is a feminist, she replies, “I am just an average woman of the twentieth-first century. I have my feminist ideas, but I also want to stay at home with my children as much as possible.”

The intensity and talent with which Judit approaches the game has made her unquestionably the greatest female chessplayer in history, so far ahead of any other woman in chess (her rating is between 150 and 200 points higher) that she has not even played one game against a woman in six years. “My attitude toward the game, especially in my youth,” Judit tells me, “could be called obsessive.” Her childhood was decorated with unprecedented achievements. In the same year that she scorched Thessaloniki, Judit became the youngest player of either gender to gain an international master norm. Also in 1988 Judit became the first girl to win a mixed world competition, the so-called Boys’ Under 12 Championship in Romania. And 1988 was only a typical year.

Judit Polgar, age 11, playing in the top section of the 1988 New York Open. (Photos by Gwen Feldman.)

As a preteen Judit began her quest for the highest title in chess, grandmaster. She was racing to break Fischer’s record in acquiring the grandmaster title at fifteen years and eight months. It seemed as if Judit was on track. A twelve-year-old Judit scored her first GM norm at the start of 1989, in Amsterdam, Holland, causing a sensation in the chess-crazed nation: “Polgaritis conquers Holland,” wrote Hans Kottman, a reporter for New In Chess, going on to describe Judit’s conduct at the board: “She smilingly rattled off deeply calculated variations, leaving her male opponents quite embarrassed with the situation.” Almost two years later, after many near misses, Judit scored her second norm in a round-robin tournament in Vienna. Judit had only one major tournament in which to score her last norm and break Bobby’s record: the 1991 Hungarian championship.

Both Judit and Susan played in the nine-round all-play-all national competition. Judit began the event with three draws: the first against her sister Susan—who performed well in the event, placing third—and the second and third against two veteran grandmasters of Hungarian chess—Portisch and Adorjan. Portisch’s irritating remark that “a woman world champion would be against nature”7 may have provided the additional and necessary motivation for Judit. Portisch realized that he was old-fashioned, pointing out that people once thought that no man would ever walk on the moon. However, a female chess champion, he said, would be an even less-likely circumstance.

In the second half of the tournament, Judit was unstoppable. At her level, having the first move was an enormous advantage, and in rounds four and six, she used the white pieces to devastating effect. Her opponents helped her by choosing very tactical opening variations, turning the games into the mad melees in which Judit was brilliant. By the last round, Judit had five points out of eight and was in a fantastic position.

A draw would clinch her the grandmaster title, but a win would earn her the title of Hungarian Champion. Would Judit play a quiet line in order to secure the draw or would she go for the tournament victory as well? She played the most uncompromising line imaginable. Navigating through the thicket of variations, Judit emerged from the scramble into a winning endgame. Her opponent, International Master Tibor

Tolnai, was twice her age. He resigned on move forty-eight: Bobby Fischer’s record was shattered. Judit became the first woman to win a national championship, and only the fourth women to gain the GM title.

Judit’s list of accomplishments started to read like a laundry list, as British master and chess journalist Cathy Forbes points out: “Reports of the Polgar sisters’ successes, at first astonishing, began in time to sound like a litany—repetitive and predictable….the repetitive refrain, symbolized by stark numeric scores, was only success.”8

After gaining the grandmaster title, Judit improved even more and advanced into the elite group of players rated over 2600. This score of players, the roster of which changes from year to year, now always includes Judit. For her, chess is a lucrative profession in which she battles the top men in the world in well-sponsored round-robin tournaments and rapid events in glamorous locations such as Aruba, Monte Carlo, and Buenos Aires. Judit is always in demand—she is the only woman in the world able to hold her own against the world elite. Judit’s presence ensures peak media interest, and her single-appearance fee is about $10,000.

Judit’s first success in a high-profile “super” tournament was in Madrid in 1994. She placed first in a strong field that included Latvian Alexei Shirov and Russians Evgeny Bareev and Sergei Tiviakov, all world-class players. New In Chess described her victims as “lamentable figures reminiscent of the gloomiest Goya pictures,” to which Judit added, “I am now eighteen and they behave as though they lost to a little girl.”9

Judit continues to try for more tournament victories. When I congratulated her on all her recent successes, she, like a true champion, reacted with customary dissatisfaction: “True, my rating has gone up, but it’s been ages since I won a tournament!”

Judit is notoriously reluctant to agree to interviews, so I was pleased that she had time to meet me for a one-hour interview. I took a cab to the greenest and most posh neighborhood in Budapest and walked up two flights to Judit’s immaculately decorated apartment, which she shares with her tall, dark, and handsome veterinarian husband, Dr. Gusztav Font. She met her husband when she took her dog to his office; he recognized her and asked her out for a game of tennis. Among the decorations in Judit’s apartment are a fine collection of chess sets and a tiger-skin rug. I inquired about her veterinarian husband’s feelings about the rug, and Judit replied with a laugh, saying, “Oh, this is not his work. Don’t worry.” The two got married in Budapest in August 2000. Since then Judit has achieved some of her career milestones, beating Kasparov and breaking the 2700 rating for the first time. Judit, at the start of 2004, was ranked eighth in the world—a new height for her.

Judit credits her recent achievements to her happy marriage. “My husband supports me and works part-time so that he can travel with me to tournaments. You can even see that my playing style has changed. My life is more stable, and my play is more solid. Before I would sacrifice and lose a point, where now I would relax and make a draw.” Judit, especially in her youth, has been famous for her ruthless, verging on the reckless, attacks. But for her to compete with the world elite, it is necessary that she have a more universal style. “When I was younger, people would say my style was too aggressive, and I just didn’t understand what they were talking about!” That her victory over Kasparov was an endgame, where technique takes precedence over attack, is symbolic of her more balanced style.

Of the three sisters, Judit is the one who responds most negatively when I ask if she’s a feminist. “I’m not a feminist!” However, she has her own definition of the word: “In America I hear stories about women getting angry at men for holding the door for them or buying them dinner. I think women have the same mental capabilities as men, but I still like it when a man treats a woman as a man should treat a woman.”

When I ask her about future plans, Judit continues in the traditionalist vein. “Right now I care more about family than career.” Drinking tea with her on that Tuesday morning, it struck me that Judit resents the idea of being a symbol for feminism, or any other cause. Her cool manner and traditional opinions disappointed me—I was hoping that Judit would be more bombastic about her own accomplishments and more vocal in her support of other women in chess. She says, “I’ve been playing chess since I was a little girl and I have achieved so much. There is nothing new for me in the chess world. Being in a serious relationship is new and excites me more. I will continue playing chess, but I am not putting any timeframe on when I will have a child, regardless of how it affects my career.” The ordinary and the extraordinary have been flipped for Judit, who had been trained from infancy to aspire to dazzling heights in the chess world. The very goals Judit strove so hard to achieve have now, with their attainment, become banal.

Throughout the interview Judit asks me questions about my thoughts on feminism and my experiences in Budapest. Even after years of being interviewed, she is still uncomfortable with the format, and would prefer just to have a conversation. As soon as the interview is over, Judit’s guarded posture and diction morph into those of a friendlier person. Because I am a chessplayer and a member of her sister Susan’s training team, Judit likes me and wants to chat, but she is clearly suspicious of my journalistic intentions.

Judit has been hounded by the press for as long as she can remember. This has resulted in a lifelong distaste for fame. When I asked her about the plusses and minuses of celebrity, she disregarded the first half of the question: “When I was younger, it was particularly unpleasant. I would walk around and people would be pointing at me and whispering, but they wouldn’t even approach me and introduce themselves—just point.” The Polgar family is notorious for its mercantilist nature. Judit often charges reporters for interviews—from which I was happily exempt—at rates as high as $2,000. Recently, though, Judit has been giving many interviews for free, especially to chess-related reporters.

The custom of charging journalists for interviews was Laszlo’s idea—and certainly one that made many people less sympathetic to the girls. Reputable magazines and newspapers rarely pay subjects, since it would create an atmosphere for auctioning off celebrity interviews to the highest bidder. As a result, the media coverage of the Polgars, though prolific, has not been so far-reaching or as deep as it could have been. Some journalists have had to use comments from others about the Polgars or reprint quotes from other sources. A typical scenario occurred at the World Youth Championship in Wisconsin, in which Judit played and won the Under 16 division. A woman filming a documentary called Chess Kids was denied an interview and had to resort to using a voice-over of a printed quote from Judit.

Besides making money, Laszlo probably did this to shield his daughters from an onslaught from the media. After all, if Judit accepted every interview and TV spot she was offered, she would have little time to work on her game. In contrast to Judit, who claims to extract little pleasure from her fame, Susan has mixed feelings. Susan reveled in the international recognition she and her sisters received after winning gold in Thessaloniki. Highlights included a trip to the White House and a spot in a commercial for O.P.T., the biggest bank in Hungary. When the press threatened to swallow up too much of their time, Susan says, “Laszlo was very good at pulling us away.”

The Polgars have always been sensitive about their public image, and the entire family was disturbed by an unauthorized biography,

The Polgar Sisters: Training or Genius (1992), written by Cathy Forbes. To this day, Susan refuses to autograph copies of the book. Laszlo said, “The book strives to portray us in a negative light,” a summary that in my opinion, is untrue. The ethical standards, however, are fair to critique—Cathy often quotes anonymously or from unreliable sources. (She describes an incident in which Judit and Susan are chatting in the bathroom—as heard from a woman eavesdropping in a stall.) She did not attempt to contact the Polgars themselves for interviews or fact-checking. In her own defense, Cathy says she didn’t believe that the Polgars would consent to interviews, adding, “Any book which tries to be interesting and truthful is bound to offend a lot of people.”

I met Cathy at a café in Selfridges, the historic department store in London, to discuss her views on women in chess and the criticism of her book. Selfridges was the same place where, in 1926, handsome Cuban World Champion Jose Capablanca gave a simultaneous exhibition to thirty-six women.

Despite its historical import, Selfridges is an inconvenient meeting spot, since there are several cafés in the department store, and when I finally did find Cathy I was more than half an hour late and frazzled. She calmed me immediately with friendly greetings. Cathy was extremely well put together, with neat red hair and small features. I marveled as Cathy consumed cappuccino after cappuccino while explaining her views. Cathy quotes intellectuals in casual conversation, a habit that might smack of pretension if it weren’t for her passion. Such writers as Germaine Greer, Naomi Wolf, Sammer Ashani, and Oscar Wilde all came up as we chatted. “I always memorize a few quotes from the books I love.” Cathy has been removed from the chess world for some years. The controversy over The Polgar Sisters wounded her and she prefers to talk about other subjects, such as literature, politics, and London.

When I do get her to speak about her book, Cathy intimates that she took the criticism of her book to heart, and is nearly in tears when she tells me that she “regrets deeply not trying to contact the girls,” adding that she “didn’t have a thick enough skin to accept the harsh reviews.” She says, “I was twenty-two when I wrote it. Such a young biography is bound to tell more about the writer than the subjects, and upon reading my own work today I see myself more than I see the Polgars.” Indeed, on the last page of the book, Cathy, a competitive player herself, writes, “I respect and envy—yes, envy—their achievements…and have sometimes wondered whether I could have…been brought up in the same disciplined way.” Cathy concludes that her “lazy freedom has always been so dear to me!”10

Cathy’s thoughts have become even clearer in retrospect. After our interview, Cathy wrote me a letter:

My book rather clumsily attempts to express the tension between a positive feminist response to the sisters’ achievements on the one hand and unease on the other at the personal and ethical price of those achievements. The Polgars seemed to me to belong to the type of people who are interesting primarily in what they do rather than in terms of who they are. Oscar Wilde, my hero of creative individualism, was the opposite type; he put ‘all [his] genius into [his] life, and only [his] talent into [his] works.’ His friends felt that his conversation was more brilliant than his writing, and the dramatic tragedy and pathos of his life is more moving and fascinating than his fiction or his plays. The genius of the Polgars, however, is to be found in their chess, not in their personalities. I instinctively felt profoundly disappointed by the apparent completeness of their compliance with the parental project. Ideally, a female chess grandmaster, to have a more lasting feminist role-model value, should be more self-invented.

Cathy still believes that the Polgars have had a positive impact inside and outside the chess world, and is aware that her expectations going into her research and writing were quite high, confessing, “I wrote the book because I wanted to be them.”

At the start of 1986 Susan Polgar was the highest-ranked woman in the world, her name at the top of the list published by FIDE. She had won the women’s grandmaster title and the girls’ junior competitions. Eager to compete with men, seventeen-year-old Susan tried to enter the Boys’ Under 20 Championship. The Hungarian Federation refused to send her. They argued that since boys were not permitted to play in the girls’ sections, girls ought not to play in boys’ sections. At the time, all of the most prestigious tournaments on the chess calendar were strictly divided by gender into separate sections—women against women and men against men. Included in these was the most prestigious of them all, the World Championship, for which Susan should have qualified when she tied for second in the 1986 Hungarian Championship. Once again, the Hungarian Federation refused to send her. She was bitterly disappointed—devastated. “How would you feel if you were invited to the big dance and never got to go?”

Susan went to war with FIDE and her federation, battling for the right to play against men. ans campaigned on her behalf, writing letters and organizing Polgar supporters. She won on paper during the 1986 FIDE Congress, when the name of the World Men’s Championship was changed to the Absolute Championship. Women could play in either the traditional women’s event or, if—like Susan—they were qualified to play against the stronger competition, in the absolute championship. The problem was that the national federation of each country decided who would go, and the president of the Hungarian Chess Federation had a bad relationship with the Polgars, and did not want Susan to play against men.

Finally in 1988, the FIDE president at the time, Florencio Campomanes, intervened. He demanded that the Hungarian Federation begin to nominate Susan and her sisters for absolute titles. That year in Adelaide, Australia, Susan was finally permitted to play among her young male peers. She placed a respectable eighth in a strong field of fifty-two players.

Susan was the first woman to challenge the gender divisions in international chess tournaments. She set the precedent. Women’s tournaments still exist, but it is now commonplace to see a handful of women playing in the “men’s Olympiad,” or in the boys’ sections at the World Junior Championships. Susan and her followers, who compete and succeed in tournaments once comprised solely of men, threaten the fundamental assumption upon which the segregated structure was based—the one that implies that men are stronger than women.

Susan was the first woman to become a grandmaster in the customary way. (Nona and Maya, the first two female grandmasters, were awarded the title on the basis of their world championship titles and high standard of play.) After years of near misses, Susan’s third and final norm came in 1990 in Salamanca, Spain. She told me that “it was a joy to finally win the grandmaster title.” Then, as if to dispel any notion that she might have been worried about winning it, she added, “There was no doubt in my mind I would achieve it.”

Susan made history as a teenaged chess prodigy. She led the women’s rating list and fought to give women the right to compete with men. All her accomplishments, though, paled in comparison to her younger sister’s meteoric rise to the top. When Susan was just nineteen, her twelve-year-old sister, Judit, had a rating that exceeded hers, which must have been painful for Susan. We were talking about Judit’s play in a recent tournament in Budapest when I detected a hint of resentment: “I am proud to have paved the way for my sister Judit. By the time she came onto the international chess scene, I had already fought and won many battles.” After I remarked that Judit must be very grateful for this, Susan pauses before saying cryptically, “Yes. You would think she’d be grateful.” In a recent interview for New In Chess, Judit acknowledged what her sister went through: “It was clear to me from a very early age that I was the lucky one. Whenever someone was against my father’s ideas, she [Susan] would be the first to hurt.”

Susan has not improved substantially since becoming a grandmaster. In 1992, she decided to make a comeback by going all out to win the Women’s World Championship. Laszlo was dead set against this, believing that the separation of women and men in chess was unnecessary and insulting. Daughter Sofia echoed her father’s strong opinion: “I have always hated the idea of separate women’s tournaments. It is like admitting that we are weaker than men.” Judit, for whom women’s tournaments were never very important, was somewhat less critical. She said, “I have only played in three women’s tournaments in my life,” adding wryly, “I’m not a big fan of them.”

Susan, however, had much to gain from playing in the Women’s World Championship. Changing her mind dramatically on segregated women’s tournaments, she now saw them as a way to encourage more girls and women to play and improve. “I came to realize that for an average girl, who did not have the support I had, there is much more resistance from both society in general and the male-dominated chess world. My father always believed that I should shoot for the ultimate and not play for women’s titles. But I was determined to play because I knew that the title would give me the respect from the press I needed in order to promote chess fully.”

Susan had to undergo a grueling qualifying cycle to determine who would challenge the current World Champion, Xie Jun from China. After the final qualifier the two women left standing were Susan Polgar and Georgian Nana Ioseliani. Nana, often overshadowed by her countrywomen Nona and Maya, is a great player, and like Susan has a composed, commanding presence. The two would meet in Monte Carlo for the right to play the champion.

Rated 100 points higher than Nana, Susan was the heavy favorite in the match. Living up to her ranking, Susan got off to an early lead (3.5-1.5), scoring three wins and a draw in the first five games. Unfazed, Ioseliani began to climb back into the match. She won the sixth game, and Susan’s lead narrowed to a single point. By the final game, Nana could tie the match with a win. She traded Queens early, hoping to squeeze a full point out of a slight endgame advantage. Susan’s nerves got the better of her, while Nana, calmly and coolly, managed to exploit her advantage and eke out a win.

The match was tied, the winner to be decided by a series of tiebreaks. After three mini-matches, Susan and Nana were still deadlocked. At that point a bizarre FIDE rule came into play: If, after twelve games, a tie has not been broken, the match can be decided by the drawing of lots. To no one’s surprise, Susan was opposed to the unorthodox tiebreak. FIDE also agreed that the rule was unfair. If

Susan and Nana both consented, the tie could be broken by more usual methods. However, Nana, who must have understood that she was the weaker player, took the shameless but understandable position that she preferred a fifty percent chance by drawing lots.

An absurdly complicated ceremony was staged to determine the winner. First, a Mrs. Van Oosterom, wife of the organizer, picking between two envelopes, pulled out the one that read “Nana Ioseliani.” Then, Ioseliani chose between two more envelopes. The paper inside that one read “Susan Polgar.” Then Susan was asked to pick between two boxes offered by the arbiter. If she selected the gold coin, she would be the new champion. When she opened her box, Susan’s heart dropped. Inside was a silver coin. “My eyesight was blackened for a few seconds, I thought I was fainting. The meaning was clear: You are second.”11 In her entire career, Susan could recall no more disappointing moment. Nona went on to lose to Xie Jun in the Women’s World Championship match.

While all of this was taking place, Susan was reeling from another type of heartache. Julio Granda Zuniga, her muscular, square-jawed, Peruvian lover, was in Monaco to accompany and assist her. Julio is a free-spirited grandmaster who is considered to be one of the most talented players in the world. He walks around with an air of sublime confidence. Based in Peru and isolated from a community of strong players, Julio has always managed to keep pace with the top players, relying on his talent and energy more than on detailed theoretical knowledge. In Monaco, Julio had made up his mind to end his relationship with Susan, but had not yet told Susan. She guessed that something was amiss because of Julio’s uncharacteristically cold behavior. Later Susan discovered just how removed the real Julio was from his free-spirited chess persona: he had a wife and two children back in Peru!

After the fiasco against Ioseliani, Susan was more determined than ever to compete at the next Women’s World Championship in two years. Once again she made it to the semi-finals, where she would face an even more formidable Georgian opponent, former World Champion Maya Chiburdanidze, who was hoping to avenge her 1991 loss to Xie Jun. This time Susan had the support of her sister Judit, who trained her especially for the cycle. After seeing how disappointed Susan had been to lose to Nana, Judit “was determined to do anything I could to help Susan.” In the match against Chiburdanidze, Susan was victorious, taking her one step closer to the championship.

The match against Xie Jun was held in Jaen, a small town in the mountains of northern Spain. The first game was a comedy of errors for Susan. With the white pieces she overextended her position, squandered her opening advantage, and later miscalculated, giving Xie Jun a winning endgame. Susan regained her composure with draws in the next two games, followed by a win with the black pieces in the fourth. The match was tied at 2-2. At this point Susan was ready to unleash her secret weapon. Throughout her chessplaying career she had almost always^12 started her game with white by moving her Queen pawn two squares (d4), one of the two leading ways to open the game. Beginning with d4 tends to lead to slower, more strategic battles, while the slightly more popular alternative, e4 (moving the King’s pawn), results in more tactical games. Judit and Sofia have always been e4 players, while Susan was loyal to d4. Most professional players stick to one or the other, because there are dozens of ways to respond to either, all of which must be studied in detail and require experience to master.

For the first time in her career in this crucial game, Susan opened with e4, a radical switch for a professional player in any game, let alone a game of such importance. Xie Jun was shocked. She could have had no inkling that Susan would do such a thing, and probably spent little or no time preparing for King pawn openings. Xie lost the game in just twenty-five moves. Susan’s brave opening strategy delivered a psychological blow to her opponent. Xie Jun was never able to regain her ground and Susan won the match easily, with a lopsided score of 8.5-4.5.

Susan was accompanied in Spain by two people who loved and supported her: her sister Judit and her new husband, Jacob Shutzman. In 1994 in New York, Susan had been introduced to Jacob by his brother, a chess fan. The couple had such a good time in New York that Jacob went to Hungary to visit her, where they fell in love. Susan was thrilled to start a new life in New York City, where Jacob had moved from Israel to work as a computer consultant. “I think one of the reasons I loved New York so much more than my sisters,” she explained, “is because I subconsciously wanted to get out of Europe, having bad memories from my past relationships with FIDE and the Hungarian Chess Federation.”

Jacob and Susan worked together on various projects, including starting a chess school in Queens, the Polgar Chess Center, and co-writing The Queen of the Kings [sic] Game, which chronicles Susan’s career. The book was the first account of the lives of the Polgars told from the inside, but it does not do Susan or her family justice. In addition to being poorly written—Jacob Shutzman, who was responsible for the writing, is clearly not in full command of the English language—the book details Susan’s struggles more than her accomplishments, which creates an extremely bitter tone. That Susan was prevented from reaching her full potential is emphasized. Various perceived enemies, from Nana Ioseliani to members of the Hungarian Federation, are harshly treated. The book is now a source of embarrassment for Susan, who blames Shutzman for its quality; she swears that after all the copies are sold, there will be no more printed. She promises that her next book, Breaking Through, to be written with current business partner Paul Truong, will be much better.

Susan and Jacob are no longer together. After a few years of blissful marriage they began to quarrel. The emotional tumult of September 11 intensified their problems, making their fights increasingly urgent and more frequent. By the end of 2001, the pair had split. Disagreements over finances and custody of their two children, Tommy and Leeam, are ongoing. The break-up was not peaceful, leaving Susan disillusioned with romance itself. “Well, I’m still happy to live in New York, although I’m no longer thrilled about my reason for moving here.” When I asked Susan whether it is better to date within or outside the chess world, she responds cynically, “Either way leaves very low chances for success.”

Susan has not played in a serious competition since her victory against Xie Jun in 1996. An invitation to defend her title was issued to Susan in 1999 only months in advance of the scheduled match. At the time, Susan was pregnant. “FIDE refused my request for a reasonable and proper delay,” writes Susan. “I was illegally stripped of my title.” Motherhood, like menstruation, is often cited as an explanation for the less-frequent participation, and decreased enthusiasm, of women in competitive chess. In one U.S. championship, three-time champion Angelina Belakovskaya dropped out unexpectedly. She needed to rush home and breast-feed her baby. Another U.S. championship participant, Shernaz Kennedy, dealt with her problem in a more imaginative manner—she express-mailed her breast milk home from a tournament in California to New York.

In a recent encounter of my own, motherhood was cited as a possible obstacle to my future success as a writer. In negotiating a possible book, I was told, “I’m not sure if you plan to continue with your writing and chess careers or if you intend to just pop out a couple of babies.”

Not all agree that motherhood is an impediment to chess results. Young Lithuanian mother and top woman player Victoria Cmilyte was asked in a press conference, “What do you think of the Russian saying that each baby takes off fifty points from your rating?” Cmilyte responded, “I think each baby adds fifty points to a woman’s rating! Motherhood is such a stimulating experience for a woman.” Later, she explained that being a mother was so demanding, that it instilled discipline. In comparison, preparing and playing chess was easy.

Despite the upbeat comments of women like Cmilyte, the reality is that motherhood in many societies leaves women with the bulk of the childcare responsibilities, often interfering with any leisure time—especially interfering with the time needed for highly focused and demanding activities such as chess. Some chess couples with young children take turns playing in tournaments. A practical solution to encourage the participation of mothers would be to make childcare available at tournaments. Susan believes that the schedule for Women’s World Championships should be announced and set at least a year in advance, so women can make plans based on this.

Now a mother of two, Susan expressed to me that her interest in chess will never be as intense as it was when she was in her twenties. Susan, who competed in the 2004 Olympiad in Mallorca, told me that the main reason for her comeback was not to reach new chess heights, but to promote chess in America. Indeed, despite going out of her way to organize the training sessions, Susan is virtually inactive. The only time she has played in public was in a tournament in Oklahoma in which the whole Olympic team played against local players. Since the members of the team did not play each other, Susan’s rating was far higher than any of her opponents’. From her demeanor one would have thought that she was competing for the world championship. She was deadly serious, rarely getting up from the board. Susan won her first six games, as expected, but in the seventh she drew a player with a rating 500 points lower than hers. Susan, playing with the black pieces, used her prepared double King pawn opening, but was frustrated by her opponent’s unambitious opening strategy—he took few risks and she had few chances to win. Afterward, Susan was clearly upset about the draw, wondering if she should have chosen a more double-edged opening strategy.

Our Dream Team training sessions have given me the opportunity to spend time with Susan. Despite her formal demeanor, her love for chess is evident: she always comments on the beauty of surprising finishes or subtle finesses. During meals and breaks, Susan is a gracious conversationalist. Choosing her words carefully, she asks questions of all of us about our favorite cities and our current projects. Her reactions are so consistent—she rarely displays anger, joy, boredom, or excitement—that is difficult to tell whether she is enjoying herself. Sometimes, she seems lonely. Susan spends most of her time with her children and her manager, Paul Truong, a hyper Vietnamese-American businessman, who says he never sleeps “more than three hours a night.” She does not seem to know many other people in New York. Paul and Susan have such a close business relationship that many in the chess world have taken to calling the pair “Trulgar.” Susan does not hide the fact that Paul assists her with her writing projects, such as her columns for Chess Life and ChessCafe.com, along with her books. When I get e-mails from “Susan,” they are peppered with smiley faces and exuberant exclamations, which is typical for Paul, but totally incongruous for Susan. Such a shared Internet and literary persona makes it hard to determine what Susan is really like.

Sometimes I wonder if Susan would like to break out of her conservative persona. “I rarely drink,” she once told me. “Sometimes I have a glass of wine, but I never finish it.” The one time I did see Susan lose control made an impression that remains with me today. On lunch break at a training session, the Dream Team was treated to a sumptuous buffet. Its crowning glory was a magnificent dessert spread—flan, triple chocolate mousse, and a selection of fancy Italian pastries. We all started out by choosing and eating one. It was obvious that we all wanted to sample more, but no one wanted to go first. “Let’s repeat moves,” someone said, then, furthering the play on chess lingo, said, “how about three-move repetition?” Finding this absolutely hilarious, Susan began to laugh so hard she doubled over. She went on laughing for several minutes, which was totally unexpected from this otherwise perfectly composed woman.

A devoted ambassador of chess, Susan promotes the game all year long, giving simultaneous exhibitions and book-signings at National Scholastic tournaments, working on writing projects, and organizing Dream Team sessions. Her new attitude toward separate girls’ tournaments has led to the founding of a “Susan Polgar Tournament for Girls”—a yearly invitation-only event, the first edition of which was held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the summer of 2004. Thirty-four girls arrived in Florida to represent their states. The winner, sixteen-year-old Roza Eynullayeva, was from Massachusetts. The response to the event was overwhelmingly positive. Ohio representative Emily Nicholas called it “the best tournament I have ever been to” and said “meeting Susan Polgar made me feel important. She really made us feel like she cared about us and that she wanted us to keep playing chess.” Stephanie Hueng from Florida called it a “a flawless blend of chess and girls. Over the board, girls were archrivals, yet, after the game, complete strangers from coast to coast went out shopping together, and ‘girl talk’ was plentiful.” The Virginia representative, Ettie Nikolova, said the Polgar tournament was “the first time in my life where girls were not only excited about chess, but also advanced enough to play good games.”

During the summer of 2004 as Susan was promoting chess in America, her youngest sister, Judit, was in Budapest. Judit was taking a break from her own inspirational trail blazing. Judit Polgar was the only female invitee out of 120 players to the 2004 World Championship, held in June in Tripoli, Libya. She declined to participate. Her first child, a boy, Oliver, was born in August 2004. “You never know when I will show up again, but I will come back.”

6

Women Only!

Winning feels good. Winning feels to me like catching a one 100-pound fish feels to a fisherman.

— Chess-in-the-Schools student, after winning a big trophy in the 2004 Girls’ Nationals

When I moved to New York City in 1998, I got a job at Chess-in-the-Schools, a New York non-profit that hires chess instructors for schools in inner-city neighborhoods. In 2001, CIS selected me to lead a program called Girls’ Academy. Invitations were sent to the strongest girls from CIS schools all over the city, most of which are located in Bronx, Brooklyn, and Upper Manhattan. One Sunday a month, at the CIS headquarters in midtown, I met with about twenty girls, ranging in age from nine to thirteen.

Beginning and intermediate chess books, with few exceptions, feature the games of male players. To redress this, I included women’s games in each of my girls’ academy lessons, starting with one of my favorite brilliancies played by Judit Polgar. In addition to presenting role models, I wanted the girls to have fun, because then they are likely to continue with chess. During Girls’ Academy sessions, the girls had time to chat and play casual games. Friendships formed.

All Girls’ Nationals, Chicago 2004. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)

Chess tournaments are social occasions for kids, especially when they get to stay in hotels. After their rounds, they stay up late watching movies, playing blitz and pranks. Elevators, ice machines, and sneakers are all fertile ground for mischief. If a child is one of the only girls, she can be left out of the fun. For instance, at a summer chess camp, one girl, due to a strict policy preempting romance, was barred from hanging out at the after-lesson pizza and blitz sessions held in the boys’ dorm. There were not enough girls for her to form similar chess parties, so she had little fun at the event.

In May of 2004, I went as a coach with ten of my Girls’ Academy students to the first ever All Girls’ Nationals. The event was held in Chicago, in the Adler Planetarium right beside Lake Michigan. Between rounds, girls could race along the shore of the lake, photograph the Chicago skyline, or look through solar telescopes. The event was organized and publicized on short notice, but there was great support for it, from coaches, organizers, and the players. One of my students, Laura Edgard, was excited to participate, despite being a tomboy used to playing boys. Laura is one of the most determined students I have encountered. Before the first round of a crucial tournament I had asked Laura how she felt about her chances, and she looked me straight in the eye and declared, “I’ll bring back their heads.” In Chicago, Laura told me it was “fun for a change” to hang out and play against girls.

My students all had a great time at the event—they appreciated the beautiful tournament site, the games, and a side trip to the top of the Sears Tower. But what made these competitive girls the happiest was that we had to take an extra taxi to the airport to carry all the trophies they had won. I was not surprised by their success, because they were higher rated than most of their opposition, and New York kids tend to do well in national tournaments, partly because they get a lot of practice in strong local competitions.

Susan Polgar helped organize the Chicago tournament and was in attendance throughout. She played a simultaneous exhibition, signed books, had photographs taken with each prizewinner, and even played casual games between rounds with some of the players. This was all from a woman who grew up with a chess worldview that rejected women-only events. The divergent opinions in the Polgar family mirror those in the debate in the chess world about segregated women’s tournaments, titles, training, and prizes. The debate resembles a discussion of affirmative action, where one side argues that incentives are necessary to encourage the paltry percentage of female participants, and the other contends that these incentives are condescending and will ultimately stunt the development of female players. Those outside the chess world wonder why women and men ever play separately, since they see the world of chess as a unique arena in which men and women should be able to compete on equal terms. In the United States there are few separate women’s tournaments. The Chicago event was the first and largest of its kind.

The first-ever international women’s tournament was held in 1897 in London. At the time, critics of the event worried that “the players would collapse with nervous strain at having to play two rounds a day for ten days.”1 Thirty years later, also in London, the first Women’s World Championship was won by Vera Menchik. Once thought of as progressive, women’s tournaments are now controversial for the opposite reason. Separating women and men is antiquated, said British master and writer Cathy Forbes, who thinks that many women are ashamed to play in segregated events. “A feminist chessplayer is faced with a dilemma. Her belief in the equality between men and women does not mesh with her decision to participate in separate tournaments.” Ultimately, Cathy believes that women’s tournaments are detrimental to women’s progress in chess. This, according to Cathy, is because men are motivated to work harder, since they do not have the “soft options” of playing in weaker tournaments, and winning qualified championships and prizes. Almira Skripchenko, the 2001 European women’s champion, also feels that “separate tournaments hold women back, because in order to play at the level of a strong man, it is necessary to play strong male grandmasters. The best method,” Almira says, “is to have prizes and titles that serve as incentives for strong women to improve and keep playing, but to hold the tournaments co-ed.” Almira believes that in order for women’s chess to progress, women ought to get the best of both worlds—the money for being top female players as well as tough competition against men.

My own occasional participation in women’s tournaments used to make me feel uncomfortable, even embarrassed. I enjoyed the competitions, the traveling, and the prize money, yet I could not reconcile playing in women’s events with my feminist views. As I have become involved in writing this book, my attitude has changed. I have stopped thinking about such events as less than the events with men and started to think of them as a way to meet and compete with female colleagues. I reframed the question that I am often confronted with: “If women are as strong as men, why would they ever play separately?” to “Why might women enjoy playing amongst other women?”

Separate tournaments offer women space to compete in a positive way—opportunity for intellectual competition and camaraderie among women that is sadly lacking in our society and not often portrayed by the media. There are a great many inspiring movies from Rocky (boxing) and Hoosiers (high-school basketball) to Searching for Bobby Fischer (chess) that address complex relationships created by competition among men, but A League of Their Own (about a women’s baseball league during World War II) is one of the few to feature women.

However, there has been a recent surge in media coverage of girls and competition. Books on the subject, all published in the year 2002, include Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabees, Leora Tannenbaum’s Catfight:Women and Competition, and Rachel Simmons’ Odd Girl Out:The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. Mean Girls, a movie released in 2004, was a comedy directed by Tina Fey of Saturday Night Live, based partly on material from Queen Bees and Wannabees. The common theme in all four works is that competition between women is catty and covert, taking its most vicious forms in bathrooms and cliques rather than in sports arenas or classrooms. As Leora Tannebaum writes in the introduction to Catfight, “I concentrate on the negative aspects of competition because that is what we need to fix.” I think this is a naïve (or perhaps disingenuous) assertion, which exemplifies the mean-girl buzz. It is not self-evident to me that revealing the details of cruel behavior has anything to do with eliminating, or even reducing, it. To the contrary, there is a big risk that by graphically detailing mean-spirited tactics, unfair and simplistic stereotypes of females are reinforced. We need, instead, more positive—but equally complex and enticing—portrayals of females in competition with one another. Chess is an ideal battleground in which to form such relationships.

During my last two years in high school and throughout college, Irina Krush was my main chess rival, and she inspired me to become a stronger player. Whenever I played against her, the stakes were raised, even if it was just in a casual weekend event, such as our 1997 encounter in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was a large open tournament split up into different sections based on ratings. In total, there were about two hundred players, and less than ten percent of those were women. Irina and I were the only women in the top section, but coincidentally, we were paired in the last round. Irina attacked me mercilessly. I defended well until I made one careless move. As soon as I took my hand off the piece, I nearly gasped. It was a terrible move to which Irina had a brilliant win. I am very expressive and was sure that my face would show her I made a mistake. I got up from the board and paced, preparing myself to resign. Then I saw that my clock was ticking, but she had played a different move. She didn’t see it! I jumped right back into my chair, stymied her attack, and proceeded to win.

My next game against Irina was at the 1998 U.S. Women’s Championship, where Irina and I were among the favorites. We both won our first two games, and were to play in round three. I was nervous. I knew this game would likely decide the tournament winner. Irina was well prepared, choosing a variation I had never seen before. Once again, she attacked me with verve. This time she was successful, sacrificing a Bishop to break open my King’s protection. I was forced to resign on move twenty-three. This was the beginning of a brilliant tournament streak for the fourteen-year-old Irina. She won eight games, drawing one and losing none. Anna Hahn and I, who were the second- and third-place finishers, went shopping together afterwards, a slim consolation for me. For months, I had been training daily for the event, and was dreaming of winning. Anna must have felt the same way:

“I’m happy at least,” she said, “that I scored the one draw against her.” After such an amazing result, I imagined that Irina would be flooded with interview requests, invitations to strong tournaments, as well as lucrative sponsorships. I was jealous and worried that everyone would write off my own potential. I realized that I would have to work harder in order to get attention as a female chessplayer in America.

Irina Krush. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)

Irina and I first became friends as roommates in a junior competition in 1999 in Armenia, where we stayed up late, giving each other romantic as well as chess advice. However, I didn’t consider her a close friend till 2002 in Bled, Slovenia, when we played together on the American Women’s Olympic team. Through the three weeks of intense chess matches and parties with players from all over the world, Irina and I supported each other in the mornings before the game, and gossiped at night. When we came back to New York, Irina posed for me in all pink, on my roof, for a photo series I was compiling. Later I enlarged and hung the photos of her and other friends and family members—including my mother, father, and brother—along with pink Christmas lights for a pink party at my place. For the occasion, my friend Mikey, a videogame programmer and expert chessplayer, spray-painted me a chess set with pale pink representing white and fuchsia representing black. Irina, who doesn’t like large crowds or noisy atmospheres, did not come. Irina and I do hang out regularly, usually one-on-one or with her boyfriend, Pascal, trading books and playing basketball at the courts in my neighborhood. While our friendship is still grounded in our competitive past, our relationship off the board has eclipsed our chess rivalry, and I root for Irina in every game except those she plays against me.

In high school, I liked playing boys, and liked even more to score upset wins against experienced male players. On day trips to New York City, I would play, and usually win, against the macho men at Washington Square Park. I knew I would win most games, but they usually didn’t.

A crowd would gather to watch me defeat the hustlers. They would often squirm, curse, or refuse to pay me. I was used to playing against men, had no female rivals in my school or in Philadelphia, and had never played in an all-women’s tournament.

Then I was invited to be one of two female representatives in the World Youth Festival in Guarapuava, a small, landlocked town in southern Brazil. It was 1995 and I was about to turn fifteen.

My father and brother accompanied me on this, my first international trip where teenagers from five continents were gathering to crown World Youth Champions: Girls’ Under 16; Girls’ Under 18; Boys’ Under 16; and Boys’ Under 18. Right away I understood that this trip was going to be about more than chess. My brother and I visited a local school, where the students crowded around us to get our addresses and to practice a few English phrases. They invited us to their gym class, where they outclassed us in soccer and we introduced them to full-court basketball. After the rounds, players went to the Frog, a disco where samba and salsa played all night. Till then, my experiences in dancing had been limited to awkward school parties and bar mitzvahs. After an initial few days of being shy, I began to open up and enthusiastically participated in the festivities. Much older, beautiful Brazilian men flirted with me—apparently they found my freckled skin and blue eyes exotic. One player joked to me, “Latin men love gringas.” I was very inexperienced at the time. In an elaborate matchmaking game on the dance floor I was paired with a Brazilian version of the model Fabio. I was too confused to understand that I was supposed to go over and dance with him, and ended up inadvertently ignoring his advance. For months afterward, my friends back home teased me for tastes I picked up in Brazil, such as collecting samba music and developing crushes on Latino boys.

In spite of the good times, I was intensely nervous. I had never before competed in such a prestigious competition. Before the first match, I lay on my bed and read 200 Brilliant Endgames, filled with studies, brilliant positions not from real games, but composed from scratch to show off the artistic elements of chess. The aesthetic, often paradoxical, solutions inspired me and calmed my nerves. It became my pre-game routine for the tournament.

In the first round, I won a complicated attacking game, then won the second game as well, against a girl from Estonia, a country I’d never heard of before then. My most memorable game was with Martha Fierro, a charming Ecuadorian master whom I had admired since we met two years before at a tournament in Washington, D.C. Facing Martha now in Brazil, I surprised myself with my own strength, sacrificing with confidence—first a pawn, later a Bishop, and finally a Rook in order to force checkmate. It was my best game to date and my first victory over a master. For the first time I saw how winning could be an end in itself.

In the second half of the tournament, I faltered, losing several games in a row. It was hard for me to understand why because I wasn’t playing terribly: my opponents were just outplaying me as well as choosing openings that they thought would make me uncomfortable. Probably they had studied my games from the first half of the event. In one particularly frustrating game against the German participant, I lost without even realizing where I had gone wrong. The string of losses deflated my ego, which had ballooned after my great start.

In the United States, many tournaments are held in hotel ballrooms, where the florescent lighting and frigid air-conditioning create a sterile atmosphere. The ratio of males to females at such events is usually about ten to one. Now I had something to compare with that—an exotic locale with interesting teenagers from all over the world, including excellent female competition. After that tournament my father predicted that I would become a master within a year. And I did.

In retrospect, I can see that my time in Brazil was formative, deepening my passion both for chess and for living. Ever since, I have taken chess seriously and played in dozens of two-week tournaments in cities ranging from Istanbul, Budapest, Curaçao, and Honolulu to drab sites in the suburbs of Boston or Denver. The expenses for most international events are covered by the host city or country or the United States Federation, while many American tournaments are paid for by the players.

The large majority of the tournaments in which I play include males and females in the same section. The few restricted to women I’ve found quite enjoyable. Anna Hahn, 2003 U.S. Women’s Champion, echoes my feelings: “I consider myself incredibly lucky to have gotten the opportunity to play in women’s tournaments.” In Anna’s case, playing in women’s events has little to do with winning prize money. After graduating with a degree in computer science from Penn University, Anna has moved to New York, where she has worked in lucrative jobs such as programming at Goldman Sachs and trading on Asian markets. Anna thinks that she would be a weaker player without having played in separate women’s events such as Olympiads or World Championships. “I don’t consider these experiences degrading or detrimental to my chess in the least,” she says. “You have to judge results based on the quality of your play and your performance. It doesn’t matter whether you are playing against women or men.”

My experience training with women has generally been positive. In preparation for the 2004 Olympiad, Susan Polgar, Rusudan Goletiani, Anna Zatonskih, Irina Krush, and I met eight times for week long training sessions. At one of these sessions, held in midtown Manhattan at the New York Athletic Club, we all raced to solve two-dozen deceptively simple-looking positions involving only a few pieces: Rooks, pawns, and Kings. We had only a few minutes to solve each, after which our trainer for the day, Michael Khodarkovsky, would set up a different problem and reset the clocks. The stress of wondering if I was getting the answers right heightened when I saw my teammate Anna quickly and confidently filling her paper with variations. As it turned out, I got a decent number right, though not as many as Anna.

The Dream Team: Anna Zatonskih, Rusa Golentiani, Susan Polgar, Jennifer Shahade, and Irina Krush.

Hungry after this intense mental workout, the team went out for Greek food, when Michael announced something so astonishing that I assumed it was a joke or an empty promise: the great champion Garry Kasparov (whom Michael had worked with in the past) had agreed to work with the women’s Olympic team starting with a session a few months later, in the summer of 2003. As it turned out, Michael was serious. It would be Garry’s first outing as a coach. Garry’s motivation is still not clear to me, though my best guess is that he wanted to help boost the stature of chess in America to a respectable level—like in Spain, Holland, or Russia—and thought that the Dream Team members were good candidates for instigating such a change.

When I arrived in West Orange, New Jersey, a ritzy suburb of New York, it seemed surreal that I would be analyzing with Kasparov in a couple of hours. Excited anticipation mixed with nervous apprehension. Garry was known to make sexist comments when interviewed. Would he be condescending about the level of my play? Would I be offended by any of his sexist remarks? All of us, even Susan Polgar, were nervous. Garry entered the conference room, dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt—I had only before seen him in a suit. When he asked who was going to demonstrate her games first, I avoided eye contact with anyone who might latch onto a glance and cajole me to the front. It was Irina Krush who bravely stepped up to show him a game, an exciting Sicilian. Kasparov’s eyes lit up when the position became complicated, and rattled off variations at high speed. He slowed down whenever he felt we weren’t following—typical of his behavior at the training session, which was attentive and charming. “You see the position clearly many moves ahead,” was his compliment to Anna Zatonskih, adding,

“I know many top male grandmasters who can’t do that.” The focus of the session was our games, and Garry seemed genuinely interested in our repertoires, especially our response to Queen pawn openings: “What is there to do against d4?” he asked.

During breaks, we became acquainted with Garry Kasparov, who was perceptive in conversation. In one instance, some of the members at the table were making sexist, unfunny jokes about men with several wives. I have no poker face and was grimacing—Garry came to my defense: “I don’t think Jennifer likes that!” He noted that “women are starting to reach the highest level in chess, a reflection of their entrance in other fields.” When I asked Garry Kasparov his opinion of women’s tournaments, he thought they could actually accelerate the progress of women and thus increase the chance “to create ten Judit Polgars.” I asked Kasparov why his comments were so different from the often-sexist remarks I had read in the press. He claimed that journalists tend to distort what he says. It could also be that Kasparov is sensitive enough not to insult women at a women’s chess training session. Or he could have changed his mind, in view of the recent crop of young women talents, and his first-ever loss to Judit Polgar, which he simply described to me as “a loss to one of the strongest players in the world.”

The ratings needed to become a grandmaster or an international master are about 200 points higher than those for the corresponding women’s titles. British author Cathy Forbes, an outspoken feminist who once held the title of master herself, objects violently to special titles, convinced that “in the titles ‘women’s grandmaster’ and ‘women’s world champion’ women is just a euphemism for ‘inferior.’”

Supporters argue that special titles keep more women in the game. Tournament organizers can offer room, board, and pocket money for women GMs and IMs thus encouraging women to play. Some feel that since fewer women have a realistic chance of becoming traditional grandmasters, having the women’s title gives them a prestigious award to shoot for. This argument has been undermined in recent years because of the increasing number of women who are meeting the requirements for regular titles. There are now more than fifty women who are international masters or grandmasters and dozens more with one or two norms toward their full titles.

Irina Krush, who became a regular international master at sixteen, finds gender-based titles insulting. She has no problem with separate women’s tournaments, but as for the WGM title—awarded to her without her knowledge—she told me, “I have no interest in this title.” Cathy Forbes, who is stridently against women’s titles, concedes that stripping proud recipients of their titles would be unfair, so she proposes, “Women grandmasters should take matters into their own hands, and revoke their titles.” So far, no volunteers have come forward.

Though I only occasionally participate in women’s events, I have often been disappointed by my results in them. Since I was fifteen years old, I have dreamed of winning the U.S. Championship, where ten of the country’s top women meet in a round-robin tournament. In my first attempt, as a sixteen-year-old, I played well, tying for fourth place. Three times after that, in 1998 (third place), 1999 (second place), and 2000 (third place), I came within reach of the title. Each time I either choked or another player would start to win game after game, leaving me behind.

In one game, played in the 2000 tournament, I played well in the opening (my favorite Dragon variation) and middlegame against National Master Olga Sagalchik. Transposing into a winning endgame, I realized that this win with black would put me back in the running for first place. I played quickly and confidently despite having more than a half hour to finish the game. Then my heart dropped. One of my rapidly played moves was an enormous error, allowing Olga to achieve a draw. I was inconsolable after this disaster. I tried commiserating with family and friends, but it only made me feel worse. Stronger than sadness was a feeling of incompetence—my brain felt like a machine doomed to malfunction at just the crucial moment. To ease the pain of such disappointments, I believe that accepting how painful it is to lose is the best solution. Sometimes, hanging out with non-chessplayers helps. Trying to deny the importance of the result by staring at the mirror and shouting that it’s just a game, or drinking a bottle of wine, just delays or even exacerbates the pain, which is inevitable for a serious chessplayer.

In the summer of 2001, I was informed that the next U.S. Championship was to be held in Seattle. The prize fund had doubled, and for the first time men and women were to play in the same field. The top-scoring woman would win a large prize and the title of U.S. Women’s Champion. The new format had been designed by American Foundation for Chess, a non-profit organization based in Seattle. I was determined to train harder than ever for the tournament during my summer break from university. I had just moved to a new apartment in Brooklyn. I slept in a tiny room just wide enough for my bed. A huge backyard, a rarity in New York, compensated me for the lack of space. I studied chess intensively, often outside, working for at least four hours a day, and also got into good physical shape, playing basketball and lifting weights. I was feeling good and on top of my game. In August, I had a disappointing result. After playing well in a tournament in Boston, I blundered in a crucial last-round game. I decided to take a week off from training.

My fall semester at NYU had just started when September 11 happened. I was devastated, but also compelled to examine my life in larger terms. I was questioning my devotion to chess, which had seemed much more important just a week before. A few days after 9/11, classes resumed and I began a challenging schedule, including courses in Spanish literature and journalism. I was further distracted by the process of moving out of my miniscule apartment into a much larger space just two blocks away. The one-week hiatus in August turned into months of half-hearted attempts to reopen my chess books.

Nevertheless, come 2002 I was in better spirits. I had just celebrated my twenty-first birthday (New Year’s Eve) in my new loft apartment in Brooklyn, my semester had ended, and I was able to refocus my energy on chess. I arrived in Seattle a day early to relax, explore, and look over some of my openings. I liked the vibe of Seattle, which reminded of my hometown, Philadelphia, but was less used to how new and spacious everything was. I had never seen such a clean city. A man dressed up enough for a business lunch asked me for a spare dollar. I soon found evidence of Seattle’s less-glossy side. Capitol Hill, a hip, commercial neighborhood, was filled with tattoo parlors and secondhand-clothing and music shops, in which I pined over a pricey red leather jacket, and bought This Is Hardcore, an album by a Brit-pop band, Pulp. The songs soon became some of my favorites; they are forever entwined with my experiences in Seattle.

Before the first round, I had mixed feelings about the men and women’s championships being combined. I was excited about playing with the best men in the country, but wondered how the new format would affect my chances. Players ranked higher than I often intimidated me.

In the first round I played against Gennady Sagalchik, a grandmaster and the husband of Olga, whom I had blundered against in the previous championship. I had spent the morning searching through the two million games in my computer database. First I looked at Gennady’s games (of which there were 250), and then I studied the opening positions that I thought I might get. I worked till thirty minutes before the game. Then I left my gleaming white Westin hotel room, which was slowly becoming littered with coffee cups and newspapers. I walked the mile to the tournament hall in the convention center, just adjacent to Seattle’s signature Space Needle. My preparation was successful, and I achieved a great position in the middlegame. At a critical moment, I made a mistake and gave away most of my advantage, but Gennady had become rattled, used up all his time, and lost. It was my first serious tournament victory over a GM.

Midway through the event, I lost to Grandmaster Alexander Fishbein. I needed to get my mind off of chess, so I went to the Crocodile Cafe, a bar and concert venue. Upon entering, I was surprised to see another chessplayer, Grandmaster Larry Christiansen, with a beer and a steak, also unwinding from the tournament stress. I ordered a glass of wine and later went next door, where there was live music from local punk-rock bands.

The break was refreshing. Apparently Larry was also relaxed by his break. He went on to win the tournament. In the rest of the event I played with unprecedented confidence, earning draws against players I had previously been in awe of, such as Grandmasters Yasser Seirawan and John Federowicz. In the penultimate round, I played against a master originally from Armenia. After twenty moves, the position was equal, but I saw a chance to set a trap. I made a move that seemed like a blunder—he could win my Rook. He followed this variation, but missed the zinger I had at the end. A few moves later, he resigned.

I couldn’t get up for a few minutes after the game. I was sitting on my legs throughout the game, and now they were numb. I felt dizzy with happiness—I had clinched the U.S. Women’s title with a round to go. In the final round, I played against a grandmaster. If I won this game, I would place third and win a norm toward my grandmaster title. I ended up losing that game, playing very badly. One of my most brutally honest friends wondered if the reason I played so poorly was because, having already clinched the women’s title, I had relaxed. Perhaps if I were male, he suggested, I would have played harder, knowing that the only way to get attention at a U.S. Championship would be to prevail against the entire field. This comment reminded me of the reasons that the Polgars questioned women’s prizes and events. At the same time, I’m sure I would not have been on that high board in the last round if it hadn’t been for the women’s tournaments and prizes that encouraged me in my teens to stay with the game. Despite that last-round loss, the tournament was a big success for me. In interviews after the tournament I was asked if I liked the new format. I won. Of course I liked it.

I celebrated a lot. On the Saturday after the tournament, I went to an all-night warehouse party back in Brooklyn with Gabi, a dancer and artist whom I’ve been close friends with since high school. Proud of my victory, she was wearing a shirt that was meant to say “Jennifer Shahade is a man-eater” in gold marker, but the pen ran out of ink midway through, so it only read “Jennifer Shahade.” I was flattered nonetheless. At this party, no one played chess, but word spread through a few circles that I had just won the U.S. Women’s title—news that was greeted with congratulations combined with disbelief: first that chess was a professional sport, and second, that the blissed-out, blue-wigged girl was its new champion.

Often I am eager to promote the game and tell nonplayers all about my career, but other times I keep my status secret. I fear that the conversational dynamic will change into one of surprise, sometimes disbelief, followed by a litany of questions that can turn an equal exchange into an interrogation. To avoid this I either say, “I’m a teacher”—which is true—or I lie, claiming to be a circus performer. On the other hand, I can also be annoyed when I get no recognition as a specialist. One time when I was at a bar with Gabi, we met a charming man with lots to say about film and politics. When the bar closed at four, the conversation retired to my apartment. The topic of chess had not yet come up. Glancing around the room, the man noticed chess magazines and sets scattered around, and he began quizzing my roommate Eric on the game, assuming that the male of the house had to be the player. Eric, who is a strong amateur, noted my annoyance and tried to divert the questions to me, but the guy was not getting it. By this time the sun was coming up, and I, coming down, was ready to call it a Saturday night. This man, despite ignoring me on chess matters, was interested in me and wanted my phone number. I must have been bitter or just too tired to respond, so he left dejected, numberless. Gabi described the incident as painful to watch, while Eric said, “I felt so bad—I gave him my business card!”

Until Seattle, I had not realized how much never winning a national title had bothered me. The money was also important. Moving, books for college, and New York prices had strained my budget. I needed the $9,500 check, along with the pay increases, invitations, and exhibitions that followed the title. I was particularly excited about the U.S.-China chess summit, scheduled for Shanghai, China, in the summer of 2002. The Chinese women’s chess team was the best in the world, and I hoped that in Shanghai I might be able to understand why and how they were the best.

7

Chinese Style

Women hold up half the sky.

— Mao Zedong

Along the back streets of today’s Beijing, hidden from the hustle and bustle of bicycles and cars, dozens of men crowd around

dusty chessboards, playing xiangqi, or Chinese chess, in the open-air. Exploring Beijing on foot, I rarely encountered a girl or woman playing these casual games. A lay observer would have no way of knowing that it is young women who are the stars of board games in China. Chinese women have captured four consecutive Olympiad gold medals—1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004—and have produced two Women’s World Champions. The Chinese government has supported the promotion of chess, a trend that was accelerated by the success of Xie Jun, the trailblazer of women’s chess in China. Young players, many of whom were adept at xiangqi, were encouraged to switch to chess and enroll in the training center in Beijing, where they were able to develop their talents under the tutelage of experienced masters and coaches.

Xie Jun was born in 1970 in an army base outside Beijing, where her father was posted. Jun means soldier in Chinese, a reference to her father’s occupation, but the choice of Xie Jun’s name has a larger significance.1 “The name Jun is more often given to boys, but the year of my birth was in the midst of the cultural revolution. During this turbulent period in modern Chinese history, it was common to minimize the differences between men and women, and this was also reflected in the names given to newborns.” During the Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966 by Mao Zedong, Chinese culture was meant to be purged of the “Four Olds”: old ideas, habits, customs, and culture. At this time, traditional Chinese games such as Go, Mahjong, and xiangqi were banned. Books were burned, historical temples and sites were destroyed, and traditional gender roles eroded.

By the time Jun was a small child, the Cultural Revolution had ended, Mao had died (1976), and the ban on board games was lifted. She learned xiangqi at six years old and took to it immediately. Her father accompanied her to the streets, where she competed against middle-aged and older men. At eleven, Jun won Beijing’s girls’ championship in xiangqi. She was spotted by chess trainers, who taught her international chess and entered her in the Beijing team. Her passion for xiangqi transferred easily to Western chess. The skills required for excellence at both games are similar. Jun’s progress in chess was rapid. She became, at fourteen in 1984, the youngest Chinese national master. In 1988 her local team found a sponsor, which permitted her to travel to the World Junior Championships in Adelaide, Australia. She became more serious about chess after she tied for second place.

Xie Jun’s spectacular breakthrough came two years later, in the candidate cycles—a two-year series of tournaments to determine the challenger to Women’s World Champion Maya Chiburdanidze. In 1990 Xie Jun won a preliminary tournament in Malaysia, qualifying to participate in the candidates’ finals in Georgia. In the second round, Xie Jun won against local heroine Nona Gaprindashvili. Xie Jun’s compassionate nature is evident in her description of the encounter:

“I felt overcome by a feeling of sadness at this moment, when Nona realized that she had no more chances and I was about to mate her, I could see the tears in her eyes. Every time when Georgian players won a game, the three to five hundred spectators applauded enthusiastically. But now there was a dead silence in the hall. I could not feel as happy as one would normally expect. The whole situation had touched me and I felt too much sympathy for my opponent.”

Xie Jun won her last round game against Nana Ioseliani, catapulting her into a tie for first with Yugoslavian Alisa Maric. The two would play a match to determine who would face Chiburdanidze later that year. Xie Jun won the match, held in Yugoslavia, by two whole points. The chess world and the Chinese press were astonished: Xie Jun was the first Asian to compete for a World Championship in chess. She was just twenty years old.

To Chinese head coach Liu Wenzhe, Xie Jun’s qualification for the finals was a triumph of historical proportions. In The Chinese School of Chess, Wenzhe promises, “The Chinese school will be pre-eminent in the chess world. This is the necessary logic of chess history.” But such an upheaval would take time, and Xie Jun’s victory caught even the optimistic Wenzhe by surprise. In assessing Xie’s chances, Liu was reserved: “Taking into consideration Chiburdanidze’s skills and experience, as well as those of the Soviet coaches, the overall strength of the Soviet team is greater than ours. It will therefore be very difficult to win the match. Xie Jun has to undertake thorough preparation.”

All of China’s chess resources were poured into the upcoming match against Maya. Wenzhe summoned every grandmaster in China, all men at the time, to provide support for Xie Jun. Ye Jiangchuan, first board for the Chinese national team and a coach of Xie Jun, told me that the Chinese women play so well “because the men help them.” When I reminded him that men had also helped the women in the Soviet Union, he laughed and said, “Here, the men really help the women.” Each grandmaster was assigned a different set of openings to work on at home. They were to convey to Xie Jun their deep understanding of the positions along with detailed and original analysis. During this period Xie Jun’s days were tightly scheduled. Eight hours were devoted to chess, along with blocks of time set aside for light exercise and meals. (The transcripts of the training program are published in Wenzhe’s Chinese School of Chess.)

The chess confrontation between the Soviet Union and communist China coincided with a turbulent time in the USSR, which was crumbling as the match was played. Midway through, Xie Jun realized: “Maya was not at her best throughout the match. The timing coincided with huge changes in the former Soviet Union. In Georgia, civil war had broken out and I cannot imagine that Maya ever had a peaceful mind.” Indeed, Maya confirmed in interviews that, at the time, she was distracted by politics.2

Because Xie Jun had played in few international tournaments, she was something of a mystery. It was clear that she was young and talented, but her legendary Georgian opponent was higher rated and a big favorite. The match was held in Manila, Philippines, the first time a Women’s World Championship was held in Asia, and the crowd was naturally rooting for Xie Jun. In the first game Maya achieved a better position with black, but Xie Jun played resourcefully, finding a Knight sacrifice that led to a draw after a ten-move variation. The eventual triumph of youth over experience was underway. The second game was a quick draw. Maya made a mistake in the third game, and Xie Jun pounced, drawing the first blood of the match. Maya then came back to win two games in a row. A series of draws followed, until Xie

leveled the match with the black pieces in round eight.

Top: Xie Jun, Susan Polgar. Bottom: Nona Gaprindashvili, Florencio Campomanes, Maya Chiburdanidze.

Xie Jun gained momentum after her eighth-round victory and she won her next two games with white. Maya was unable to catch up, so Xie Jun won the match, a final score of 8.5-6.5.

Her upset victory created a stir in China, where Xie Jun became a major celebrity. “I was not sure where I was or who I was. Chaos had set in,” wrote Xie Jun. “It was impossible for me to plan anything—my life had become a whirl of excitement.” She was even elected as a member of the parliament in 1993. Though the post was mostly ceremonial, Xie Jun rejoiced in her new role as politician, which she “considered a great honor. It was a tremendous experience for me…and a nice break from chess.” Xie Jun also took some time off from chess to pursue her university degree in politics.

Xie’s political career was short-lived. Toward the end of 1993, she resumed her training regimen, preparing for her match in Monaco, where she would defend the title she had won two years before. Xie Jun considered being a world champion an enormous responsibility, so she worked hard to improve her chess understanding after her unexpected victory. She gained the grandmaster title and raised her rating to over 2500. Her opponent was Georgian Nana Ioseliani, who had won the right to challenge Xie Jun after winning in the controversial tiebreak against Susan Polgar. Ioseliani was mercilessly defeated by Xie Jun, in an overwhelming 8.5-2.5 victory. Her improved skills were evident as she defended her title. Describing the one-sided match, Xie Jun’s remarks were once again gracious and compassionate: “Luck was on my side in the first game…I felt in great shape and winning four out of the first five games was beyond my wildest dreams…for Nana it must have been horrible. …”

Xie Jun’s third title defense in 1995 was unsuccessful. She faced a determined Susan Polgar, who duly crushed her, forcing Xie to confront the first major setback of her chess career. The kind and sympathetic words Xie had once had for both Maya and Nana were gone, replaced by an angry diatribe. She complained about the poor conditions in Jaen, Spain: the food did not suit her and there were no decent translators for the Chinese delegation. A chief gripe was the unprofessional conduct of organizer Luis Rentero. Rentero sent both Susan and Xie Jun letters, which harshly scolded them for making quick draws, imposing unprecedented fines. Rentero wanted every game to be exciting, but the rules had already been establish and Xie and Polgar both found the fines disrespectful and distracting. Xie Jun claims she was unable to calm down afterward. She gave Polgar nominal credit for her play: “I cannot say that her victory was undeserved.” She continued, though, “The incident with the letter was unforgivable. All I can hope for is that one day I will have the opportunity to play another match against Zsuzsa [Susan], under different conditions.” These candid remarks reveal Xie’s fiercely competitive streak.

Xie Jun was determined to reclaim her title. During Christmas 1997, she played in a nine-player qualifying tournament held in Holland. The two top finishers would play a match to determine the challenger to Susan Polgar. Russian Alisa Galliamova won first place, and Xie Jun came in second. So that neither player gains an unfair advantage, most title matches are held in a neutral location or split between both home sites. Half of Xie-Galliamova was set for Jun’s native China, in the large city Shenyang, and half in Kazan, Alisa’s hometown. At the last minute, Kazan backed out and the entire match was switched to China. Galliamova did not accept these conditions, didn’t show up for the match, and Xie Jun won by forfeit. Susan Polgar, who was starting a family in New York, protested the rushed proceedings of the Polgar-Xie rematch, and refused to play. Galliamova was chosen as a replacement, and invited to play Xie Jun once again. This time the match was conducted as anticipated, half in Kazan and half in Shenyang.

The games were interesting and hard-fought, in my opinion the most interesting chess of any World Women’s Championship match thus far. Xie Jun prevailed in the end, winning five games to Alisa’s three. Jun’s victories ranged from a 29-move checkmating attack to a 94-move win in an endgame.

The match was the final Women’s Chess Championship held with the classical three-week-long format. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the president of FIDE since 1994, decided upon an entirely new system, which he thought would help to popularize chess. First of all, the time control, (a preset time limit for a player to complete her moves; if exceeded she will lose the game) was changed, so that the average game lasted about three or four hours instead of the standard five or six. The tournament format shifted to that of a knockout, in which sixty-four players play two-game elimination matches. Ties of 1-1 are broken by rapid matches. The field is whittled down, round by round, into 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 until there is a four-game final, at the end of which a champion is crowned. The grand prize was over $50,000. The new idea was certainly more exciting, and the large starting field gave young players a chance for the first time. Detractors argued that the knockout format and quickened pace resulted in games of much lower quality than those played in classical format. A player who would have few chances in a regular candidate cycle could have a few good games and emerge as World Champion. Elisabeth Paehtz described the new knockout as “more like gambling in a casino than world championship chess.”

Xie Jun, the highest-rated and most experienced player in the first edition of the event, held in New Delhi in 2000, was able to win handily, even in the more random format. She outplayed her first five opponents calmly, meeting her young compatriot, Qin Kanying, in the final round. Xie Jun outplayed her with a win in the second game, and drew the others. The all-Chinese final was indicative of the dominant position of China in women’s chess at the start of the twenty-first century.

In the two decades after 1981, when Xie Jun first turned her attention from xiangqi to chess, the number of casual chessplayers in China soared from a few thousand to five million.3 From all over the vast country, talented young players were recruited to train at the National Chess Center in Beijing. China’s future female team was coming together. Zhu Chen was only seven when she began to play chess in a local club. Just four years later, in 1988, she traveled to Romania to play in the World Girls’ Under 12 Championship. She won first place, becoming the first Chinese chessplayer to win a gold medal in an international event. After this victory, Zhu Chen was summoned to the capital to train. Zhu Chen desperately missed her family and yearned to return home, but her parents implored her to suffer through the homesickness by throwing herself into her chess. She did just that. She describes being so tired after grueling eight-hour sessions that she would collapse into bed at night, going on to dream of chess variations.4

Unlike Xie Jun, whose ascent to World Champion was swift, Zhu suffered a number of setbacks on her way to the top. At the 2000 World Championship, held in New Delhi, India, she failed to survive the first round of the knockout. She was upset by American teenager Irina Krush, who, after drawing the first game, dispatched Zhu in an unbalanced game that could have gone either way. “I was so excited after this game,” Irina told me “that I threw up afterward.” Early in the following year Zhu Chen was awarded the grandmaster title, becoming the eighth woman to be so honored, and the second Asian woman.

Zhu Chen and Irina Krush. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)

A year later Zhu Chen had another chance to capture the ultimate title at the 2001 World Women’s Championship. She arrived in frigid Moscow with high hopes for the tournament that was to be held in a majestic hall in the Kremlin. Zhu was the highest-rated Chinese woman there, since Xie Jun chose not to defend her title for reasons she did not reveal. I had also qualified and was paired against a young Russian, Alexandra Kosteniuk, in the first round. I lost the match, 0-2. My sole consolation after this disappointing loss was in watching Alexandra handily dispose of all her opponents that followed me. Among Alexandra’s victims were Almira Skripchenko, the reigning European champion; Hoang Trang, an international master from Vietnam; and Xu Yuhua, another of the new wave of Chinese stars.

Meanwhile, Chen was tearing through her half of the field, defeating two Georgians in back-to-back rounds—first the young Nino Khursitdze and then the legendary Maya Chiburdanidze.

The final match between Kosteniuk and Zhu was dramatic and entertaining. Seventeen-year-old Kosteniuk, a native Muscovite and crowd favorite, has been featured in dozens of fashion magazines, including Vogue. Tagged “the Anna Kournikova of chess,” Alexandra has an image similar to that of the famous tennis star. Her picture was in photo galleries all over the Internet. The two striking young women exchanged blows while the chess world followed the event in Moscow and on the Internet. To the satisfaction of chess fans there were no short draws that so often detract from the entertainment value of world championship matches. For the first eight games the women exchanged victories—first one, then the other—until Chen finally broke through with consecutive wins. The title was hers. Seventeen years after Zhu Chen first learned to play chess, her dream of ultimate glory was realized. Another Chinese woman was champion of the world.

I had occasion to speak with Chen in the summer of 2002, at the closing ceremony of a friendly match between the American and Chinese teams in Shanghai. Held in a ballroom on the top floor of our luxury hotel, we had a spectacular view of Shanghai’s recently developed Pudong skyline, with buildings designed in futuristic shapes such as rockets and cylinders. We were feasting on an eight-course meal of crispy duck, shark-fin soup, and peeled shrimp. As is the custom in high-end dining in China, no rice was served so that diners have room for the rich meats and sauces. As I was musing upon this, Zhu Chen commented, “Sometimes you have to wonder why we are eating this fabulous meal while other people are starving. I hope to use my position as Women’s World Champion to help less fortunate people in my country and around the world.” As our conversation continued, Chen frequently expressed her devotion to helping the less-fortunate and bridging cultures through her power as a champion. Zhu Chen also showed her playful side when she sang a lively rendition of “Que Sera, Sera” to the delight of her proud mother, who was sitting with us. Chen belted out the lyric: “My mother told me, Que Sera, Sera whatever will be, will be, the future’s not mine to see…” Chen’s own mother could hardly have seen that her daughter’s future would be as the Women’s World Champion of chess.

Thoughtful and playful, Zhu is at once controlled and wildly impulsive. She has demonstrated how disciplined she can be by enduring the rigors of the Chinese chess school. Her chess control contrasts with her lifestyle, in which she frequently defies convention. Once she shaved off all her hair. In FIDE’s official yearbook, the photos of the women’s world champions throughout history include a black-and-white shot of a bald Zhu. An outraged woman remarked to me, “She looks like a concentration-camp victim!” I disagreed with this perception. Many women shave their heads to make a statement, including Indian feminist Adhuriti Roy, writer of the best-selling novel God of Small Things.She shaved her head after being elected one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” because she didn’t want to be seen as “some pretty girl who wrote a book.”5 American chess coach and expert Elizabeth Vicary has shaved her head twice. The first time she was a senior at Columbia University, and was shocked at how differently people addressed and treated her. “Before people would listen to me just because I was pretty—after shaving my head, I learned to be a better conversationalist.” Roy and Vicary both chose to abandon the conventional standards of feminine beauty, even though they would benefit from these standards. Wondering about Zhu’s motives for her impulsive act, I asked if she were taking some kind of feminist stand, but she assured me that she “wasn’t trying to make any statement” and “just got bored of the same haircut.” A little later, after thinking it over silently, she told me, “Shaving off all my hair is an expression of my individuality, and you can also see this in my chess career.”

Zhu Chen’s patriotism sometimes conflicts with her free-spirited nature. Zhu Chen believes in the future of chess in China: “Chess history always follows the great nations. China is destined to become the next great chess dynasty.” However, she chose to marry a grandmaster from Qatar, Mohamad Al-Modiahki, whom she first met at an Asian youth tournament in Malaysia in 1994. Although she and Al-Modiahki shared no common language, according to Chen, they were able to communicate over the chessboard. “There are many combinations with the King and Queen that are quite beautiful.”6 Since then, Zhu Chen has gained a good command of English, a language in which Al-Modiahki is also fluent. Chen’s mother did not approve of the marriage and tried to convince her daughter to find a nice Chinese man, but her efforts were in vain. “Nothing,” said Chen, “could have stopped our marriage.” Like Zhu’s mother, Al-Modiahki’s parents also believed that the many cultural, racial, and geographical differences were insurmountable, and Zhu refers to the familial disapproval as a “cold war.” There were certainly no financial restrictions to stop their relationship. Like many citizens of Qatar, Al-Modiahki is heir to a great oil fortune.

Zhu’s relationship with Al-Modiahki is featured prominently in her first book, published in May 2003, an autobiography, the title of which translates, Lay [the] Piece Without Regrets: Waits and Dreams of a Mermaid.7 Zhu Chen is as optimistic about love as she is about chess. “Chess is a good way to bridge different cultures in a peaceful way, and my relationship with Modhaki is a great example of this. Love can defeat any resistance.”

As impressive as the individual personal triumphs of Zhu Chen and Xie Jun were, even more striking was the proliferation of Chinese women chessplayers, many of whom were playing at the level of international masters or even grandmasters. By the late 1980s their performances in the Olympiads were already beginning to attract worldwide attention.

In the 1988 Olympiad in Thessaloniki, it was the Polgars and the Soviets who grabbed all the headlines. Quietly, though, the Chinese women were gaining ground, finishing a respectable fourth. Two years later in Novi Sad they had climbed to third, bringing the first Olympic chess medal home to China.

The 1992 Olympiad in Manila was held just after the break up of the Soviet Union. For the first time the fourteen newly created republics could field their own teams. World-class players from Georgia and Ukraine and Russia, who had been left out of the powerful Soviet teams, could now participate. As a result, the tournament fielded more top-flight teams than ever, despite the absence of the Polgars. The Chinese team got off to an excellent start, in first place after ten rounds. However, the team faltered in the closing rounds, having to settle for the bronze medal once again. Hoping for gold or silver, a disappointed Xie Jun consoled herself by remembering that this was probably the strongest field ever assembled for an Olympiad. “Viewed in that light,” she concluded, “bronze was not bad at all.” In the 1996 Olympiad in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, China came ever so close, narrowly missing the gold medal, which went to Georgia.

In 1998, the Olympiad was held in Russia. With great performances by Xie on first-board and Zhu on second, China finally won gold ahead of Georgia (silver) and Russia (bronze). In the 2000 Istanbul Olympiad, they easily won again, clinching first place before the last two rounds were even played. The stars of the Istanbul team were Xie Jun, who held down board one, and Zhu Chen, who posted a performance rating of 2700, gaining the top individual performance of the women’s Olympiad. As the twenty-first century arrived, the dominance of China’s women’s team was clearly established.

Xu Yuhua. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)

In the 2002 Bled Olympiad in Slovenia, Xie Jun, who had just had a baby, did not participate. Because of China’s deep and strong women’s chess tradition, a pool of seven Chinese women who played at or above the international master level (around 2400 Elo) was available to provide Xie’s replacement. The Chinese team was still top-seed. If the size of the women’s teams were increased to five or six players, the Chinese women’s team would be an even bigger favorite. Nevertheless, without the experienced Jun on the Bled team, the road to a “three-peat” was not going to be easy The Russian, Georgian, and Polish teams all presented serious challenges to the Chinese. Even the United States, ranked eleventh going into the tournament, delivered a shocking blow to the Chinese squad. It was round five, and our usually optimistic coach, Ilya Gurevich, having studied our positions on the board after the first two hours, was convinced that we were destined to lose the match, 0-3. On first board, Irina Krush was playing against Xu Yuhua, a woman in her mid-twenties. Yuhua is free-spirited, which once got her temporarily kicked off the Chinese team, and stylish, wearing clothes such as a red blouse with the word “Only” stitched in silver sequins. Yuhua had earned her share of the limelight by twice winning the prestigious World Women’s Cup championships. In each victory, she won $16,000, prevailing over her compatriots as well as the best European women players. In her game against Irina, Yuhua chose a tame but solid system, leaving Irina few chances for counterplay. It looked as though Yuhua would slowly squeeze her way to a victory. Then the nearly unthinkable happened. Yuhua gave up an exchange for free, trading her Rook for a Bishop with no compensation, an error that most coffee-shop players would be stunned to commit. A few moves later, Xu resigned.

Meanwhile on board two, I was mounting an attack against Wang Pin that she could thwart with her best play. The correct move for Wang was to neglect her own development and play a rash-looking Queen move. To my delight, she played the incorrect move, allowing my attack to crash through.

Both Wang Pin and Xu Yuhua had blundered, allowing us to win the match 2-1, to the surprise of everyone in attendance. In spite of this stumble, the Chinese women were once again triumphant, winning their third consecutive Olympic gold.

Our small victory in Bled provided sweet revenge for what had happened to us earlier in the summer of 2002, a few months before the Olympiad. We’d been invited to Shanghai to play in a friendly summit match between the men’s and women’s Chinese teams. Irina Krush, Elena Donaldson, and I represented the American women.

Our Chinese hosts could not have been more hospitable. We stayed in a beautiful hotel, were treated to lavish banquets and parties, and ate dumplings on a cruise down the Yangtze River. The generosity of the Chinese Federation appeared to be boundless—that is until the competition was underway and they posted the wrong pairings. The United States players thought they were playing different opponents. As a result, members of our team were studying the wrong games for their upcoming matches, putting us at a serious disadvantage. The visiting U.S. officials were flexible and cooperative in their efforts to set things right, but the Chinese wouldn’t budge until they finally had no choice but to admit their error. One of the officials had been especially friendly and cheerful until then, graciously insisting that we call her Abigail, because her Chinese name might be too difficult to pronounce. I can still see the anger on her no-longer-smiling face as she glared at the e-mail that forced her to admit that the U.S. team had been misled.

The chess did not go as hoped for the American women. Xie Jun played with the Chinese men, so we would not have to face her. But we did not fare well against the others. I lost both of my games with Wang Pin, and was promptly benched. Elena Donaldson managed one draw and half a point from her two games against Wang Pin. Irina Krush scored 1 out of 4 against Zhu Chen. This gave the women a grand total of 1.5 points to the 6.5 points for our opponents.

The American men did better, but once again a Chinese woman undid us. Xie Jun scored a crucial win against Grandmaster Alexander Shabalov in the last round. She played the most aggressive defense against 1.d4, the King’s Indian. Shabalov achieved a good position, but committed an error, which Xie Jun pounced on, going on to sacrifice all her pieces while stripping his King of all defenses. This victory clinched the match for the Chinese. Joking about Xie Jun’s participation in the match, one player complained, “It’s not fair. Two players against one!” Xie Jun, at the time, was eight months pregnant.

The skills of Chinese women chessplayers are mystifying to the rest of the world. “What are they doing to those girls?” asked Woman International Master Anna Hahn. “Everything about them is different,” notes another top female player, “from the way they shake hands to the tiger balm.” Before games, Xu Yuhua and Wang Pin like to rub tiger balm on their temples, releasing an intense odor. Before one of our games I asked Wang Pin for a dip. She laughed, then handed over the container of transparent balm.

Westerners are often unaccustomed to or even intimidated by what they view as exotic Eastern culture. Likewise, some Easterners feel the same about Westerners. In her book, Xie Jun reveals how foreign her first Western opponent, Jorg Hickl, an international master from Germany, appeared to her. “I felt very nervous…there he sat, a foreigner with a different coloring of the eyes and hair, with a high nose of a type I had rarely seen before. Maybe I was the first Asian girl he had ever played.” After the game, which finished in an exciting draw, Xie really wanted to discuss the game with Jorg, but they had no language in common. Xie was determined to learn English, so that she could communicate with her opponents. It is unfortunate that verbal communication between Chinese and Western teams is often limited, but at least there is chess to help transcend language barriers. Once at the 1999 World Youth Championship in Yerevan, Armenia, I played against a Chinese girl, Kuang Yinghui. Our game, which ended in a draw, was interesting and long, lasting for six hours. Although we couldn’t talk to each other, our communication over the chessboard connected us without words. We walked home together amidst tanks on the dark boulevards of Yerevan on that day in autumn, the season of Armenia’s independence day. After a few minutes Yinghui grabbed my arm and began to sing in Chinese. We skipped together arm-in-arm the whole way back to our hotel.

There is a controversy about whether the difference between the cultures of East and West extends to styles of playing chess. Many trainers and players have insisted that “the Chinese play more like computers.” I myself used to be under the vague impression that Chinese players blundered less frequently than most, that is, until Bled, when both Wang Pin and Xu Yuhua made huge errors that turned winning positions into losses. One trainer even told me that the Chinese school won’t reach the level of the Russian school because “despite having the same intense training and fighting spirit, they lack creativity.” Such spurious claims, in my opinion, are rooted in the same kind of thinking that assumes that “all Asians are good at math.” Some Westerners even claim that Asians look so much alike to them that it is difficult to recognize individuals. One American grandmaster joked that when playing against a Chinese opponent, he could actually be playing against several opponents—his opponent could get up from the table every few moves and switch with another teammate.

“I would never be able to notice!”

The idea that the Chinese fight hard and long without blundering while Western players fill their games with blunders and brilliancies appear’s to be based on little more than prejudice and anecdotal evidence. I decided to undertake a thorough study of the games of Chinese women to see if any playing-style patterns would emerge. After examining dozens of games involving Chinese women, it became clear to me that their styles varied widely. Xu Yuhua plays deep positional chess. Zhu Chen has a minimalist style, is a tough fighter, and often pulls out wins in even positions. Xie Jun is an aggressive tactician and the most well-rounded—and, ultimately, the strongest Chinese woman player. I also compared the games of the two teenage stars of the 2002 Bled Olympiad, one from China, the other, Russia. With an amazing score of 10/11, seventeen-year-old Zhao Xue wore a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and a sly smile to her games. She ruthlessly posted point after point. “My only regret in my first Olympiad is losing one game.”8

Tatiana Konsitseva, a sixteen-year-old Russian, who wore her long, light-brown hair in a ponytail and played with a poker face, finished with a score of 10.5/12. These fantastic results earned Xue and Tatiana the gold and silver medals for the best performance ratings of the entire Olympiad. In looking at their games I noticed that one of the women played with a fierce attitude and a fearless attacking style, crushing her opponents. In an equal position she lost a drawn position with a rash exchange sacrifice. The other player’s games had fewer fireworks, but showed off her fighting spirit by often picking up points when her opponents faltered in equal positions. Throughout the tournament, she made nary a blunder. The blunder-free games were those of Kosintseva. The more creative games were Xue Zhao’s. In this case, the style of play could not be predicted from the national origin of the player.

Xue Zhao. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)

In The Chinese School of Chess, Liu Wenzhe, however, argues that the Chinese do have a different style of play from Westerners. Liu Wenzhe explains that the Chinese tend to have a shallow knowledge of the opening, making up for this with a deep understanding of the middlegame and relentless fighting spirit. He points out that many of the Chinese players who were recruited by the government to learn to play international chess were brought up playing Chinese chess, xianqi and so there are some remnants of that game in their play. In Western chess, players often set up pawn structures early in the game. Pawn structures are locked formations, which rarely unravel, since pawns cannot move backwards nor capture forwards. In such closed positions, pieces are hemmed in by pawns, limiting tactical contact between the pieces and favoring long-term strategic ideas. Although the pawn is the weakest piece, they often determine the pace and nature of the game, causing Philidor, the great French player from the nineteenth century, to declare, “Pawns are the soul of chess.” In Chinese chess, on the other hand, pawn structures are less stable, resulting in more open positions, which require constant tactical vigilance. Wenzhe thinks that, as a result, Chinese players tend to be very comfortable in open games.

The Chinese women I asked were less sure that Chinese women play differently from other women. Xu Yuanyuan, a twenty-one-year-old woman grandmaster, said, “It’s all the same game.” If the Chinese do play differently from Westerners, the differences are subtle, especially in the highest circles in contemporary chess, where finding the right move tends to override individual style. Zhao Xue, the star of Bled, claims to have no preference for a particular type of game: “I like an easy position.” Professional chessplayers worldwide access the same chess databases, computer programs, and expert annotations, furthering the standardization of chess expertise.

It is hard to understand why state support of women’s chess in China was able to create a team stronger than the state-supported women’s team in the Soviet Union. The difference in ratings between the top male and female Chinese players is small compared to the differences between the Soviet men and women. The top four Chinese women at the time of writing are rated 2550, 2540, 2500, and 2500. The top male Chinese players have ratings that are on the average 100 points higher. In addition, the male players are about five years older. As the female players continue to improve, they could narrow the margin, or one day equal or even surpass the strength of the men. In Soviet teams, there is and always has been a much greater differential.

In the eighties and nineties, beginning with Xie Jun, Chinese chess trainers began to successfully train the women to play at the grandmaster level. Liu Wenzhe, the head coach of the women’s team since 1986, knew he had to replace the former leading players of China in favor of very young players who could be trained intensively from scratch. Raw talent was not that important, as he writes: “Systematically training players is more important than selecting them.” His program focused on middlegame study and careful scrutiny of a player’s own games. He criticizes programs that emphasize games of world champions above all: “It is a fallacy reflecting the obsession with celebrities.” By the twenty-first century, Liu Wenzhe was confident that he had achieved his goal, declaring: “The battle between the Russian and Chinese schools in the field of women’s chess ended in a Chinese victory.”

Almira Skripchenko offered her opinion as to why the Chinese women are stronger than the Soviet women: “The Chinese team, supported by the Chinese government, has a goal to become the strongest women’s team in the world. They will do what they need to do to reach this goal, just like the Soviets did what they needed to do to reach the pinnacle of women’s chess.” In order to win Olympiads, the Chinese had to have a team of girls strong enough to compete against the Polgars and the Georgian champions. The bar was raised, and the Chinese women climbed over it.

The success of so many Georgian women initially planted the idea that women could be great chessplayers if they had role models and training. The Polgars proved that it is possible for women to play at the highest level of chess, even though critics called them “exceptions to the rule.” The Chinese, in addition to the Polgars, are adding weight to the idea that women, in general, have equal chess potential to that of men.

The success of the Chinese women suggests that female chessplayers do not have different cognitive abilities from men, but rather that they are lacking a thorough and equally intense training program.

In explaining the development of a great player, one has to confront the controversy over just how important genius is. Overestimating the importance of genius understates the role of training and motivation. If genius were all-important, then the lack of opportunities for women in chess would hardly be relevant. After all, isn’t genius likely to override all circumstances?

8

Juno and Genius

When [a woman] thinks of a beautiful move, she is liable to think also about how beautiful she looks in making it.

— Leonore Gallet, prodigy musician and amateur chessplayer^1

We invented genius so not to die of equality.

— French feminist writer Julia Kristeva

At the age of seventeen I believed that men and women had equal intellectual potential. However, when discussions about gender differences arose, I lacked the experience and theory to back up my ideas. I recall how frustrating it felt trying to hold my own in arguments like the one I had with a twenty-one-year-old grandmaster at the 1998 U.S. Open in Hawaii. He’d just lost his penultimate game to Judit Polgar, who was twenty-two at the time, utimately giving her first place in the tournament, which made her the first woman to win the title. Analyzing after the game, Judit joked around and tossed her hair while she zipped through one variation after another. The young grandmaster could barely keep up with her. Later he told me, “I lost because she is very well-trained,” adding bitterly, “she is no genius. Name for me one female genius; I can name hundreds of male geniuses.” I was pressed for the right words as he continued to goad me: “If women are as smart as men, why aren’t there any great female chessplayers?” I tried as best as I could to rebuff his claims, but failed. Four years later, after reading art critic and feminist Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why Are There No Great Women Artists?” in an art history class at college, I looked back on that argument and saw how I could have responded. Nochlin criticizes feminist thinkers who respond to the question of why there aren’t more female artists or geniuses by trying to name counter examples. She challenges the concept of genius that assumes “art is a free, autonomous activity of a super-endowed individual.” According to Nochlin, the greatness of artists develops when they are given proper training and financial and psychological backing.

The word genius derives from the Roman genius, a guardian spirit who watched over the birth of men and their works. The female counterpart, juno, who attended the women, would have been the alternate choice for genius. Later genius came to signify a person born with extraordinary intellectual gifts. The word genius is applied to either gender, but men still far outnumber women. In Genius, a recent tome by conservative cultural critic Harold Bloom, only thirteen women are included among the one hundred literary geniuses whose lives are profiled.

In Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance (1993) scholar Steven Goldberg is overt in his attempt to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of men. Goldberg, also the author of The Inevitability of Patriarchy (1973), is a professor and the sociology department chairman at the City College, City University of New York. “I suppose that those who explain the greater incidence of male genius in environmental terms have never had the fortune to be exposed to a mind of genius for long,” he writes. “Anyone who has will know that it is inconceivable that genius could be held back by social factors.” Goldberg suggests that anyone who disagrees doesn’t know any real geniuses. Nochlin, on the other hand, disregards first-hand experience (such as conversing with brilliant people) as relevant evidence, explaining that genius may “appear to be innate to the unsophisticated observer.”

Goldberg goes on to assert that no woman could ever reach the level of a strong grandmaster, a prediction that would soon be shot down by Judit Polgar.

Goldberg compares intelligence to height:

“Only males possess the extraordinary aptitude for abstraction that is a necessary condition for genius in mathematics and related fields [chess], and the fact that far more males than females possess the high aptitude for abstraction that is a necessary condition for near-genius in those fields virtually precludes the possibility of female genius in those areas and guarantees a preponderance of males in the genius group and at the near-genius level. This is perfectly analogous to height, a quality whose etiology is overwhelmingly physiological—all people over eight feet tall, nearly all people over seven feet tall, and the vast majority of people over six feet tall are men.”

Goldberg’s “perfect” analogy is dubious at best. Height is measured by a standard scale. There can be no debate that a seven-foot man is seven feet tall. Intelligence and genius are far more difficult to measure, and the criteria for geniuses are a tricky mix of objective achievement as well as subjective values.

I think passion can be mistaken for talent, or even genius. When I was a young girl, I was convinced that I had little talent for the game, because my father and brother were both much better than me. I was paranoid that people wondered why my brother was already a master and I could barely break even in lower sections. There were many reasons for my lack of progress. My motivation was less intense since I was intimidated by the skills of my brother and my father. Besides, I wasn’t having fun playing chess. When I reached middle school, the few girls I had hung out with at tournaments, eating Doritos and watching cartoons, dropped out of the game. I still played in tournaments, but I was not enjoying them nor was I improving. I began to shift my energies into theater and writing, figuring I would be the non-games player in the family.

My parents supported this move and encouraged me to go to theater camps and bought me books on Shakespeare. So one summer, as Greg played his usual schedule of tournaments, my mother drove me to upstate New York for a one-month intensive theater program. I didn’t like most of the classes, which were based on improvisational games that I disliked because they demanded that I be clever on cue. Despite being pricey and studded with the children of celebrities, the camp was overcrowded and I had trouble making friends. I felt left out of the clique of four girls with whom I shared a room. They talked about boys and shaved their legs sitting on the carpet. During my unhappy downtime at drama camp, I often lay on my stuffed mattress, obsessively writing lists of words in my journal—not difficult or provocative words, just adjective, verbs, prepositions, and nouns. It was as if I were suddenly overwhelmed by the vastness of language and wanted to encapsulate a chunk of it in a yellow spiral-bound notebook. My obsessive streak would soon find another outlet, in the study of chess openings. One evening my roommates confronted me for not including words such as love or kindness in any of the lists. Only a few hours later did it sink in that they had no business attacking me for not including certain words—I should have been angry at them for going through my stuff. But I avoided their eyes and shrugged, waiting for them to find something better to do.  Perhaps if theater camp had been the creative and social experience I expected, I never would have gone back to the chess world, which I did soon after returning from camp.

My father wasn’t too much help at first. He thought the pressure of living up to Greg’s chess results would be too much for me. In one ugly incident when we were analyzing chess positions, he told me that I was improving quite slowly. I got so angry that I cursed at him and fled. At the door, I was still clutching Your Move, filled with the chess problems we were looking at. With hatred welling up for that book I tore its cover off. It felt so great that I continued, ripping out page after page, leaving a black and white mess of chess diagrams and variations on the gray carpet by the doorway. Recalling that incident years later, my dad laughed and said, “After that afternoon, she got good really fast.”

In the summer of 1994, a year after the theater camp, I went with my brother and father to Chicago to play in a two-week chess tournament. I was now thirteen, and hanging out with boys had become more fun for me. For the first time, I played blitz all night long and threw myself into my daily matches. My results and play improved immediately. Variations began to click and pieces danced into place. Sacrifices revealed themselves to me. Suddenly chess coaches and peers began to notice my talent. My dad also was stunned and impressed, taking me to tournaments, and arranging lessons for me. Obviously, I still had the same brain and the same neurons, but now I was motivated.

After Chicago I began to study the game seriously, on my own as well as with my schoolmates and my family. I would scrutinize my past games, looking for places that I played badly and searching for the reasons why I faltered. In this form, chess could measure my mind, which would sometimes expand to a size I wouldn’t have imagined possible, but at other times would contract, resulting in lazy play.

Post-game analysis has a rich tradition in the chess culture, and most tournaments have skittles rooms where players discuss their games freely. Moves that were discarded during the game for being too risky or just wrong are tried out in analysis, where pieces can be sacrificed at whim. If the combination doesn’t work out, the pieces are reset again, and another sacrifice is tried. Jokes and animated input from kibitzers replace the strict silence and head-to-head format of a tournament game. In the best cases, such post-mortem sessions become more satisfying than the game being analyzed, much like a Sunday brunch, where yesterday’s party breaks down over Eggs Florentine.

In the room I had lived until college, I have copies of notes to my old games. “Not patient enough,” I scribbled about one rash move. “I need to be more comfortable in waiting for something to happen.” I was hard pressed to resolve one inexplicable blunder: “I threw myself right into the rocks.” I did give myself credit for nice wins, though. In the notes to one win I wrote, “I was able to find the hammer blow right away.” This rigorous introspection has carried over into my life outside of chess, where I often dissect my own behavior in conversations and encounters.

I often wonder how different my life would be without chess. Many of the other selves I could have been might have been happier, less alienated, more politically active, and more likely to land in stable relationships and jobs. But without chess, I would be less confident and cosmopolitan, with fewer varied experiences and international friendships.

In China, a great chess tradition for women is greatly assisted by the government, which sponsors training and provides salaries for top players. The Georgian women of the former Soviet Union were offered similar resources. This type of support, both financial and psychological, is not common in the United States or Western Europe, where chess tends to be seen as an eccentric hobby, not a serious intellectual pursuit. Unless parents can pay for training or a child goes to a school with a chess program, American chessplayers (both males and females) are left to fend for themselves. Some nations offer stipends to talented players, but never in Europe or the Americas have the entire chess resources of a country been so concentrated as they were for Xie Jun’s monumental 1991 match against Chiburdanidze.

A player has to be very motivated to pursue chess in the United States or Western Europe. There are so many career options for an intelligent person to pursue that to play chess seriously requires a very passionate attraction—an attraction that could be called obsession.

Jennifer Shahade, 2000 U.S. Championship. (Photo by Val Zemitis.)

While it is viewed as normal for girls to obsess over clothes, weight, or men, it is not perceived as normal for them to obsess over chess.

As American Grandmaster William Lombardy pointed out, “Women are not as good at chess as men because they are more interested in men than chess.” A woman who does spend all her time on chess is often seen as bizarre, particularly in places where a woman is expected to marry at a young age. Linda Nangwale from Zambia told me that women in her country are expected to be married by their early twenties. She wonders, “What kind of man is going to understand that I’d rather play blitz all night or study the Sicilian than hang out with him?”

The two greatest American players have reinforced or, to a certain extent, created, the image of a chessplayer as an obsessive genius. The first American chess legend, Paul Morphy, traveled to Europe in 1858, where he stomped on his opponents in brilliant style. He quit chess soon after returning to his hometown, New Orleans, where his madness bloomed. Wandering around the French quarter, talking to imaginary people, Morphy had already gone mad when he was found drowned in his bathtub in 1884. He was forty-seven years old.

Bobby Fischer, the ultimate symbol of individualism in chess, spent even more time on chess than a Chinese woman does, but he did it alone in his room in Brooklyn or in the hotels at tournament sites, surrounded by his stacks of chess books. Now Fischer, exiled from America for tax evasion, and has become a raving anti-Semite. Unlike the more glamorous, free-spirited eccentricity of a musician or an artist, the image of chessplayers like Morphy and Fischer is more often one of narrow, introverted weirdness.

Fiction reinforces the stereotypes. Chess fanatic Vladimir Luzhin in Nabakov’s novel The Defense was unable to disentangle the events of the real world from the events on the chessboard. He became a great player, but his life ended in disaster when he threw himself out of a window.

Obsession may not be required for phenomenal success in chess, but it certainly helps. As a result, chess fever is romanticized, and some young players yearn to be more obsessed than they actually are. Harriet Hunt of Britain compared herself unfavorably to an ex-boyfriend, a grandmaster who was far more focused on chess than she was. “He would spend hours studying esoteric pawn endgames, and this really made me feel inferior and jealous that I was not as obsessed as he was. Women have this problem in chess, that we are not as obsessive as men.”

At tournaments, women may find it more difficult than men to completely lose themselves in the game and reach a zen-like state of total focus. That women are trained from a very early age to be constantly aware of how they appear may explain this.

John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing (1972), developed the idea of the “male gaze,” the feeling that many women have that they are being watched, even when alone. He writes, “A woman is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.”2 Such an extra layer of self-consciousness makes it hard to experience life directly or to feel pure freedom.

The male gaze is a psychological concept, a generalization that posits invisible differences in the way women and men think and feel. In chess, expert player Elizabeth Vicary thinks that women are also often watched in a very literal sense. As one of the few women in American open tournaments, Elizabeth and her games often attract a lot of attention. Although this can be embarrassing and annoying, it can also have positive side effects, according to Elizabeth. She feels that being mindful of their audiences makes women play more exciting chess.

Olympic women’s team coach, Grandmaster Ilya Gurevich, also believes that women are particularly conscious about what other people think about their games. “Women players are mostly worried about what their coaches will say after the game—usually men are just upset to lose.”

In the view of my coach, Victor Frias, putting in fewer hours is the main reason the best female players are not at the level of the best males. He praised Judit Polgar as the first woman to break into the world’s top-ten list, because she was “the only woman in chess who eats, sleeps, and breathes chess, just like her male counterparts.” Some feminists and writers agree that women do spend less time on chess, but think that the problem is not with women, but with the hyper-competitive structure of the chess culture. Alexander Cochburn wrote in Idle Passion, “It can be taken as a creditable sign that women have largely not become involved in chess or as expert as men in its execution, because they are happily without the psychological formations or drives that promote an expertise in the game in the first place.”

Anti-chess feminism, a way of thinking that I encountered time after time in my interviews and research, accepts Victor’s premise that women spend less time on chess, but don’t think this is a bad thing. As Margaret Mead said, “Women could be just as good at chess, but why would they want to be?” Nine-time American women’s champion Gisela Gresser considered men obsessed with chess bizzare. She said, “You know women are too reasonable to spend all their time on chess.”

Such rhetoric is not limited to the chess world. In the October 26, 2003, edition of The New York Times Magazine, the cover featured a woman sitting with her baby next to a ladder. The article by Lisa Belkin was titled “The Opt-Out Revolution.” The so-called revolution was about women leaving the work force to pursue more old-fashioned feminine roles. Sally Sears, a lawyer-turned-homemaker, said that women were leaving “the rat race” because “we’re smarter.”

That women might be too intelligent to waste their time on chess or work strikes me as a superficial idea. We reward excellence in most areas with money and respect, so to inquire casually if women are too smart to be obsessive requires a harsh assessment of our cultural values.

Surprisingly, some radical feminists would agree with conservatives that women and chess don’t mix well. Sexists might say that women aren’t playing chess because women are stupid, while “anti-chess feminists” might say that women aren’t playing chess because chess is stupid. Le Tigre, a radically feminist pop-rock band, wrote a song called “Mediocrity Rules,” with a CD cover that reads: “Behind the hysteria of male expertise lies the magic of our unmade art.” In this view, the existence of superstar figures such as grandmasters or rock stars are based on a patriarchal pyramid structure of power. The accomplishments and ideas of a few are celebrated, while the majority is overlooked. To replace “the hysteria of male expertise” it would not be sufficient to simply add a few women to the top of the pyramid, but to tear down the whole structure in favor of something more egalitarian and inclusive.

Chessplayers are definitely categorized with a pyramid structure, determined by their chess ratings. But this is not only a function of chess, but also the way the chess culture is setup, which could change in a way that valued participation and enjoyment in the game along with masterful play. In my career, I support ideas and organizations that broaden the appeal of chess, like coaching for Chess-in-the-Schools, which emphasizes participation over mastery, and in creating liaisons between artistic and chess worlds. Much more could be done. For instance, there could be tournaments in a larger variety of locations, and players could be invited based on factors other than rating, such as personality and chess style. There could be more prizes for beautiful moves rather than the current situation where—with the rare exception of brilliancy prizes (in which a panel of masters determine the most artistic games of the tournament)—all awards go to the winners. There could be more experimental matches in which the performative aspects of the game are highlighted, such as Marcel Duchamp’s match against musician John Cage, held in 1968 in Toronto. The two avant-garde artists designed and then played on a board on which each square was wired to respond to a move on it with a different eruption of sounds and images. Such measures could weaken the pyramid structure, and encourage less competitive types (both male and female) to try chess.

On the other hand, I profile the accomplishments of champions like Judit, Chen, and Nona because I believe that the focus and passion required to excel at chess is a beautiful thing. As long as there are winners and losers in chess, more prizes and attention will go to winners. And I think that’s appropriate, because winners tend to work harder on the game, have a deeper love for and understanding of the game, and deserve a greater share of accolades. Some of my fondest memories are of those periods when I was most engrossed in chess. Hours would go without my being aware of their passing as I played or studied intricacies. Losing track of time while immersed in chess fills me with a satisfaction so profound—for me the way being alive is supposed to feel.

9

European Divas

Sexy, self-confident, sociable…can we be talking about a professional chessplayer?

— Journalist Sarah Hurst on Grandmaster Stefanova

Nineteen-year-old Antoaneta was wearing a black wool jacket over her waifish frame on our way to a nightclub in a cab. The next day, Christmas 1998, was an off day from the tournament in Groningen, a Dutch college town. I was seventeen at the time and intimidated by Antoaneta, but after a couple of drinks I was loosening up and we began to talk. With her enchanting Bulgarian accent, dimpled smile, and quick wit, Antoaneta Stefanova has such charm that it is hard to meet her without wondering, How cool can you get? Already among the top ten women players in the world, Antoaneta—before hitting the dance floor—told me, “I prefer to beat men.”

Antoaneta (pronounced Antwaneta, and shortened by friends to“Ety”) was born in 1979 in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where, at the age of four, she learned to play chess from her father. Her remarkable talent for the game was clearly demonstrated when she swept the 1989 World Girls’ Under 12 Championship in Puerto Rico with a perfect score of 11-0. “I was winning all my games and very happy!”

Antoaneta extracts pure pleasure from winning, which I observed after playing her in a tournament in Spain a few years ago. Though an underdog, I was holding on to my position until she took a risk in mutual time pressure, sacrificing a pawn to gain control of the dark squares surrounding my King. This threw the game into a mad scramble. Under tremendous pressure, I eventually blundered. After the game, Antoaneta and I went to a restaurant with some Israeli friends. Glowing with the pleasure of victory, Antoaneta lingered over her tiramisu, luxuriating in what she calls “my fifteen minutes of feeling good about myself.”

Later in that tournament, I was introduced to Antoaneta’s sharp sense of humor. Waiting for a taxi outside a disco at around 5:00 a.m., Antoaneta impatiently complained: “When will this stupid fricking taxi get here?” causing one friend to tease her. “Ety—you’re so negative…” “Oh, sorry,” she quipped, “where is the very nice and highly intelligent taxi?”

Now in her twenties, Antoaneta Stefanova is one of the most active professional female chessplayers in the world. A typical yearly travel schedule (2002-2003) for Ety included trips to Argentina, Turkey, Russia, India, Israel, Indonesia, Curaçao, and nearly every country in Western Europe. Although Antoaneta usually prefers hot climates, she has recently added Iceland to her list of favorite countries. In the spring of 2002 Antoaneta and I were both there for the biennial Reykjavik Open, a strong international tournament. The Icelandic Chess Federation went to great lengths to support women players, inviting women from around the world and paying all expenses.

This was not my first trip to Iceland. In 1995, I played in a friendly chess match between American and Icelandic high-schoolers. I turned fifteen in the midst of the spectacular Icelandic celebration of New Year’s Eve. I was hanging out with teenaged Icelandic chessplayers, who were drinking beer while I sipped Coca-Cola. All over the country, families and friends gathered early in the evening to light roaring bonfires. By midnight the skies were lit up with fireworks. Iceland, a depressing place in the winter when days can remain black for as long as twenty-four hours, has one of the highest alcoholism and suicide rates in the world. One Icelandic master explained darkly, “In Icelandic winters, we don’t drink to have fun.”

Antoaneta Stefanova. (Photo by Victoria Johannson.)

This time, it’s March, and Iceland was on the cusp of spring. The event was held at the city hall in the center of Reykjavik. An hour early for my first game, I ordered an expresso in the café adjacent to the playing hall, where wide windows looked out on the icy landscape, and I could see school children skating on a pond. By the time of my last game the ice had melted.

Antoaneta had a below-par result in Reykjavik, but still managed to enjoy the virtues and vices of Iceland. The healthy lifestyle of fresh food included the finest salmon in the world. Clean, crisp Arctic air contrasted with the vibrant nightlife of smoky discotheques. We stayed at a mega disco till early in the morning, relieving the stress of six days of chess. Just before departing from Iceland, Antoaneta and I visited the famous Blue Lagoon Geothermal Pools, where tourists and locals bathed in the open air in all seasons. As the end of her stay in Iceland drew near, Antoaneta wasn’t sure she was ready to leave: “Iceland is one of the most interesting places I’ve been in a while and I would like to see more of it. But,” she added, “when I am in the same country for more than a week and a half, it feels strange, like it’s time to go.” At tournament’s end, she was off.

Antoaneta is unusual in the highest echelons of women’s chess in that she generally travels alone. I asked her why she rarely brings a coach, and she says that it is often prohibitively expensive. She also feels freer when traveling alone, explaining, “When I bring a coach I often feel more responsible for my results. I can easily become nervous and play badly.” Many coaches would also have problems with her free-spirited behavior. “I travel to chess tournaments ten months out of the year,” Antoaneta told me. “Wouldn’t it be a shame if I didn’t enjoy myself?”

If there is a discotheque near the tournament site, Ety is likely to be there, dancing to the pounding music and flashing lights. She smokes Cartiers and drinks Bacardis. Time permitting between moves, Antoaneta heads for the hallway, where she can puff on a cigarette while contemplating her position. When she was a teenager, Johnnie Walker sponsored her tournament expenses. Antoaneta has recently toned down a little. “When I was younger I used to be able to go out every night and still play well, but now if I go out more than two nights in a row it will show in my results.”

A major milestone for Antoaneta was to achieve the grandmaster title. She made her first norm during a trip to the United States by tying for second at the 1997 Hawaii International. The U.S. chess circuit was impressed by the young Bulgarian, who celebrated her eighteenth birthday during that tournament. In the weeks before Hawaii, Antoaneta had played in open tournaments in New York and Las Vegas on her first and only trip to mainland America, where she did not enjoy herself at all. She did not plan to return until she turned twenty-one, when she could legally enter bars and clubs.

Antoaneta struggled for a few years before earning her second norm in a round-robin tournament held in Salou, Spain. Her third norm came soon after in the 2001 Andorra Open, where she tied for first. She was awarded the title in 2002. At twenty-three, Antoaneta Stefanova became the eighth woman to gain the grandmaster title.

The twenty-first century found Antoaneta Stefanova among the highest ranked Bulgarian players, male or female. For the 2000 Olympiad in Istanbul, rather than agree to play first board on the three-board women’s team, Antoaneta accepted an invitation as a reserve on the mixed team. In Bulgaria, where the popularity of chess is similar to that of Olympic figure skating in the United States, an angry press attacked her decision. She could not think straight in Istanbul, Ety tells me, because of critics who wanted her to play on the women’s squad, where they thought she would contribute more points. Despite winning only three out of seven points in Istanbul, Antoaneta was able to play against tougher competition and was convinced she had made the right decision. “If I had to do it over again, I would do the same thing.”

As of June 2002, in spite of Antoaneta’s high ranking, she had never won a major women’s tournament. That year the European women’s championship was to be held in Varna, Bulgaria, a seaside resort lying on the shore of Varna Bay on the Black Sea, once a favorite spot of Bobby Fischer. The first prize of $12,000 attracted most of the top women players in Europe. Onlookers were rooting for Antoaneta, the hometown favorite. She would not disappoint. Antoaneta was in fine form, scoring 6.5 points from the first seven games. She eased into first place with draws in the last three rounds. The championship was the jewel in a crown of excellent results throughout 2002 and 2003. Her FIDE rating peaked at 2560, and when the April 2003 rating list was published, Antoaneta Stefanova had become the second-ranked woman in the world.

In the summer of 2003 Antoaneta discussed her recent successes with me, speaking with characteristic candor: “I made some good decisions in my life, for instance, moving my home base back to Sofia, where my friends and family are instead of living in some stupid place in Spain.” That place was Salou, a resort town near Barcelona. Salou’s spectacular beaches and discos provided good times as well as convenient access to strong European tournaments. But Antoaneta missed too many elements of her own culture and decided that she had to go back to her roots.

The adventurous spirit that sparks Antoaneta’s behavior also appears in her style over the chessboard, especially in her early years, when she liked to play offbeat openings. The lines were not theoretically challenging, but were likely to catch unprepared opponents off-guard and leave them frustrated. “How could you live with yourself playing chess like this?” one opponent wondered out loud during a blitz game. Antoaneta was playing one of her favorite systems, the London, an extremely solid opening that is difficult for many players to fight against. “Oh believe me, I can live with myself,” she said and then proceeded to crush him. Antoaneta now plays more conventional lines, and writes off her earlier opening strategies to laziness. “At some point I just realized I didn’t have the discipline to study the main lines in depth,” she said. She believed her natural skill would give her an edge and that she would score more points with sidelines.

Antoaneta’s strength, both over the chessboard and in her personal life, has allowed her not only to survive in the male-dominated arena of European Open tournaments, but also to thrive there. She told me, “I’d rather do feminist things than talk about feminism.” Antoaneta is not afraid to confront tournament organizers and journalists, as I discovered when interviewing her. At the time, a question I’d used in other interviews seemed entirely reasonable to me and so I asked her, “What is your favorite [chess] piece?” Even though Antoaneta and I have been friends since we met at a tournament in 1998 in Holland, she gave me a withering look as though I’d gone mad, then said, “I can’t believe that you—as a chessplayer—asked me that.” She added, “When journalists in Bulgaria ask me questions like that, I tell them to learn something about chess and then come back for an interview.”

At least I didn’t make the mistake of trying to interview her too early in the day. Antoaneta, who usually prepares at night and sleeps until just before a game, was outraged when an organizer once tried to schedule an interview for her in the morning. “What—they want me to get no sleep and lose my game?” The interview was rescheduled.

She does not tolerate disrespect. At one tournament, I ran into an angry Antoaneta, who had just spoken with a Lebanese organizer. He wanted her to come to Lebanon for a month to give exhibitions and play in a tournament. She was offered a paltry sum for her services and, to make matters worse, she would have to play in a tournament with opponents far below her level. When Antoaneta explained that her Elo rating was 2550, and she deserved better pay and better competition, the organizer challenged her: “But that’s 2550 Elo for women, right?” There has never been a separate Elo rating system for women. After this insult, Antoaneta walked off without further negotiations.

In Europe, playing chess professionally is a viable occupation. All year long there are tournaments where prize money, free room and board, and sometimes sizeable appearance fees are offered to top female chessplayers. To hone their skills, the top players must endure demanding playing schedules that often require sleeping in several different countries each month, a lifestyle that is not for everyone. Judit Polgar commands a large enough appearance fee to make her living by playing in just five or six tournaments a year, but still thinks that “traveling is the worst part about being a professional chessplayer.” To those who long to see the world, this may seem hard to believe, but “the dream-life gets old,” says Grandmaster Artur Kogan, a globetrotting professional.

Antoaneta adapts well to a schedule that is at once grueling and glamorous, and even sets herself a yearly goal to visit two countries she has never seen before. Still, the traveling and focused activity wears on her, and she often talks about switching to another field. Her main academic interest is in psychology, but recently she has completed a course in business and gotten involved in Bulgarian real estate. She tells me that she will move away from chess when it feels right, not after she accomplishes any particular goal. But she is certain that her lifestyle will not last forever. “Come on,” she says, “I am not going to be playing and traveling to tournaments like this when I’m seventy.”

The relationships formed on the professional chess circuit tend to be both sporadic and intense. At tournaments, old friends pick up where they left off, even when years have separated their last meeting. The friendships are further complicated since players are often competing against one another for prizes and invitations. Almira Skripchenko is one of the top European women players is also one of the most popular players on the tour.

Almira was born in 1975 in Moldova, a country once part of the USSR, separated from Romania on the west by the Prut River and surrounded on the north, east, and south by the Ukraine. She is the daughter of a chess family. Her mother is a woman international master and her father is a chess politician.

In 1994 at the Moscow Olympiad she began a romance with Joel Lautier, the top grandmaster from France. When they married in October 1997, Almira moved from her native Moldova to Paris. By then she was one of the top female players in the world. Besides chess, the couple shared an interest in the cinema, literature, and philosophy. Both approach life with an intensity bordering on hedonistic. In explaining to me why he took up smoking for a few months, Joel described it as “another pleasure” to add to an apparently already lengthy list. To Almira, who is interested in art and fashion, Paris is a cultural playground where, she says, “I could spend most of my days in museums.” Both are adept at languages. Joel spoke fluent Russian, and Almira was quick to learn French. The young couple has since separated (in June 2002). The two are still good friends, and live on the same block in Paris.

Almira Skripchenko.

In September 2003, Almira—along with her ex-husband, Lautier, and three other grandmasters living in France, including World Champion Vladimir Kramnik—formed the Association for Chess Professionals (ACP).  The mission of the young organization, which now has about 300 members, was to improve conditions for chessplayers and to determine ethical standards. The ACP, for example, protested FIDE’s decision to host the 2004 World Championship in Libya, where Israeli players could not participate. Almira’s easy interaction with others and social skills were qualities well suited for her entry into the arena of chess politics.  Joel was appointed the president of the organization and Almira became the treasurer.

Giving a woman such a leadership position is already in sharp contrast to FIDE, where Joel points out that “female representation is virtually nonexistent.” Indeed in attending an opening ceremony for the World Women’s Championship organized by FIDE, I was expecting to hear at least one motivational talk or one welcoming speech from a woman organizer or supporter. I was disappointed to see six men in suits, standing side by side, who gave all the speeches. In ACP’s view, promoting women chessplayers is crucial if chess is to be integrated into mainstream culture. The very first tournaments that ACP sponsored included blitz tournaments and rapid events for women. ACP also announced that their nine-person board would always include at least two women.

A current appointee on the ACP board is Latvian-American player Anna Hahn, a childhood friend of Almira’s, who was her roommate at many world youth championships. Still good friends, Almira and Anna make a point to see each other often. When I went to Anna Hahn’s twenty-fifth birthday party at a friend’s apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, I was amazed to see Almira there. She had surprised Anna by flying in from Paris to celebrate her birthday.

Almira does not have the fierceness of Antoaneta, admitting that she suffered from a tendency to accept draws against players who were higher-ranked than she, even when her position was better. When she played against one of her many friends, the game often ended in a quick draw. It was difficult, she said “to be comfortable with my aggression.” Almira’s big breakthrough came at a tournament in 2000, in Italy, where she gained her first norm toward the grandmaster title. “Instrumental to my improvement,” said Almira, “was developing an aggression and being able to separate my conduct off the board from my conduct on the board.” She attributes the change in her attitude to the influence of philosopher Ayn Rand, whose fictional bestsellers The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are built around the theme that individual development and creativity are primary over empathy. “For instance, in the past I was sometimes peaceful, and would even feel pity for my opponent. Ayn Rand’s books and her philosophy helped me to respect myself as an individual.” In Italy she refused every draw offer. Soon afterward in Macedonia, Almira won the 2001 European Women’s Championship.

In 2003 Almira Skripchenko and Antoaneta Stefanova were among more than one hundred young female chess stars from thirty-one different European countries to arrive in Turkey for the European Women’s Championship. The variety of individual personalities on the European women’s chess circuit makes the annual European championships a much-anticipated contest. The 2003 competition was held in Kumburgaz, a suburb west of Istanbul. The players stayed in the Princess Marine, a four-star hotel housed in a luxurious pink high-rise, which looked entirely out of place on the desolate stretch of unmanicured highway. Among the favorites were the champions from the previous two years, Almira and Antoaneta, along with established players Alisa Galliamova from Russia and Pia Cramling from Sweden. The field was rounded out with a bevy of young stars, including twenty-year-old Victoria Cmiltye from Lithuania, eighteen-year-old Elisabeth Paehtz from Germany, and Tatiana and Nadezhda, the teenaged Kosintseva sisters from Russia.

Alisa Galliamova had a spectacular start, winning 6.5 games out of her first seven against some of the strongest players in the tournament: Pia Cramling; Corina Peptan; and the Georgians, Ketevan Arakhamia and Nino Kurtsidze. Thirty-four-years old at the time, Galliamova is quiet, modest, and devout, covering her head with a scarf while she plays. By the time I arrived to watch the ninth of thirteen scheduled rounds, Alisa was leading the event by two full points. According to the Swiss format, players with similar scores play one another. Galliamova was so far ahead that she could lock up the gold medal with a few draws against her final opponents. In round nine, she was able to draw with the black pieces against a frustrated Stefanova, moving her closer to the championship. But in the next rounds, she faltered. She played a quiet system with white against Viktorija Cmilyte, who responded with a violent attack and a victory. Tatiana Kosintseva, whose solid play and steady nerves had earned her the nickname “The Rock,” ended Alisa’s chances in the eleventh round with an elegant Queen sacrifice in an already dominant position. What appeared a few rounds before to be a clear-cut victory for Alisa Galliamova had turned into a complicated free-for-all with as many as four women contending for the title.

It was the thirteenth and final round, with twenty-year-old Victoria Cmiltye and the teenaged Tatiana Kosintseva tied for first place. According to the Swiss format, they should have played each other, but since they had already played earlier in the tournament (a draw), they had to be paired against different opponents. Cmiltye drew her game against young Marie Sebag from France. Meanwhile, Kosintseva lost to Swedish Grandmaster Pia Cramling. This left Victoria Cmilyte tied with Pia Cramling. A sudden-death playoff would decide the winner of the prestigious title and the $12,000 purse. The first game ended in a draw, but Cramling won the second. It was over. Pia Cramling prevailed over all the young stars to become the 2003 European women’s champ. The chess world, so used to victories by young women players, was stirred up by the success of Cramling, who two months before had turned forty.

Pia is a mild-mannered, slight woman with ash blond hair. She began her chess career in the 1980s, playing mostly in mixed events. Winning a chess clock in a school tournament at the age of thirteen convinced her that she was destined to master the game. Pia’s goal was to become a respected player among men and women, not to become a women’s champion. In fact, there is no women’s championship in Sweden. She earned the grandmaster title in 1992, a monumental achievement that received little attention in light of the even more impressive feats of the Polgar sisters. Lately, Pia has been playing in women’s tournaments regularly, explaining, “I used to play in very few women’s tournaments, but now the level has increased and it is much more interesting.” It took time for Pia to find her top form. “I used to have a lot of problems playing against women. I got so tense, like I had to prove something.”

Pia does not think of herself as a celebrity. As a teenager, she became annoyed when reporting results was not enough for the Swedish newspapers, who also expected to interview her regularly. “I wanted to be left alone to play chess.” Many of the top women chessplayers share this distaste for publicity. Romanian champion Corina Peptan says, “Fame takes away from freedom. Suddenly you are not a person anymore but a brand, like McDonald’s. It is very hard to feel free if people are looking and pointing at you all the time.”

Antoaneta believes that “chess needs promoting,” and she wants to do her part, but has mixed feelings on the personal consequences of fame. Antoaneta was a guest on the most popular talk show in Bulgaria, which has an audience of two million viewers. After the show aired, she encountered a lot of attention from strangers on the street, which she thought was “funny at first, but then it started to get annoying. I couldn’t walk down the street without someone stopping me. Luckily, people in Bulgaria have very short memories, so the attention only lasted a short while.”

The tendency of the media to dwell on the accomplishments of very young people is exaggerated in the world of women’s chess, where young and attractive women have been so successful. Cathy Forbes remarks, “To put it humorously, women need the right to get old.” When I asked Antoaneta about the way the press tends to concentrate on only young and beautiful female chessplayers, she replied, “What do you expect from the press? If you’re going to beat Kasparov, then you can be anyone, but if you want attention and you can’t beat Kasparov, you’d better be young and beautiful.”

A notable absence at the 2003 European Championship was the famous Russian Alexandra Kosteniuk, who was busy finishing her high-school examinations in Moscow. Kosteniuk plays at the level of a male grandmaster, and is among the top ten female players in the world. By aggresively pursuing publicity, and playing up her good looks and youth, she has become the hottest and most controversial story in chess, also capturing the attention of the mainstream.

I first met Alexandra at the World Youth Festival in Menorca, Spain, when she was thirteen years old. I was fifteen and playing in the Girls’ Under 16 Championship for the United States. Alexandra often came around to visit her friend, Irina Krush, who was also playing for the U.S. in the Under 14 section. Alexandra struck me as a tomboy when I saw her playing blitz with spunk against boys. I remember watching one game where she slammed down her Rook, in a quiet—yet powerful—move, played so instinctively that it could only have come from intense positional training. Alexandra was home-schooled, and her father, Konstantin, a professional chess coach, trained her methodically. Alexandra loved the training so much that during a vacation to the country all she wanted was “to go home and study chess with my dad!”

Alexandra’s competitive streak, combined with intensive homeschooling and training from her father, quickly paid off. In Spain, she won her second world championship. At fourteen, Alexandra won the woman grandmaster title. At fifteen, she became an international master among men. An even bigger success came in the 2001 World Championships, in which she nearly snagged the FIDE Women’s World Championship crown, making it to the final, only losing against Zhu Chen.

It was not only in chess that Alexandra was precocious. At just sixteen, she posed in heavy makeup and a tight black dress with black-and-white checkered belt and choker for a photo series sponsored by FIDE. She was wearing the new so-called “chess uniform.” (Such a costume was never used in official tournament play, and there was no men’s uniform.) Alexandra jumped at the opportunity to model. As a preteen, she told me how she used to mail her photos to model-of-the-year competitions, but never received a response. Those early FIDE photos are disturbingly sexy as Alexandra looks at the camera with alternate pouty and helpless stares. Alexandra now says, “They’re not my favorites now… I feel I was wearing too much makeup.”

Today, Alexandra’s image is still sexy but more refined. In her hometown of Moscow, a photo of her wearing a pale blue evening gown while playing chess on her laptop is plastered all over city billboards in advertisements for the electronics company LG. She has appeared in Russian Vogue, Newsweek, and Elle Girl; and in America, she has been interviewed on CNN and in Time magazine. She is also sponsored by Balmain watches, which markets its watches as “probably the most elegant in the world” and hails Alexandra as the “vice world champion.” The moniker refers both to Alexandra being the second-place finisher in the world championship (as in vice-president), and also her presumably wild, vice-loving personality.

Alexandra tells me that she does not have a personal style, and the thing she likes about fashion and modeling is that for each photo session “a completely different look is achieved.” Her favorite shoot was for the December 2002 edition of Russian Vogue, in which she posed in Paris for fashion photographer Zhenia Minkovich in five different high-fashion outfits. Alexandra is pictured outdoors wearing a low-cut black couture dress and black leather boots with stiletto heels, her hair blowing. In another, Alexandra is strolling down an indoor mall wearing a white dress, a brown suede belt, and brown cowboy boots. “Unfortunately,” she said, “I did not get to keep any of the clothes.”

Alexandra’s life is hectic. In addition to her crowded schedule of photo shoots, chess tournaments, and exhibitions, she has embarked on a third career as a movie star. She had a major role in the movie Bless the Woman (2002), by popular Russian director Stanislav Govorukhin. Alexandra is interested in performing in more movies, though she does not consider it challenging. “It was too easy! I thought it was going to be so difficult because I’m always reading about actresses and actors who talk about how hard it is to act, and how long the hours are. Really, in comparison to chess, it was such a breeze. It was boring, just waiting around a lot.”

Kosteniuk’s frequently updated website—including catalogs of Alexandra’s photo-shoots, game scores, and future tournament and travel schedules—at times verges on pornographic. A photo of Alexandra in a pink thong bikini is labeled simply, “Alexandra is now in Miami!” where she spends a couple months each year. Another shows Alexandra naked from the waist up, with a digital Post-It covering both her breasts. Accompanying text reads, “This picture is too sexy for the website.” Beauty and Chess, her CD-ROM filled with exclusive, high-resolution photos, is sold for $34. Visitors to the site are urged to “Buy it! Do a good action today!” The brilliance of her marketing campaign is its ability to simultaneously promote Alexandra as a sex-bomb and a sweetheart who loves children. A portion of the profits made by her website are donated to Alexandra’s Chess Fund, which promotes chess for children all over the world.

Financially, Alexandra seems to do well—she won’t reveal numbers, but she snickers when I ask if she makes more money than Judit Polgar. “I know I do well; I don’t know anything about how much money Judit makes.” On sale on Alexandra’s site are photographs, jewelry, clothing, even lessons with her father. Her book, How I Became a GM at Age 14, has already sold over 5,000 copies in Russian, and has been translated into Spanish and English. For higher prices, she also sells photos and books with autographs, and as for inscriptions, she insists on “reasonable requests only.” One coach asked for a picture to add to a photo gallery of female chess stars in her classroom, and Alex sent an autographed one free of charge, because the photo was for inner-city children. Unfortunately, it was a sultry shot of her in a bathing suit. Kind though the gesture was, another (less-revealing) photo of Alex was downloaded, printed, and posted on the wall.

Alexandra Kosteniuk. (Photos courtesy Alexandra Kosteniuk.)

Chess journalist Taylor Kingston suggests that Alexandra’s website ought to be renamed “From Russia With Hype,” predicting a “logical progression to a ‘chess cake’ calendar a la Anna Kournikova and ‘fanzine’ articles linking Kosteniuk with a member of, say, *NSYNC.” But Alexandra Kosteniuk, at nineteen, chose as her manager Diego Garces, a skilled marketer more than twice her age. The pair was married in St. Petersburg recently, but Alexandra prefers to be secretive about her personal life. The wedding is probably the only thing that is not chronicled on her extensive website, which is a photo gallery, a biography, a store, and—most amusingly—a diary. Alexandra’s every move is documented and displayed in rudimentary English that sometimes makes the website seem like a beginning English textbook. “Alexandra is smiling because the weather is much better in Paris than it was in Moscow.” “Alexandra is happy to make her debut at the movies.” “Oxana [Alexandra’s sister] is happy to go to the ball too.” “Alexandra is running toward the beach…and jumping in anticipation!”

I was curious about how seriously Alexandra took her image and wondered if she was embarrassed by some aspects of her campaign. I got my chance to find out in a National Scholastic Championship in Chicago, where I was coaching I.S. 318, a national junior-high chess champion team from Brooklyn. Alexandra was there giving a simultaneous and a book-signing. I was eager to satisfy my curiosity about how she really felt about being a chess star/sex symbol. Assuming that Alexandra was charging the organizers exorbitant sums for this, I was resentful, since a number of competent American players (myself, for instance) could make appearances for less.

I went to watch Alexandra give her simultaneous to thirty children. Susan Polgar was also giving an exhibition. I was surprised to see that Alexandra was wearing three-inch heels, but had to laugh when I noticed Susan wearing similar shoes. Apparently Susan and Alexandra were not aware of former U.S. Women Champion Gisela Gresser’s advice to women giving simultaneous exhibitions: “Bring courage and a sensible pair of shoes!”

In chatting with an organizer, I found out that Alexandra was not only giving the simultaneous for free, she was paying for her own hotel room in addition to giving out prizes to the children. It was becoming clear to me that there was much more to Alexandra’s campaign than money. Anxious to arrange some private time with her, I dropped by when she was signing How I Became a GM at 14. Alexandra was gracious and radiant, autographing books and chatting with her fans in the long line of young girls, doting parents, teenage boys, and older men. When the crowd thinned out, I asked if she wanted to meet and maybe play a few blitz games later in the evening. She was enthusiastic, assuring me that although she had a dinner appointment, she would definitely keep our engagement: “When I say yes, I mean yes!” Later that night, I came to her room, spread out the chess set and clock, and started to chat with her and her husband, Diego.

Diego was propped up on the king-size bed, half watching an action movie, occasionally glancing at our blitz games, and mostly working away on Alexandra’s website. He is the sole web designer, pointing out that “it only takes a few months to learn how to do this properly.” Alexandra glowed with pride over her husband’s computer prowess. When I asked her how much input she had into the website, she told me very little. “Sometimes Alexandra does not agree with some of the photos I post there,” Diego teases her, “like they are too sexy. For example the one on the beach. Alexandra must have thought her stomach looked big in it,” Diego said, as if Alexandra could not possibly doubt the appropriateness of a bikini-thong shot, and any objection she has must surely arise from vanity. When disagreements arise between the newlyweds, Alexandra says, Diego always wins her over to his side. “I listen to his thoughts on publicity and politics, and I always agree with him.” Diego, who is rated about 200 points lower than Alexandra, says, “I trust Sasha’s chess evaluations.”1

In the first blitz game with Alexandra, I used one of my favorite openings for black, the Dragon, a risky set-up in which the pawn structure supposedly resembles a dragon. Midway through I became aware of how much I wanted to win. I may have come to her room primarily out of curiosity, but when the clocks started, I was a chessplayer. I outplayed her in the endgame and won a pawn. Alexandra fought back. She checked me, I moved my King to the only available square, and she checked me again, forcing me to return to my King to its previous square. It was perpetual check, one of the paths to a draw. Afterward, she showed me a winning line I had missed. By now, the idea of winning the blitz match had completely seduced me. In the second game, I played a tricky, aggressive line, hoping to catch her off-guard and steal a quick point. It seemed as though it might work. Alexandra then spent nearly two minutes on three or four moves—a luxurious allotment for a five-minute game. She either figured out the moves over the board or recalled them, but in either case she played the late World Champion Mikhail Tal’s recommendation and I lost. She visibly relaxed as we continued to speak about her career and lifestyle.

In their energetic lifestyle I sense Alexandra’s and Diego’s passion is more for the fame and glamour than for the money: for shopping in Paris, lounging in Miami, having a quick vacation in Venice, and doing business in Moscow. Of course, money is required for such a lifestyle, but it seems that money is merely the means for the jet-setting excitement that is the real source of pleasure for the couple. “We always have a plane ticket in our front pockets,” says Diego. “I can’t stand being in the same place for too long,” Alexandra concurs. “We have 336 unanswered e-mails,” Diego says with a laugh. “These days Alexandra gets about a hundred e-mails a day, and we try to answer each and every one of them.” Compared with those chessplayers who can’t be bothered to show up for press conferences, Alexandra and Diego are refreshing in their enthusiastic quest for fame.

Alexandra Kosteniuk. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)

Alexandra and Diego don’t comprehend feminist criticism of their campaign. When I asked Alexandra about her views on feminism, she tells me, “I smile when I hear about feminism. I don’t understand what feminists are fighting for now. Perhaps this was necessary some time ago.” Men’s magazines, including Penthouse and Playboy, contact Alexandra, but Diego says, “We will not allow them to photograph Alexandra, but they are free to choose any photograph from the site.” Playboy magazine will not yet be able to concoct a spread, playing with words such as mate and position. However, the two see no problem in offering interviews or pictures to erotic magazines. “What’s the problem? The questions they ask are the same as usual.”

Alexandra’s website happily accepts her label as the “Anna Kournikova of chess,” a journalist’s moniker that quickly caught on. Both Kosteniuk and the Russian tennis star are at the center of debates about publicity. Anna Kournikova appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in June 2000, causing heated criticism from feminists who pointed out that male athletes are not “stuffed into tight-fitting uniforms that display their genitalia as a way of getting more women to buy magazines.” Feminist cultural critic Michael Messner argued in his book Taking the Field that it is too simplistic to assert that women like Kournikova and Kosteniuk are “disempowered dupes who have allowed themselves to be ‘objectified’ by a powerful cultural system.” The diversity of feminist viewpoints, he explains, should not be confused with one specific strand of anti-sex feminism. Powerful women athletes may see no contradiction in being both an attractive woman and a formidable player. Alexandra enjoys modeling, playing chess, and being famous, and believes these things are compatible.

Alexandra has no problem separating her sexy image from her serious chess play. She is intent on reaching the level of a strong grandmaster, and when she is not in a tournament, she trains for up to six hours a day. At chess tournaments she dresses professionally. She wears thick glasses and expensive-looking business suits, dressed as if she is about to have a power lunch. In Alexandra’s position, she will garner criticism no matter what she does. If she wore skimpy outfits, she would be criticized for dressing unprofessionally. As it is, people chide her for appearing so plain at tournaments and at the same time fancying herself as the Anna Kournikova of chess. I’ve heard people remark that Alexandra “is no Kournikova.” In other words, she is not blond, not blue-eyed, not long-legged, and not as big-chested as Kournikova. Kosteniuk, slender with classic features, does not fit as perfectly into the narrow ideal of female sex-symbol beauty as Kournikova, but she does a good enough job. As Alexandra said: “I am clever, so I can play chess; and I am not so ugly, so I can model.”2 When I ask her if it is difficult to concentrate on chess with all her publicity, she denies a conflict, explaining that when she is playing chess, she is completely focused on the game.

Alexandra believes that “chess deserves better” but that chessplayers tend to talk about promoting the game without doing anything. According to Alexandra, her initiatives in publicity have not been embraced by most chessplayers. She told me, “I have no female friends in chess anymore. They are all so jealous of me. I show people my photos and they say things like ‘Wow, it’s amazing what photography, lighting, and makeup can do,’ as if the quality of the photos has nothing to do with my personality or style.” Alexandra says that she hears what others say behind her back, but no one in the chess world is brave enough to criticize her to her face: “Not one person has ever said something straight to me.”

But there is more behind the criticism of Alexandra’s publicity tactics than jealousy. The stereotype that competitive women are unfeminine can cause some participants to bend over backwards to flaunt their sexuality. This reassertion of femininity may be a free choice, but it plays out within a larger context with attention and money on the line. I avoided a knee-jerk reaction of disapproval because, from a feminist perspective, I find nothing wrong with Alexandra being proud of her looks. However, she goes too far on her website, creating the impression that clothes, makeup, and modeling are more important to her than chess variations, thus perpetuating the idea that a woman’s most essential quality is her appearance. Encouraging men to ogle at Alexandra is an easy way for amateurs to forget that Kosteniuk could destroy them over the board. The stereotypes of female inferiority that Alexandra bashes with her play are thus covered with her smiling, sultry shots. While this does promote chess to the mainstream, it doesn’t necessarily help all women chessplayers. Less-attractive players, or those who are unwilling to play up their looks, might be left with little attention and few endorsements and invitations.

Both chess and non-chess media focus on the looks of young female players, a phenomenon that chess journalist Mig Greengard derisively calls the “Lolita factor.” The Lolita factor was on full display at a match between Kosteniuk and German Elisabeth Paehtz held in Mainz, Germany, in August 2002 when both girls were seventeen. Officially the match between Elisabeth and Alexandra was termed the “Duel of the Graces” and unofficially “The Duel of the Cuties.” Most important to the press were the looks and sex appeal of the young players. Though not quite so well known or high ranked as Kosteniuk, Paehtz is famous in Germany and is a frequent guest on German talk shows. If Kosteniuk is the pop star of chess, Paehtz is the closest thing the game has to a rock star. She likes to go out, knows all the gossip, and dresses in funky outfits, including a signature black-leather hat pulled over her cropped red hair. “Playgirl” is her nickname on the Internet. Often blunt to the point of hilarity, she once complained to me about how her loose tongue got her into trouble with journalists: “They made me look like an arrogant girl who parties all the time and only beats grandmasters who are drunk!”

The hairstyles and outfits of the attractive teens were scrutinized round by round, while their actual play was often dealt with as a sidebar—a shame considering how thrilling the games were. Both Kosteniuk and Paehtz have extremely aggressive chess styles and are most comfortable in wide-open games with lots of tactics, and in each round of the match, both girls played as if they might never get another chance to play a chess game. Both exchanged blows, each winning three games. The remaining two games were exciting draws. Since the match was tied, a blitz playoff determined the winner, who turned out to be Kosteniuk. A disappointed Elisabeth was unprepared for the surge of media attention the match got. She later complained to me that reporters would try to get her to say mean things about Alexandra to report in the papers the next day. In one instance, when Paehtz was asked what she thought of Alexandra’s glamour photographs, she snapped, “Anyone can look good with that much makeup.” Concurrent with the Kosteniuk-Paehtz match was a match between FIDE world champions Ruslan Ponomariov and Viswanathan Anand. This match was advertised as a serious match between grandmasters in which Ponomariov was never once asked what he thought of Anand’s outfit.

Elisabeth “would like to play against Kosteniuk again,” but intimated to me that she hopes in the future “the matches will have more to do with chess.”

The media frenzy over the Kosteniuk-Paehtz match is typical of the atmosphere at any chess tournament in which young, attractive girls participate. Throughout the chess world, chatter about the looks of the top women players is constant, usually complimentary, but sometimes nasty. When two women players contest a chess match, the live commentary from spectators on the Internet often focuses more on their bodies and whether they are hot or doable than on chess variations. Even the best female player in the world is vulnerable to criticism: one grandmaster criticized changes in Judit Polgar’s figure, using inappropriate gestures and language. Polgar is a stronger player than he, and his comments sounded as though they were meant to put Judit in her place. The message is that Polgar may have money, fame, and brains, but she is still a woman and as such is open to nasty attacks on her physical being. I’ve had my own experiences with such unkind remarks. On one newsgroup, I was both horrified and amused to find someone describe me as “pretty, smart, but fat.” The “but fat” caused me to scream, “I’m not fat,” and then to ask, “but so what if I were?”

ChessBase.com, the most popular chess news source in the world with over 50,000 daily visitors, covers the top tournaments in the world, along with exhibition matches, chess politics, and instructional briefings. There is a heavy emphasis on showing off young and beautiful chess-playing women, though their games and quotes are rarely included beside their photos. The site loves Alexandra Kosteniuk, who is hailed as the ultimate “chess-playing babe.” Every few months ChessBase posts a new series of photos of Kosteniuk. In 2002, in the annual ChessBase player-of-the-year contest, fans selected Alexandra Kosteniuk as the winner—she edged out Kasparov by a hair. Frederic Friedel, who is the editor and founder of ChessBase, congratulated Kosteniuk “on her convincing win over Kasparov,” the subtext being that Kosteniuk would never beat Kasparov in a game that didn’t involve photos.

Kosteniuk is not the only darling of the ChessBase website which often posts photos of other pretty, smiling young women, preferably in bikinis. One headline, “Bikini chess championship in Ukraine,” featured “dazzling pictures of young women GMs and IMs in beachside circumstances.” In another news item, ChessBase profiled an eighteen-year-old Siberian master, Ksenya Rybenko. Her respectable rating of 2260 FIDE was never mentioned in the report because her “vital statistics” were determined to be her measurements, weight, and height, which were duly noted. The picture gallery includes a photo of Ksenya holding a gun and another of her lounging on a Thai beach in a bikini.

ChessBase came very close to crossing the line into straight up porno when it reproduced an interview with a thirty-year old Russian master, Maria Manakova, who calls herself a “sex specialist.” She had posed nearly nude for the cover of a Russian tabloid magazine, Speed. This resulted in a spate of interviews, one of which, titled “Sex and Chess,” was filled with ludicrous questions about whether or not Maria travels with her husband so she can have sex during tournaments, and whether there are any “real men” among the top male players. Another burning inquiry was, “A chess game usually lasts for four hours or more—is there enough time for sex?” Maria’s responses included: “A woman should always be a woman,” “Maybe I’m a bit perverted,” and “We are not so strong as men, so we should cash in on our beauty, don’t you agree?”

“I love to eat Bishops,” reads the headline of the Speed cover. A strong chess-playing woman is certainly made less threatening when she is half-naked and her image emphasizes her fondness of oral sex. The intellectual threat of a woman chessplayer is thus undercut—Maria Manakova’s image is an extreme example of the tendency to downplay the intelligence of female players, to celebrate their physical beauty and sex appeal instead.

Women and men with a range of levels of feminist sympathies read such news items, even if they are offended by them. My brother, who was particularly outraged by the news item on Manakova, told me, “Now I have to avoid reading ChessBase—that’s the only way to make a point of this.” But others (including myself), who lack the firm resolve of my brother, pay attention to such things, even as we criticize them, because sex and controversy are entertaining reading. Using such news items to lure readers is an effective but juvenile tactic, tantamount to trying to get attention for a junior-high school fundraising drive by holding up a sign with SEX in big block letters. Okay, I looked, but I’m not buying any candy.

In an interview with a world-class grandmaster from Russia, Vladimir Tkachiev, ChessBase found a way to display its self-proclaimed “sleaze alert.” Vladimir has movie-star good looks and is proud of his bon-vivant lifestyle, including a love for alcohol and women. The interview ends with a discussion of the best-looking girls in chess, and with what ChessBase founder Frederic Friedel calls a “humorously sexist note.”

“Among the girls who could compete for the beauty contest title are Kosteniuk, of course, and then the big favorites are [Dana] Reizniece, a Latvian player who is a very spectacular woman, and Shirov’s wife, Victoria Cmilyte. Another big favorite is Regina Pokorna, who is a child-woman, an eternal girl. The reason there are so many beautiful women playing chess these days is because the game has become faster and faster. As Tal said, it was always too difficult for women to play chess because during the games they are forced to keep silent. Now the games are much quicker and it has become easier to shut up during the games [laughs uproariously].”

Disclaiming his interview as “humorously sexist” is typical of Frederic Friedel, who knows that the way ChessBase presents women is over the top and leaves the site open to criticism. Therefore, the presentations are done in such a light-hearted way that any critics are likely to be called “Feminazis”—moral crusaders out to win an argument, while stunting the development of chess.

As ChessBase became more popular, more readers mailed in complaints to the site, which Frederic published, along with his responses. One reader wrote, “I’m just tired of seeing ChessBase objectifying female chessplayers. I don’t think that is the best way to make chess more popular or for that matter to attract more women to this male-dominated sport.” In response to the criticism, Frederic asked a litany of questions, “You really want us to become one of the boring run-of-the-mill sites that the world ignores? You really want chess to stay permanently out of the mainstream? Restricted to studious people with no interest in the many non-chess aspects of human life?”

Frederic thought sexy news items would actually increase female interest in the game, since “it eliminates the century-old cliché that chess is a game played by boring old fogies and women’s chess by elderly matrons. They see that perfectly normal—in fact, pretty—girls participate in the game.” He continues, “In every area of human life and entertainment the media celebrates beautiful women,” but that can depress adolescent girls, whose self-esteems dip when they read fashion magazines.

Irina Krush and Jennifer Shahade, Viewing Room Gallery, New York, 2003. (Photo by Paul Truong.)

I think that chess can do better than imitate the worst aspects of mainstream culture. There are ways to show that chessplayers can be hip and attractive without stooping to bikini shots and measurements. In conversation with Friedel, I expressed my disapproval with some of the content of his site. He attacked me: “Aren’t you interested in promoting chess?” and then challenged me: “I thought that you would understand chess needs promoting, with all the wigs you wear.” Friedel was referring to a match I played with Irina Krush in the Viewing Room art gallery (also covered on ChessBase), in which we wore white and black outfits, from our shoes to pageboy wigs. I considered the event both a chess match and a performance. The atmosphere was festive. There were a dozen brightly colored abstract paintings on the walls. Spectators from art and chess circles sipped wine, ate cookies, and mingled as Irina and I played.

The two-game match was competitive despite the artistic focus of the event. Irina won the first game convincingly, while I fought back from a losing position in the second, tying the match. Usually when non-chessplayers come to tournaments, they are struck by the oddness of two people sitting down, staring at the chessboard for hours on end. I wanted our event to highlight that strangeness. Two young girls all dressed up, staring at a chessboard instead of the camera.

It’s not all black and white, as Grandmaster Susan Polgar points out: “We all have different limits as to how far it is acceptable to promote chess through feminine beauty.” Promoting young and attractive women chessplayers is not in itself objectionable. After all, much of Garry Kasparov’s fame in the mainstream press is because of his confident swagger, good looks, and luminous energy. However, there is a line with him and other male players that one dares not cross. Journalists and fans don’t go around commenting on the size of Kasparov’s cock. In the chess world, the sexuality of the top male players is private and implied, while discussion of a woman’s sexuality is open to all.

10

Checkmate Around the World

Some people call me ‘bitch’ for playing with boys all the time. But it’s the only way I can get proper training; so they can call me names until they get tired—they always do.

— Linda Nangwale from Zambia

I am in Budapest, Hungary, losing game after game in the August 2003 edition of the monthly “First Saturday” tournaments. I came in the hopes of earning my third norm toward the international master title. My living conditions are more suitable to socializing than competing against seasoned grandmasters. I am staying in a dingy hostel with college students on their summer breaks and Japanese teenagers on whirlwind tours of Europe. All-night revelers awaken me at all hours. I decide that since I can’t sleep, I might as well join the fun.

I’ve become friends with a waiter in a nearby restaurant called Noa, which serves fancy salads and sandwiches to well-heeled tourists and stylish Europeans. In Hungary, chess is popular and the best players are national heroes, so when my waiter, Arpi, started talking with me, I mentioned that I was here for a chess tournament, and also to conduct some interviews. Arpi immediately began to gossip about the two top players in Hungary, Judit Polgar and Peter Leko. Arpi is tall and blond and has movie-star good looks. I can’t help but think that this wild and charismatic twenty-four-year-old would be successful—even famous—if he lived in more prosperous circumstances. In Budapest he seems exhausted from working double shifts and he expresses his disquiet by self-destructing. When we go out, he tends to order a shot of tequila, a beer, and a double espresso. In between gulps of this fatal combination he puffs one cigarette after another. Arpi yearns to live in North America. He seems jaded by the sentiment that his beloved Budapest is irreparably corrupt. While waiting tables at a break-neck pace, he points out some muscled, tattooed men, who are sipping beers at a nearby table. Arpi whispers, “They are part of the mafia that protects this place—they never pay for anything.”

In Hungary, corruption is also evident in the top tiers of chess, since resources are so limited. It is rumored that unscrupulous and desperate professionals can sometimes buy the coveted final IM and GM norms, which will secure invitations and respect for them. Opponents with nothing special to gain from a win are sometimes willing to accept a fee to lose on purpose. When some of my American chess friends heard I was going to Budapest, one advised me not to play in the tournament because of its poor reputation, while another joked: “Make sure to bring enough money to buy your last IM norm.”

When in Budapest, I never once encountered anyone being offered the opportunity to buy norms and suspect that it must have been the crooked practices of just a few chessplayers that gave rise to the myth that Budapest is a “norm factory.”

Several chessplayers from Iceland, the United States, and Russia told me stories of another kind of Hungarian swindle. An Icelandic master was drunk at a bar when a beautiful Hungarian girl asked if he would buy her some champagne. He obliged. Thirty minutes later, he was shocked to find that the bill came to $500. When he explained that he didn’t have the cash on hand, a few friendly members of the mafia escorted him to an ATM machine. An American chessplayer, who had fallen for a similar con, tried calling the police. They laughed and told him, “There is nothing to be done.” Arpi just shook his head knowingly when I told him about the refusal of the police to intervene. “To get any kind of justice here,” he said, “you have to go back to the mafia.” It is hard for Arpi to imagine that anyone would choose to live in Budapest. He says derisively of the post-Cold War influx of Asian immigrants: “Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants who couldn’t get into America or Western Europe come here.”

Budapest is the center of the chess universe, a prime destination for ambitious young players. It is close to major tournaments in the Czech Republic and Germany and not too far from Russia, Holland, and Spain. Every month, world-class tournaments are held on the second floor of a non-descript building on Budapest’s antique row, where the Budapest Chess Club is housed. Players from five continents regularly come to the spacious club with big windows and sturdy furniture to chase their final grandmaster and international master norms. For Vietnamese Hoang Trang Tranh (Trang is the given name), the tenth-rated woman player in the world and former Asian champion (2000), Budapest is an ideal place to live. Hoang Trang earned two grandmaster norms in First Saturday tournaments in 1999 and 2000, and also reached a rating near 2500, the minimum requirement for the GM title. She expected the GM title to follow quickly. But in the past couple of years, her rating has dropped and the final norm has proved elusive. Now that her results are improving again, Hoang Trang feels that she is coming out of her slump.

Hoang Trang. (Photo by Arvind Aaron.)

Trang and I meet at Europa, a café on a bustling street in Budapest. Trang is a petite, upbeat twenty-three-year-old, who speaks in a soft voice. Wearing small glasses, she arrives dressed in a trendy jean jacket and maroon dress decorated with printed elephants, which her mother brought from Thailand. She cannot devote much time to shopping since she spends four to six hours a day studying chess, and another few hours on the administration of her family’s two businesses, in chess training and trade. “My mother works in commerce between Vietnam and Hungary, and she always knows how to pick good clothes for me.”

Europa is an apt, if somewhat forced, name for this posh Hungarian café. Hungary was not yet fully European. (On May 1, 2004, Hungary was accepted into the European Union, with partial privileges to start.) But the international crowd, rich pastries, and plush surroundings are decidedly post-communist. From a sumptuous selection, Trang selects a slice of cake with raspberries along with peach tea. I am on my third cup of coffee of the day, at which Trang marvels: “Coffee has always been repellent to me, though I wish I liked it.”

Hoang Trang is reflective about the differences between us. About fifteen minutes after settling down across a white marble table from each other, Hoang Trang confesses that she is bewildered by my note-taking. Apparently, I had not made my intentions completely clear. I felt slightly guilty that she did not understand I was eager to grill her on her life and opinions. She thought I just wanted to hang out. Trang explained that I look like I go out a lot, shop a lot, lounge in coffee shops, lifestyle choices that are special treats for her: “Usually I am too serious to meet up casually with friends, but my boyfriend urged me to come meet you. He said, ‘Hang out with the American girl! Enjoy yourself!’”

Recently, Hoang Trang met her first serious boyfriend when doing administrative work for her parents. He is a Vietnamese foreign-exchange student in architecture, who, according to Trang, identifies himself as an artist: “He is not as serious as I am. He only applies himself when he’s really interested, in which case he will spend all day and night working. I, on the other hand, study chess every day, whether or not I feel inspired. He does what he wants to do, and I do what I need to do.” To Trang, being Vietnamese is as important to her identity as being a chessplayer. “I need a boyfriend who is Vietnamese more than a chessplayer, because in any relationship, problems will arise. Being from the same culture makes them easier to overcome.”

The government supports chess in Vietnam. Trang describes a typical schedule for Vietnamese chess school as grueling. The morning begins at 6:00 a.m. with two hours of running, followed by eight hours of chess with a break for lunch. Trang thinks the system sometimes puts too much pressure on players, which can be detrimental to results. Her father, also her main coach, is more relaxed. “My father understands that a chessplayer who is sitting down to play obviously wants to win.”

Trang’s father, Hoang Minh Chuong, emphasizes the psychological aspects of the game. For a while, Trang experienced some difficulties playing against women. “I realized at some point that my chess was suffering because when I played against male players I would work very hard, but against women players, even though I thought I was playing my best, deep down inside I thought that I should beat them pretty easily because I played so well against men. My father told me then that I have to add 100 points to a woman’s rating in my mind when I play. I did this, and the problem was solved. Now I automatically respect women as serious, worthy opponents.”

Haong Trang’s career goals are as focused as her lifestyle. In addition to earning her final norm for the grandmaster title, Hoang Trang strives for the ultimate women’s crown: “A player of my level obviously dreams of being world champion. Without such high ambitions, I would not be where I am now.” Though Hoang Trang has spent equal time in Budapest and Vietnam since she was eight years old, she has never seriously considered representing Hungary in international competitions: “Hoang Thang Trang of Hungary just doesn’t sound right.”

Trang doesn’t think there is anything particularly Vietnamese about her style. “I don’t play as an Asian, or Vietnamese, or as a woman. I have my own personal style.” However, Trang describes her approach to chess as professional, and is baffled by the tendency of some Western players to drink and party after games: “Asian players don’t go out after the games. We stay at our hotel rooms, prepare for the games, and play. We take it more seriously, probably because of the government helping us.” The support of a government is similar to family support. Either way, material conditions are satisfied and training is arranged. The danger is that all these resources can generate enormous pressure to win, making players nervous, or causing them to burn out.

In Vietnam, Hoang Trang is widely known. She has been elected one of the top ten sportspeople of the year six times. In 1998, when she became the Girls’ World Champion, she was chosen as second sportsperson of the year, just behind a champion in wushu, a Chinese martial art. In 2000, when she won the Asian Women’s Championship, she was third place. The population of Vietnam is approximately eighty-one million. Whenever she returns home, customs officials stop her at the airport to inquire about her tournament schedule. She enjoys the recognition, but she assures me, “I don’t play chess with the goal of being famous.”

Hoang Trang is the most successful Vietnamese woman chessplayer. Living in centralized Hungary allows Hoang to compete with players from all over the world, but still enjoy the disciplined support of her father, and the recognition from her home country. Hoang Trang plays chess not just for herself, but also for Vietnam. She thrives on the pressure. Beneath her soft voice, small frame, and polite manners is a character strong enough to withstand the demands to achieve from her country, her family, and from herself. “When people around the world hear about Vietnam, they hear about war or strife. It makes me proud to represent my country in a positive way.”

In Ecuador, recognition for Martha Fierro reached an unprecedented height. For three years in the late 1990s, her likeness, appearing in an advertisement for margarine, was plastered on buses all over the capital city, Quito. Ecuador is a small country on the west coast of South America, but it has the strongest women’s team on the continent and Martha is the leader of that team.

Although Martha grew up in Ecuador, with Spanish as her first language, she was born in Rhode Island, which allowed her automatic entry into the U.S. and the opportunity to apply for citizenship. But Martha has never considered switching her allegiance. “I have in Ecuador what I would never get in the United States: the love of the people.”

Martha has sparkling eyes and a warm smile. Charm seems to flow from her singsong voice and graceful step. At tournaments she is always ready to laugh and talk with anyone from a grandmaster to a young novice. When I was just thirteen years old, I played in a tournament in Washington, D.C., that Martha also attended. I admired Martha straight away. At the time I was just starting to take chess seriously and was competing in one of the lower boards of the tournament. I was excited when Martha, a master, came from the top boards to check out my games. Between rounds, she introduced herself to me and suggested improvements for my game. She told me stories about her international success and gossiped about the best players in the world. Martha couldn’t get enough of the game. After rounds, she could usually be found playing casual blitz games with friends. She would tease her male opponents relentlessly. “Oh no, you’re going to lose to a girl! Has that ever happened to you before?” or announce, “Time to attack!” before pounding down an aggressive move.

Martha Fierro. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)

Martha did not always love chess so much. When she learned the moves from her mother as a thirteen-year-old, she was not so enthusiastic. She liked to travel, and enjoyed the attention she got as one of just a few female players. After playing in more tournaments, she says, “I began to become addicted to the game itself. I would play every day from six p.m. until one a.m. All I wanted was to win the Ecuadorian National Women’s Championship.” She reached that goal in 1992, and went on to win the national title every year for the next decade. Now Martha “cannot imagine a life without chess. I would probably not have traveled to a tenth of the places I’ve been. Most likely, I would have a common life.”

In 1994 Martha began to represent Ecuador for the Pan-American Championships in which players from all over North, Central, and South America participate. She won the event and repeated the feat for the next four years. By the fifth time, Martha was becoming blasé about winning the title. This feeling was in direct contrast with that of her Ecuadorian fans, who hailed her as a heroine. The media hounded her for interviews, and fans clamored for autographs. “For me it did not seem hard to win the Pan-American Championship. Though I was happy to give autographs to my fans in Ecuador, I felt guilty. Maybe if I won the world championship I would feel as though I deserved all the attention.”

Martha was more proud of her international accomplishments. She won a silver medal for her individual performance at the 1996 Olympiad and became a WGM, one of only three women in South America to hold the title. Martha was invited to an elegant banquet in her hometown of Guayaquil, a port city, the second most populous in Ecuador after capital, Quito. The Ecuadorian political and sporting elite was all there to determine the best sportspeople of the 1997. Martha was delighted just to be invited, but was stunned when she was called to the stage to receive the award as number-one sportsperson of the year, ahead of Jefferson Perez, the 1996 Olympic gold-medal winner in race-walking. Martha recalls, “That evening was one of the highlights of my life. I was so happy when I went up to the podium, I could barely remember the names of the people I had to thank.”

Her new recognition resulted in sponsorship from the telephone company Bell South, which paid for her airline tickets and gave her a monthly stipend. A bank also sponsored her. With firm financial backing, Martha was able to travel around the world, playing in tournament after tournament.

Martha has a close friendship with Antoaneta Stefanova, with whom she shares a jet-setting lifestyle. Martha manages to take her games seriously while flitting around the tournament hall, keeping track of where the party is each night. Martha finds that she can enjoy the nightlife more when she is abroad than in Ecuador, where she is too likely to be recognized, even in the darkest discotheques. “And then they ask me: ‘Why aren’t you studying chess?’”

“I play better when I’m happy. Going out and having a good time before the game and sleeping till the round time is far better than staying up all night worrying about the openings.” Martha claims that she often wins her best games after staying out late. In the 1996 Olympiad in Yerevan, Armenia, where Martha won a silver medal, she had a good time despite the Spartan conditions. “The food was awful, the buildings were dark,” Martha said. Armenia, in the midst of political turmoil at the time, held its presidential elections during the Chess Olympiad. Protestors tried to storm the main square of Yerevan because of an irregularity in the counting of the votes. Tanks, which had been on display for Independence Day festivities, were used to block off the protestors. During the chaos, hotel guests were barred from the streets.

On that particular night, Martha Fierro and Antoaneta Stefanova, tired of the daily fare of bland meat at their assigned hotel, had gone out to dine at a better hotel. Because of the turmoil they found themselves locked inside the new hotel: “We only brought enough money to eat so we had to spend the night in the lobby. We had no idea what was going on outside. It was scary. But there was a bar so at least we had something to do.” The next day Martha won her game and went on to earn a silver medal for her performance on board one.

In spite of Martha’s frequent assertions that her freewheeling lifestyle has helped her chess, I get the sense that she herself is not entirely convinced. There were times in her life, says Martha, that she regrets not taking the game more seriously. “In Ecuador we call the years between seventeen and twenty-one the donkey (el burro) years, where young people go crazy. At this time (in the late nineties) I had so much support, I sometimes wish I had tried harder.” When I remind Martha of her claims that partying often improves her performance, she said, “Well, maybe I did need to go out. I never learned to get that balance, where I could go out and prepare well.”

Martha admires Antoaneta’s ability to balance the demands of having fun and preparing. “If Antoaneta and I go out all night dancing, she will still be at her computer in the morning, even with dark circles under her eyes, preparing for the game.” When I ask Martha how good she might have become had she studied more, she became philosophical: “Who knows if I would have been in the top women players in the world? But at least if I had worked I would have a chance. Without working, there is no chance.”

Her fame in Ecuador brings with it pressure. Martha tells me that one of the reasons her chess activity has waned in the past few years is the overwhelming feeling that her fans in Ecuador would accept no less than first place. In 2001, at the age of twenty-four, she moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she taught chess to children for two years. Even there, she was recognized by one of the only Ecuadorian families living in Charlotte.

It didn’t take long for Martha to become bored with Charlotte, where the Hispanic population is small, the nightlife limited, and opportunities to play top-level chess nonexistent. In 2003 she moved to New York City, where her grandparents live. She is now teaching and playing more often. Martha plays in the New York Masters, a weekly event held at the historic Marshall Chess Club, organized by my brother, Greg. Martha has a voracious appetite for the game. Between tournament rounds she will play rapid games, and analyze late into the night. Greg founded the New York Masters to promote chess in America, and he wishes more women played there. He finds Martha’s attitude toward the game refreshing: “It’s rare to find a female player who will never miss a tournament. Martha is so straightforward in her love for the game.”

“I am here in New York because I am serious about the game,” Martha says. “Without chess I would lead a more common life, in Ecuador, probably married with a stable career.” Her father, Miguel, supported Martha’s chess wholeheartedly in the beginning, paying for her tournament expenses before she found a sponsor. Miguel was brought up in a working-class family, one of seventeen children. When attending university, he met Martha’s mother, also called Martha, who was from a wealthy family and has an infectious personality that has clearly influenced the younger Martha. His burgeoning success as a naval engineer along with wife’s inheritance afforded the whole family a comfortable lifestyle. Unable to underestimate the importance of money, he ultimately wants Martha to have a career more lucrative than chess. Though her family is proud of her fame and success in chess, Martha points out, “To be famous is not the same as to be secure financially. People in Ecuador assume that because I am always in the press, I am making a great living all the time.” The truth is that Martha’s love for the game is what keeps her playing chess: “I could make more money just by using my image in Ecuador, or by teaching chess in Charlotte.”

Although Martha has a strong allegiance to Ecuador, she acknowledges the problems there, such as racism. For instance, light-skinned men and women are almost always used as models in advertisements. Martha describes her own skin as “very light for Ecuador.” When I press the issue, she reminds me, “In the United States, there is racism—it is only slightly more under the surface.” Martha is relatively privileged, which seems to make her neither proud nor ashamed as she describes to me the fancy private school she attended in her hometown, Guayaquil. Martha is a poster woman for Ecuador, but she is not representative of its average Ecuadorian. Because Martha is relatively well off and famous, she escapes rigid gender roles (an expectation to marry young and raise a family), which restrict many Ecuadorian women. Still, interviewers chide her about her non-traditional lifestyle. When visiting her family in Ecuador recently, Martha gave a radio interview. They insisted on discussing her love life: “They even told me, ‘You better promise me you’ll be married by age thirty!’” Martha, twenty-six at the time, was caught off guard: “What could I do but laugh and agree?”

For Ecuadorians who are not as renowned or mobile as Martha, becoming an international chessplayer is hardly possible. Martha’s friend and Ecuadorian teammate, Evelyn Moncayo, won the World Girls’ Under 10 Championship in Wisconsin in 1990. Despite this show of talent, Evelyn received few opportunities to compete internationally. Raised by a single mother (her father passed away when she was ten), her family could not afford to send her to tournaments, and Evelyn never managed to attract a regular sponsor or coach. Now twenty-two years old, Evelyn explains that Ecuadorian culture does not mesh well with her goals as an international chess star. “In Ecuador women usually get married by twenty-three or twenty-four. After twenty-six, if you are not married, it is a problem. Before you get married, you should not be out after ten p.m. For a while, it was really difficult, because if I wanted to play in a tournament in a neighboring city or stay at the chess club until late, it was not possible. Now my parents are more accepting. But there is no struggle for boys who want to go to a tournament in a city far away. Their parents will say, ‘No problem!’”

In 1980, after the Iranian revolution, chess was outlawed in Iran. But Fatemeh Salami, president of the Iranian Women’s Chess Association, assures me that the government permitted chess again after just a few months. Traditionally, strict Muslims prohibit games of chance and gambling, like cards and dice, but permit chess, a game of skill. Fatemeh thinks that the misconception that chess was outlawed for a longer period is typical. “Too many people have an exaggerated sense of the restrictions on women in Iran,” she says: “Iranian girls can do anything—use the Internet, drive their cars, vote, go to parties, play chess. The only thing that irritates many young Iranian women is the hijab.” Hijab is the requirement for all women in Iran, even visitors, to cover their hair and bodies, usually with thick, dark fabric.

Shadi Paridar (left) and Atousa Pourkashian, Bled Olympiad, 2002. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)

At a tournament in Russia I spotted Shadi Paridar, seventeen at the time, covered in black hijab. Her bubbly personality was evident straightaway. I barely made eye contact when she gave me a huge smile and introduced herself. I asked her for an interview. She asked permission from her supervisor and companion, Fatemeh Salami, who agreed, but only if she could sit in on the interview. When I went to their room later that evening, Shadi was wearing a pink headscarf, which she removed at some point (permitted because there were only girls in the room), revealing short, dark hair.

Shadi is a four-time Iranian women’s champion, has a WGM title, and has defeated some of the best women players in the world, including Antoaneta Stefanova. Still, she is not ranked among the top fifty women in the world, partly because in Iran, there are few top-flight tournaments or competitors against whom Shadi can test her skills. Today this disadvantage is less relevant than it would have been a decade ago, since Shadi has to up-to-the-minute chess news on the Internet, including live feeds of games from elite tournaments. Shadi can also play casual games with masters all over the world on sites like the Internet Chess Club (The ICC.) Under the nickname “shadishelmo,” Shadi has played more than 2,500 games there. ICC, founded in 1995, has about 30,000 members, among them the majority of active grandmasters (who get free membership).

In order to qualify for the Olympiad and the World Championship, Shadi participates in the Iranian Women’s Championship, which is a three-part event. In the first leg, three to five hundred Iranian women play in an open tournament. I am surprised and impressed by this number, but Fatemeh is not satisfied with the level of participation. “There are eighteen million women in Iran who are eligible to play in this event. A few hundred is not so many.” The forty top finishers qualify for the second leg, and the final leg consists of twelve. Shadi now prefers to play outside Iran, where she can play against stronger competition, as well as male opponents. Iranian laws prohibit her from playing against men, but there is only one other Iranian girl who is at her level, Atousa Pourkashian.

Chess is one of the few sports in which Iranian women can compete abroad. Women must wear hijab in the presence of males. Therefore, in Iran, women’s sports like basketball and swimming have all-female referees, and audiences. But outside Iran, these conditions would be impossible to maintain. Along with chess, women can travel internationally for shooting or tae kwon do competitions, in which wearing hijab is also not an impediment to play. When I ask Shadi if she likes wearing hijab, she bursts into hysterical laughter and makes faces at me. When she finally calms down, she says sarcastically: “Oh I just love it. I feel like such a star in this outfit. People look at me and know I am from Iran.” Then she raises her eyebrows and informs me, “I am very bad at wearing hijab, you know.” Pushing down her pink headscarf a few inches and demonstrating: “I wear it like this, but it is supposed to cover all my hair.”

Shadi and Fatemeh are intent on expressing to me how progressive many Iranian women are. “There are so many young people in Iran now. The government does not want to annoy them, so they are more relaxed about many things than they were in the past. Young people can have parties together. Young people often let a little hair show from

their hijab, and nothing happens. They can wear hijab in any color. Black is a popular one, but I have orange, pink, and blue. It’s like fashion.”

Shadi has not found the time for a boyfriend yet. She does like parties and dancing, and when music from a friend’s laptop leaks into our room, she starts dancing. “I like music with a fast beat. No love songs!” When I ask if girls must wear hijab at parties, she winks at me and starts laughing again. “Shadi is always laughing. That is her problem. She is so talented, but not serious enough at chess,” says Fatemeh. Shadi stops giggling to explain: “Of course I am always laughing. My name, Shadi, means happiness.”

Shadi has performed successfully in Asian girls competitions, winning a gold medal for Under 16 in 2000. She will attend physical education school for free as a result of her performances. She intends to continue her chess studies at university: “Physical education” she says with a laugh, “is not so hard.”

Shadi understates her devotion to chess with an aloof attitude: “I don’t like chess books. They make me go to sleep.” Still, she has high ambitions. First she aims to become a grandmaster, and then world women’s champion. Then Shadi laughs and declares: “And if after all that I’m still breathing, I will shoot for the overall world championship!”

I met Linda Nangwale at the 2002 Olympiad in Bled, Slovenia. She stood out from the crowd with her short braids dyed in green, yellow, and red, the colors of the Zambian flag. The striking and confident African woman with her wide smile and open, friendly personality attracted reporters and photographers, who clamored after her. Linda thinks little about her appearance and what she wears, and she told me that in Bled she was hoping to rid herself of vanity. “I only brought along only three pairs of trousers. Many women can’t lay their hands on money without buying clothes. I think that emphasis in clothes in women is related to an inferiority complex, where what is inside is not enough. In chess, an inferiority complex will halt your progress.”

Linda Nangwale. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)

Just getting someone to teach Linda the rules of chess was a struggle. Every night when her brother and his friends played chess in the backyard, Linda was distracted by the ruckus they made. She was also intrigued by their excitement and was anxious to learn the game. “Chess is a man’s game and you won’t survive an inch on the board,” one of the crew told her. That was the night Linda convinced her brother to teach her the rules. He warned her that chess was boring, but Linda loved it. “I joined the bandwagon of noisemakers behind the house every day. They hammered me easily at first, using fools’ mate.” Fools’ mate is the quickest chess finish in which black checkmates white in two moves. It is actually very rare, since it requires white to play the worst moves possible. I think Linda was actually referring to Scholar’s mate, a four-move checkmate that is far more common.

“Some people,” Linda said, “call me ‘bitch’ for playing with boys all the time. But it’s the only way I can get proper training, so they can call me names until they get tired—they always do.” Now that she is a strong player, boys from the neighborhood come to her for lessons. “I don’t forget to seek revenge fools’ mate on the unlucky few!”

Linda’s successes have aroused considerable interest. After winning the 2002 Zambian Women’s Championship, in which there were fifteen participants, Linda said that the local papers “reported on my success, and many men came to my house to see if a woman could really beat them in chess. They lined up around the block.” Linda has a more feminist outlook than most of the women with whom I spoke, maybe because she had to fight so hard to get where she is. Linda’s family life has been troubled. Her mother, Carolyn Tembo, divorced her father, Bebbington Nangwale, in 1989. “My dad,” Linda says, “was a selfish man who loved no one but himself. He hardly ever had time for us.” She describes her mother as an “underpaid secretary,” who worked tirelessly, dying soon after her divorce, leaving Linda and her older brother to take care of their two younger brothers. When Linda’s successes were reported, her father “wanted to play the proud papa,” but Linda was unwilling to forgive his irresponsible behavior. “In my country, men are always trying to take the credit for the accomplishments of their children, while women get the blame if they go astray.” Not reconciled with his children, Bebbington Nangwale died in 2001.

Linda must tolerate sexist attitudes from society and from her friends, who frequently inquire about her marriage plans. Her experience with her father has made Linda wary about jumping into a relationship prematurely. She told me: “I’m twenty-one and have no boyfriend or prospects of a boyfriend. People are asking me: ‘What are you doing, girl?’” In response, she says, “What kind of man is going to understand that I’d rather play blitz all night or study the Sicilian than hang out with him?”

Zambia, located in Southern Africa and bordering Mozambique and South Africa, is one the poorest countries in Africa and has an alarming AIDS rate. One out of four Zambians between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four has AIDS, leaving huge numbers of orphans to fend for themselves. Linda speaks Njanya, one of more than seventy tribal languages in Zambia. She is also fluent in English, so our correspondence has been easy. When her speech does strike me as foreign, it is usually because of its wild exuberance rather than grammatical errors. She sends me e-mails from a computer at an Internet café. They are filled with exclamations: “YIPPEEE! Skirts up! Trousers down!” or “Do men get angry when I beat them? OH YES!!! They actually go mad!” Telling me about the beauty of Zambia’s wildlife and nature, she urges me to visit one day and with childlike affection adds, “It is super, just like you!” Lamenting about the poor state of Zambian healthcare and finances, she says, “It is a harsh situation, and many are afraid to speak out.” Linda, a positive person, who can’t bear to sign-off on such a somber note, closes with, “Despite all this, your brother is so cute!”

Linda was sponsored to play in Olympiads and All-African tournaments, but the Zambian chess federation does not have enough money to support her year-round. The top male player, Amon Simutowe, has family ties to the small but powerful Zambian elite, and he has improved the visibility of chess in the country. But Linda still describes dire prospects for professional chessplayers, especially females: “The sports minister is a woman, but she won’t sponsor women’s chess. She thinks that soccer is the only sport.” It is hard to get periodicals and chess books in Zambia. Linda complains, “Once you have a good book it’s best to hide it ’cause once someone borrows it the chances of it being returned to you are one in a thousand.”

Though Linda hopes to earn a scholarship to study in the United States, she loves Zambia and wants to do her part to improve conditions there. She is a dedicated coach for young girls, including a group of children with AIDS. “I want to go to university, but first I have to do something for these kids.” Linda Nangwale is very much admired by the young girls and boys she teaches. She told me, “I overheard one girl saying that I was her role model, and I felt so proud.”

Linda’s chess heroes are Judit Polgar and Indian Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand, whom she admires because “he proves that a player from the third world can rise to the world-elite.” Viswanathan Anand, a former world champion, is the second highest-ranked player in the world, just behind Kasparov. He is a national hero in his country, heralded as a “one-man Indian chess revolution” on the webpage of the All-India Chess Federation. Partly because of the successes of Anand, chess in India enjoys an exalted status and is thoroughly covered in the sports sections of Indian dailies. Anand gives up to 100 interviews on busy weeks. When I remark how cooperative he is with the media, he tells me: “Of course! You can’t complain about the popularity of chess and then get mad when they want an interview.” In a report on an international tournament in Delhi, Scottish Grandmaster Jonathan Rowson observed, “Chess had become a symbol of Indian national resurgence, or at least a vehicle for patriotism.”1 The explicit goal of the Indian Chess Federation is to produce 100 grandmasters by the year 2012, which would position India at the top of the chess world. As of 2004, there are eleven GMs, seven of whom are under twenty-five years old.

The exposure and promotion of women’s chess in India is growing, and the top women players are also national symbols. Much of this is because of the success of Indian prodigy Humpy Koneru. Humpy’s rise was fast and spectacular. She won the Girls’ World Under 20 Championship at just fourteen. At fifteen, Humpy became the ninth woman, and only Indian female, to gain the requirements for the GM title. She also broke Judit Polgar’s record by three months and one day, becoming the youngest female grandmaster in history.

Humpy’s parents, Ashok and Latha, had designs for their child as soon as she was born in 1989. It was her father Ashok’s idea to name her Hampi, which is derived from the word champion. Later, he was influenced by great Soviet chessplayers and changed his daughter’s name to Humpy to sound more like a Russian name. When Humpy, at age six, showed a talent for chess, Ashok poured his extra resources of time and money into her development. Friends and relatives were surprised when Ashok and Latha used their savings to buy a laptop instead of a color TV, as most middle-class Indians would do. “I still remember how people mocked our decision to buy a computer,” said Latha.

In one of hundreds of glowing articles about Humpy in the Indian press, Ashok is described as the “proudest father of the Queen of India…waiting for that day when she is queen of the entire world.” So, too, waits all of India, where Humpy is a celebrity, whose chess results are followed by all the major newspapers. To play under constant scrutiny of the national media is tremendous pressure for a teenager, but Humpy handles it calmly.

Humpy pays little attention to fashion. At tournaments she wears sneakers and sports pants. Reserved and composed, Humpy rarely smiles. In interviews, much like Judit Polgar, she tells little, except that she aims to become world champion (among men).

Before Humpy came along, Viji Submarayan was the headliner in Indian women’s chess. The first woman grandmaster to come from India, Viji held down board one for the Indian women’s team in the 1998, 2000, and 2002 Olympiads. Humpy did not play. Unlike her reserved compatriot Humpy, Viji is forthcoming, willing to talk about her role in chess, women in India, and the problems faced by her poverty-stricken country. Viji says, “I am quite patriotic. I usually take the responsibility to represent India in team competitions very seriously and play well.”

Humpy Koneru. (Photo by Arvind Aaron.)

Viji is not fully satisfied with the status of women in India. She complains that the Indian culture “worships the man. The woman is supposed to be of service to the man, and parents are disappointed when they have girl children.” Fortunately, Viji’s parents were different: her father always encouraged his three daughters to be strong. “He didn’t care whether we were boys and girls. He wanted us to be good sportspeople.” Chess is an ideal sport for a woman in India, Viji points out, because “women can study chess alone at home.” Traditional Indian values can actually help women in chess, Viji argues, since chess is an activity that can be pursued in private.

Viji used to be distracted and despondent by the severity of the poverty in her country. Recently, she has learned to relax and focus on her own goals. An avid reader, she has been affected by Ayn Rand’s books (just as Almira Skripchenko has been), which argue that compassion is a spurious virtue. “There is so much poverty and starvation in my country. It is so sad, and it affected me so much in the past, and it still does. But I realize now that feeling pity is not going help anyone and I have to live my life. Even the smallest of insects has to search for his own food.”

Humpy, Viji, and several other masters are all supported by the government. India has one of the strongest women’s squads in the world—strong enough to compete for the highest honors at Olympiads in the next decade provided that Humpy does not prefer to play for the men’s team.

In India, you can find some of the best women chessplayers in the world, and also millions of women crippled by poverty. Such juxtaposition raises disturbing questions about the role of chess in a world with so many problems. That feminism confronts different problems in developed and undeveloped nations is real. I was made acutely aware of this outside of Istanbul during the 2003 European Women’s Championship, which I attended as a spectator and writer. At the time, I was looking over the notes on gender difference I had compiled after dozens of interviews. I was frustrated that many of the women I had interviewed had traditional concepts of gender roles. I was looking for more criticism and more anger from them.

I spotted Austrian teenager Tina Kopinits, who stood out from the crowd with her bleached-blond hair, low-cut jeans, and confident swagger. I had an inkling Tina might have something challenging to say. I introduced myself, chatted about Istanbul, the tournament, and her life in Vienna. I discovered that Tina was an activist and had radical political views. I asked whether she considered herself a feminist and was roused by her answer: “Yes, but I don’t think about feminism in relation to the chess world. The place a feminist most needs to fight is in the third world, where women are victims of crushing poverty and abuse. Anyone who is playing chess has got it pretty good already.” I agreed with Tina that sweatshop labor, overpopulation, and domestic abuse are more urgent issues than sexism in the chess world. Still, I felt her argument was much like responding to “my stomach hurts” with “but some people have kidney stones.” I told her that. Tina laughed at my stomach analogy, but was not convinced, maintaining that chessplayers were automatically among the lucky. I admired Tina’s idealistic passion to combat world poverty. Women who have their civil rights and sufficient food in the first world fight for quality of life, while women of developing nations fight for survival. At the same time I think it is still acceptable to argue in favor of activism on smaller, admittedly less urgent, battlefields.

Attending an international tournament in India can be an emotionally grueling experience for the more sensitive members of the chess world. In reporting on his first trip to India, grandmaster and writer Jonathan Rowson described his confrontation with poverty, sickness, and existential confusion: “If life begins at the edge of your comfort zone, then life begins in India.”2

My own trip to India was both thrilling and wrenching. The World Championships in 2000 were held in late November at a luxurious five-star hotel in the capital city of Delhi. I had qualified by placing third in the U.S. Women’s Championship in 1999. Intent on seeing more of India, I had arranged to stay for three weeks, regardless of how many rounds I advanced in the knockout format.

The hotel had five gourmet restaurants, a discotheque, a fitness center, massage services, and lush bars. It would be easy for a chessplayer to spend time in India sheltered in air-conditioned comfort. Many participants, serious about their chance to compete in the most elite tournament in the world, understandably did not leave the hotel complex. To mix the chess world and the real world is difficult for some players. Former World Championship challenger Victor Korchnoi feels strongly that “chessplayers should not be tourists.”3

For my first few days in Delhi, I followed Korchnoi’s advice. I studied chess in my hotel room and ate at the rich buffet. At night I sometimes went to the bar adjacent to the hotel, frequented by upper-class Indians and Westerners on business trips. An Australian rock band played U2 cover songs as customers drank eight-dollar martinis underneath flashing lights. This scene did not seem far from Manhattan. When Georgian Ketevan Arakhamia knocked me out of the tournament, I switched from chessplayer to tourist.

Outside, a world of dirt roads and crushing poverty awaited me. I turned down an invitation to go to the Taj Mahal in Agra in favor of exploring Delhi. So I took an open-air taxi into Delhi’s Old City, the ancient core of the now-sprawling metropolis where sacred cows and fornicating monkeys are always out and about. The streets were nothing more than multiple zigzag lanes, and the permanent rush-hour traffic gave me the leisure to take it all in. The traffic was so slow that the mutilated beggars who approached my cab reached into the car; others knelt on empty spots of pavement, pleading for money and food. I had read in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children about impoverished Indians cutting off their limbs to increase their worth as beggars. I thought this had to be an exaggeration, but the frequency of mutilation and bizarre disfigurings cast aside my doubts. An elderly woman with no teeth approached my cab and knelt beside me. I gave her the ten-rupee note I was using as a bookmark in a contemporary, post-modern novel, Art and Lies by the feminist author Jeanette Winterson. I felt my literary pretensions being dwarfed by my embarrassment.

The pollution was so severe that my face was covered with soot by the time I reached my relatively unmemorable tourist destination. Later that day, exploring on foot, I crossed an abandoned parking lot, where dozens of homeless were camped out. I was instantly surrounded by bare-footed beggars in rags, who blocked my path back to the street. I was hit on a visceral level by the suffering I was witnessing. I had always known about poverty in India, but to see it up close was unforgettable. I could not think straight, and on the taxi-ride home, I was softly weeping. My driver coolly remarked, “You must have just arrived. You are still so sensitive.”

I knew my experience was hardly unique. Travelers who’d also been emotionally devastated in their first experiences in impoverished countries had warned me. My reaction that evening surprised me even more than my afternoon sadness, as I felt more humbled than guilty. I went back to the hotel to take a shower and gratefully re-entered the chess world, its never-ending stream of meaningless variations a great relief.

11

Playing for America

Never offer a draw to an American!

— Grandmaster Eduard Gufeld, coach of the Soviet women’s team

Every radio comedian and night-club wit has several entries in his card-index file about the possibility of a woman’s becoming President of the United States. The idea that a woman might become our chess champion seems equally ‘comical.’ Yet both of these possibilities are less remote than they were in, say, 1930...

— Mrs. H.D. Sheldon in Chess Review, 1950.

In the fall of 2000 I was to be invited for the first time to play for America in the prestigious biennial team competition, the Olympiad, to be held in Istanbul, Turkey. After each Olympiad, the chess world buzzes for months about brilliant chess and lively gossip from the three-week-long event.

Arriving in Istanbul, I was immediately smitten. My first evening there, I walked around the main strip, my senses reveling in the aroma of beef kabobs, carts of mussels and mangoes and incense. The sounds of calls to prayer mingled with modern Greek music. I observed the intense gestures of Turkish men and noted the style of women, some of whom were veiled while others were dressed like fashion models. I remember thinking over and over I am in Istanbul, and this is so great. Istanbul nightlife was diverse: when teammate Anna Hahn and I went out to a bar in a coastal suburb, we were shocked when we realized that the live Turkish music was being performed by a man in drag.

The Chess Olympiad is a social occasion as well as a fierce competition. Most delegations include four women and six men, so the male-to-female ratio is much more balanced than at most chess tournaments. Several married couples came out of Olympiads. Lithuanian Camila Baginskaite and the Russian-American Alex Yermolinsky met at the 1996 Yerevan Olympiad and now live in Northern California, with two children. Almira Skripchenko and Joel Lautier began dating at the 1994 Moscow event. Such relationships are instigated by social events at the Olympiad, like the historic Bermuda bash. The Bermuda team has one of the lower-rated lineups in the event, but they make their mark each year with their party, held at every Olympiad since 1980. They rent out a huge space, hire DJs, and print out invitations for thousands of participants, along with arbiters, journalists, and chess tourists. Always held before a free day, even the most professional players abandon rigorous routines to stay out late and sleep in. “I can’t wait to see all these players, so serious over the board, shake it over the dance floor,” said Zambian representative Linda Nangwale. Temporary social constellations form between players from all corners of the world, from Santiago to Oslo and Namibia. I met an Iraqi medical doctor, who asked me to dance: “I don’t like to talk about politics.” Some of the best Russian players in the world perform comically athletic dance moves, arms flailing, jumping up and down for some treasure on the ceiling.

Some nonplayers would be surprised at chessplayers’ penchant for partying, but for me there are natural similarities between chess games and parties. Before either, I feel giddy over the numerous possibilities—perhaps this party will be one where I will have a transcendent conversation or perhaps this game will be filled with sacrifice and beauty, making the hours of small talk or technical study worthwhile. As the night or game goes on, anticipation dwindles into the reality of the present. You win or you lose, the lights are turning off.

Not all of my memories from Olympiads are positive. In the 2002 event (held in Bled, Slovenia), in addition to playing, I was writing an article about the Olympiad for Chess Life (the national chess magazine). I wanted to interview two of the top young Russian male players in the world, both of whom have been heralded as possible future world champions. I was nervous, especially because one seemed particularly cool—he had big blue eyes, dreadlocks and wore black leather. I was already familiar with his games, one of which had impressed me so much that I showed it to the junior high team I coached back in Brooklyn. (“That game was hot,” said one of my students, “can I have a copy?”) I approached him at the hotel’s dining room and was pleased that he consented immediately to an interview. He wanted to do it right then and there, over dinner where his teammate, the other young grandmaster, was also eating.

It was the most disturbing interview I have ever conducted. One declared that he hated journalists, hated New York, and became annoyed when I asked him about his training routine. His teammate had even worse things to say. America was a horrible place, he said, because the rape laws were stricter than in Russia, where he was used to raping women who are ‘too ashamed to go to the police.’ He proceeded to use words like lesbian, fat, and stupid to describe American women. As we left the dining hall, one of them asked me to join him and some friends for drinks later that night, as if their outrageous comments were part of a charming routine. I declined. Later, I found out that the two were bragging to their teammates about how much they upset me with their sexist, anti-American insults.

At my first Olympiad in Istanbul, I was feeling more American than I ever had. I’m not particularly patriotic, but there is something about competing for my country internationally that uncovers my deep-seated identification as an American. Because of this, chess at the Olympiad is even more intense for me as winning feels noble and losing shameful. At the 2000 Istanbul event, the U.S. team began with a sensational upset in the third round, beating the higher-ranked German team 3-0. We were euphoric for a short time—the following day, we lost to the lower-ranked Vietnamese team.

Midway through the Istanbul tournament, I tuned into the BBC to watch the votes of the 2000 Bush-Gore election being recounted. I was nineteen at the time, so it was my first chance to vote in a presidential election. I knew I was going to be playing in the Olympiad on Election Day, but I applied too late for an absentee ballot, and did not receive it before departing for Turkey. Feeling guilty, I lay down on the bed and watched the TV for hours until it became more and more clear who our new president would be. I yearned to be back in the States, commiserating with friends and family.

I often criticize the policies and customs of my own country—yet still I get defensive when I travel to tournaments and Europeans gleefully rip on America. It’s like the difference between criticizing your family and hearing a stranger do so. Sometimes, I encounter foreigners who think that to be an American is to be stupid: “I’m so surprised to have such an intelligent conversation with an American,” “I’m sure I know more about American history than you do,” or “I’m impressed you’re doing so well! I heard it is very difficult for American girls to learn chess.”

Women’s chess in America has, in fact, had a very rich history. True, there have not yet been any homegrown American women’s world champions, or even contenders, but there have been many women who are deeply passionate about chess, just like their counterparts around the world.

The history of women’s chess in America had fortuitous beginnings. In 1934, Caroline Marshall was inspired to organize a women’s event. Caroline had recently been widowed from Frank Marshall, the world championship candidate and founder of New York’s still-active Marshall Chess Club. For the next two years successful open women’s tournaments were held at the West Village brownstone. In 1937, the tournament got an official boost from the National Chess Federation, which announced that the first official U.S. women’s title was at stake.

The tournaments began in a progressive spirit, through the impassioned efforts of Edith L. Weart (1897-1977), an energetic feminist born in Jersey City. She graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in chemistry. She learned to play chess late, at twenty-seven, and played in many U.S. Women’s Championships, though she was among the weaker players. A free-lance writer, Weart penned many articles on the rise of female chessplayers in the world and in the United States.

To Ms. Weart, the entry of women into the chess arena symbolized their acceptance into other fields. In one article she wonders why “women have left undisputed men’s claims to mastery of the royal pastime.” She responds, “The answer lies, I think, in lack of opportunity.”1 In another article she points out: “As in practically every other sphere, woman is astir in the chessplaying world and bent upon emulating the activities and achievements of the male portion of the population. The doors…are beckoning our sisters to enter the portals behind which have been kept from them opportunities for delightful mental recreation and possible distinction at home and abroad.”2 She organized a scrapbook of clippings on early women’s chess in America, which is now part of the John G. White Collection at the Cleveland Public Library.3

There were ten players in the 1937 event, which was won by Belgian-born Adele Rivero. Rivero learned chess to disprove her Spaniard husband’s assertion that women didn’t have the brains for the game. Riviero won the 1941 championship also, but she faded as two women—Mona Karff and Gisela Gresser—established a nearly exclusive rivalry for the national title.

Refined, rich, and redheaded, Gisela Gresser and Mona Karff were uncannily similar on the surface. Each won many national women’s championship titles: Gisela won nine; Mona, seven. Both were multi-lingual, interested in the arts, and loved to travel. Mona had a degree in international affairs and in 1948 traveled through Europe in support of the One World movement. Gresser painted, sculpted, and wrote. American player Dorothy Teasley, who knew both women, said, “It was hard to mention Gisela Gresser without mentioning Mona Karff. The two went together…two very brainy, very savvy, very well-traveled, very sophisticated, and very cosmopolitan women of another era.”

Mona Karff was born in Central Europe and lived in Palestine as a teenager. She learned chess from her father, Aviv Ratner, who was a Zionist and rich landowner in Tel-Aviv, Israel. Karff was described as “a refined, elegant woman who loved opera, collected art, spoke eight languages fluently, traveled the world with confident ease, and made millions in the stock market.”

Mona Karff won the second U.S. Women’s Championship in 1938. She collected six more titles, the final one in 1974, thirty-six years after her first victory.

Karff was mysterious. Even good friends of hers were left in the dark as to the most basic matters concerning her life—her birthplace is to this day uncertain. The USCF listed her place of origin as simply Europe, while relatives attest that she was born in a Russian province, Bessaberia. It was not easy to ask her. Ms. Teasley “once inquired, innocently enough, where she had been born” and was disappointed: “I got some kind of reply but it was definitely not a direct answer.”

Mona Karff. (Left photo courtesy Cleveland Public Library.)

Soon after settling in Boston in the 1930s, Mona had a brief marriage with a cousin, Abe Karff, a lawyer. She kept even this a secret, and one good friend only found out about the marriage when she called Abe’s house and Mona picked up the phone. Mona had a longer-lasting relationship with International Master Dr. Edward Lasker, who was twenty-nine years older than she. When one female chessplayer innocently asked Karff’s main rival and friend, Gresser, if Lasker and Karff were engaged, she responded: “Miss Karff is much, much too sophisticated to be engaged.”

Lasker and Karff lived separately but were always together at tournaments and parties. Allen Kaufman, who was a rising young chessplayer at the time and was often a guest at their home in the 1960s, says, “Lasker lived in a magnificent penthouse apartment overlooking the Hudson River, where he would host lovely soirées. He threw German lieder on the phonograph, and chessplayers would play and analyze for hours. Karff was always there—and she was a great conversationalist.”

Lasker died in 1981, leaving Mona single. Allen observed that “she seemed heartbroken,” but was still able to get on with her life. “I saw her at restaurants dating guys when she was in her eighties—she was a go-getter, not the type to mope around for too long.”

Mona and Gisela were of approximately the same strength, but their styles were in direct opposition to one another. Karff was aggressive and “never missed an opportunity to throw materialistic caution to the winds,” while Gresser had a patient style, preferring closed games.

Gisela Gresser was born in Detroit in 1906, with a silver pawn in her mouth. Her father, Julius Kahn, was the president of a steel company and an engineer who earned a fortune by inventing reinforced concrete. Though she had learned chess from her father as a child, her youthful passion was for Greek, of which she said in an interview in 1945, “When the other children were out playing, I used to study Greek. I loved it just the way I love chess now.”

Gresser followed her love for ancient languages, earning an A.B. in classics at Radcliffe and a post-college scholarship in Athens. In 1927 Gisela found herself in New York City, where she married William Gresser, a lawyer and accomplished musician. They settled in a Park Avenue apartment, and her luxurious lifestyle allowed her to pursue many hobbies—horseback riding, sculpting, painting, and voracious reading in ten different languages.

Gisela and her husband went on a cruise to Europe in 1938, the same year the first U.S. Women’s Chess Championship was held. On the boat she met a man with a pocket chess set and a chess book and became hooked on the game. Thereafter, chess was her primary addiction. Gresser was quickly successful, winning her first U.S. Women’s Chess Championship just six years after her chance encounter on the boat. She developed a strategic style, preferring closed games. Gresser was a record-breaker on the U.S. circuit: besides winning more U.S. women’s titles than any woman in history, Gresser was the first woman to achieve the national master title.

Gisela Gresser. (Photos courtesy Cleveland Public Library.)

In 1948, Gresser and Karff tied for first place in the U.S. Women’s Championship and were selected as the official U.S. representatives to the first Women’s World Championship held since the war. The event (which ran from December 19, 1949, through January 18, 1950), in Moscow, had the Soviet Federation hosting the players and absorbing the many expenses that such a large undertaking incurs.

Both Karff and Gresser had dismal showings, scoring five points each from fifteen games, and finishing in a three-way tie for twelfth to fourteenth. One bright spot of Gisela’s event was her victory over the tournament winner, Ludmilla Rudenko. Gisela was frustrated by her inability to communicate or navigate Moscow, and upon returning to New York, she began to study Russian. By the time Gresser won the 1955 U.S. championship, and was again selected to play in Moscow, she had a basic grasp of the language.

Gisela Gresser (left) playing Adele Raettig in the final round of the 1944 Women’s Chapionship. Gresser won the game and clinched the title.

Gresser plays a skittles game with U.S. Champion Arnold Denker. Standing (r to l) Albert S. Pinkus, Frank J. Marshall, I.A. Horowitz, Herman Steiner, Reuben Fine, Edward Lasker. (Photo courtesy Chess Review, 1944.)

After her second journey, Gresser wrote “Chess Queens in Moscow,” a twenty-page, candid account of her thoughts on the tournament and the city. She seemed more concerned with the state of the Soviet Union than her mediocre result. Gresser, a well-heeled Upper East Side socialite, was struck by the uncomely appearance of Russian women: “There is no attempt at elegance or charm in the ordinary street dress,” Gisela observed coolly. “The women appear resigned to their corrugated hair and crude cosmetics, their colorless knitted headgear and shapeless suits.” Her opponents did not escape her scrutiny either:

“The Russian ladies have all gotten very fat since I last saw them.”

According to Gresser, her hosts were gracious and intent upon showing her the best Moscow had to offer. “In what other country would female chessplayers be fêted like traveling ambassadors and followed as though they were movie stars?” Upon her arrival at the airport, she was greeted with bouquets of flowers. The opening ceremony included ballerinas, marionettes, even “a magician who extracted a bowl of live goldfish from a vest pocket.” The best seats at the opera and the ballet were arranged for her, and she was assigned a private translator and assistant, Tamara.

Despite such generosity, Gresser was unable to get more basic things in Moscow. “Toilet paper,” she noted, commenting on one terrifying trip to the restroom, “must be a bourgeois luxury.” She was disappointed by the unavailability of jarred caviar to bring back to friends or glue to reinforce the soles of her shoes. In one particularly absurd episode, Gisela, overwhelmed by the jumbo pillow on her bed, asked for a smaller one, but Tamara deemed it impossible. “We have some things, at other times, other things…This year we have only large pillows. A few years ago the pillows came small. But now it has been decided that Moscow people all like large pillows, so we have only large pillows.”

When Gresser left Moscow, Tamara was the last person she saw.

“I shall always think of her as a child, gentle and eager and obedient, never complaining and never questioning the authority of her guardians.” Gisela was clearly unsympathetic with communism. She concluded that Tamara was symbolic of an intellectual immaturity pervading the country. “There must be many Tamaras in the Soviet Union.”

Women’s chess never got the financial backing or support in the United States that it had in the Soviet Union. American women went to prestigious events without trainers, unthinkable for Soviet and European representatives. A trainer’s role,s or “second,” in a serious event was multiple. Up until the 1980s, adjournments occurred in major tournaments. The game would stop, and both players would have all night to analyze the position, resuming play on the next day. To analyze an adjourned position without a strong player to bounce ideas off is an unenviable situation. With the advent of computer analysis, the adjournment tradition is nearly extinct, though there are a handful of Luddite organizers who persist with having them. An equally valuable role of a second is the psychological support and companionship the person offers. To play in a foreign country can be a lonely, taxing experience, and a trainer psyches a player up before the game, then consoles or celebrates with her afterward. Gresser, who had a strong personality, seemed content to tackle the tournament solo.

In some ways, Gresser was happy to be without a trainer. She was unimpressed with the attitudes of the Soviet and Eastern European coaches, many of whom were married to their students. Gresser overheard one trainer proclaiming loudly, in earshot of other players, “Today my wife played like a dog.” Another said scathingly, “Women can memorize mountains of opening theory, but can’t win the simplest positions.”

Nearly ten years later, in the Georgian coastal town, Sukhimi, Gresser got a more positive impression of Soviet chess training. Gresser played in the 1964 Candidates’ Championship, which would determine a challenger to World Champion Nona Gaprindashvili. This time it appeared that a Yugoslav player, Lazarevic, would upset the Soviets. Lazarevic had only one game left—against Gresser. Gresser recounts, with amusement, that a group of Russians bemoaned her chances of beating Lazarevic. “I heard a group of Russians discussing my gloomy chances…and was sorry that I had taken two years of Russian.” If Gresser won, it would pave the way for the victory of the Russian player, Alla Kushnir. Gresser was accosted on her way to the dining hall and asked where her trainer was. When Gresser responded that she had no trainer, the Soviet coach arranged an emergency lesson with her for the next morning. Gresser was blown away: “In that hour I learned more about chess theory and chess psychology than I could have ever have thought possible. Next day, when I walked on the beach after winning the best game of my life, the bathers (all Russians, of course) were screaming malodiez (meaning bravo).” Gresser was ecstatic. “One of life’s great moments!”4

Gisela’s dilettantish approach may have prevented her from cracking into the world chess elite. She was not so successful internationally as she was in the United States. She simply had too many other interests. Gresser never felt guilty for not spending more time studying chess. If anything, she seemed proud of it. She considered chess a dangerous addiction, and was sometimes wistful for the hours she had whiled away on the game. “To spend so much time on something that’s not really constructive hurts my conscience. I don’t spend all my time on it, but I could.”5

In her writings and speeches, Gresser may have underplayed her devotion to the game. Allen Kaufman describes Gresser as being competitive and sometimes paranoid. At one U.S. championship, Allen says that Gresser was convinced that Karff’s common-law husband, Edward Lasker, was cheating by observing Mona’s games and then passing her paper notes, on which he would presumably write what move she should play. Allen commented, “She was very childlike in this way. She even thought I was probably passing moves to my wife, who was also a contender in the U.S. Women’s Chess Championship, and tried to get me kicked out of the playing hall.”

Gresser had a vain streak. In one instance, she played in a senior championship, for players over sixty-five. She requested that the tournament director make a special announcement that she was playing under special consideration of her gender, and not because she was over sixty-five, which in fact she was.

Gisela played with verve till her last days. Ivona Jesierska, a young immigrant from Poland, was invited to Gisela Gresser’s apartment to play blitz soon after she arrived in America. Under ordinary circumstances, a young immigrant with no knowledge of English would not find herself as a guest in a Park Avenue home. But in chess, such things are normal. Ivona was stunned by the comfort in which Gisela lived: “I had never seen anything like it. We went up to her place in an elevator, where she had an entire floor to herself—the apartment was filled with antiques.” Even more surprising to Ivona was Gisela’s blitz strength: “I took one look at this old lady (Gisela was in her late seventies at the time) and thought, ‘No problem!’ But I don’t think

I won a single game.”

In 1951, Mary Bain, who was born in Hungary, interrupted the domination of the U.S. women’s title by Karff and Gresser. Her stepfather had been captured in World War I and never reappeared: her mother died of a broken heart. Bain, seventeen years old at the time, was on her way to join her sister in New York City. Mary, who spoke no English at the time, spent most of the weeklong trip to America playing chess with passengers. She showed remarkable talent for the game, and an audience of onlookers was delighted when she beat the captain of the ship.

A highlight in Bain’s career came in 1933, when, at twenty-three years old, she defeated Jose Capablanca in a simultaneous game. The Cuban world champion missed a simple tactic, allowing Bain to grab his loose Bishop, after which he resigned—an ignominious eleven-move loss. Bain’s talent was recognized after this game by Hungarian Grandmaster Geza Maroczy, who hoped Bain would one day challenge his star student, Vera Menchik.

In 1937 Mary Bain sailed to Stockholm to play in the World Championship there. She was the first American woman to represent the U.S. in an organized chess competition. Menchik won the tournament, but Bain came in a respectable fifth out of twenty-six players.

Mary Bain. (Photo courtesy Cleveland Public Library.)

According to Allen Kaufman, Bain was “strong, with a husky, peasant look about her.” Bain would spend hours at the Marshall Chess Club, playing in tournaments or just hanging out. Frank Brady, author of Bobby Fischer: Profile of a Prodigy, called Mary a “classic Village type…very liberal.” When a man addressed her as Mrs. Mary Bain, she sharply corrected him: “Just Mary Bain!” Another time, she waved her hand dismissively at the suggestion that women ought to wait till marriage to have sex—a brave declaration in the 1950s.

It was not until 1951 that Bain managed to capture a single title from the Gresser and Karff duo. This enabled her to take another stab at the world crown. She was thrilled to travel to Moscow, along with second-place Karff, to participate in the 1952 World Championship Candidates.

Bain was impressed by the generosity of her hosts, who invited her to the circus, the ballet, and fancy banquets. Distraught at being under-prepared, she did her best to relax: “I am going to enjoy my stay, at least until the tournament starts. After, I’ll be worried about my games.” Once the tournament began, she was overwhelmed, writing: “The excitement is too much for me. The large crowd, the cameras, the large wall board…the importance of the scene is killing me.”

Bain did not play well. She lost game after game and finished with just 3.5 points out of 15. Elizaveta Bykova won the tournament and went on to defeat Rudenko for the world championship title. In a series of letters written to David Lawson—American organizer, chessplayer, and author of Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess—Mary Bain reveals that her poor showing wrecked her emotionally. Depressed, she was unable to eat or sleep for days. She gives her opponents no credit for her defeats, saying: “I am not being outplayed, I simply beat myself.” Compounding her misery was news from America that Eisenhower had won the 1952 election over Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson. After this, Bain was so despondent that she “collapsed in my room and cried like a child,” signing one letter “Good for nothing Mary.” But Bain didn’t blame herself alone.

She was livid that the American Chess Federation offered her neither financial nor psychological support. “My sendoff was cruel. I was told that I was not going to represent the USA and USCF but Zone Number Four.6 No use complaining…” She also had no second to help her analyze adjourned games, which usually resumed the following day: “When I have an adjourned game I stay up all night and then make the worst move.” Ideally, Mary would be sleeping soundly, while her trainer would work through the night, and then supply her with a thorough analysis in the morning. British Master Golombek sympathized with Bain, pointing out, “It is very sad that a great country like the USA should have such a weak chess federation.” Perhaps the worst insult was that the Soviet Federation had been willing to pay all expenses for her second, but Bain had not been told this until it was too late to arrange.

Bain and Gresser were both trounced by the Soviets, who were simply better players. Their reactions to their poor showings were diametrically opposed. Gresser looked at the chess world with detached curiosity and gentle derision. Happy to dip in and out of the elite chess world, Gresser was content with her position in the U.S. chess circuit and comfortable in her Park Avenue penthouse. Her talent brought her to the top of the U.S. women’s chess circuit, but without assiduous work, she couldn’t hope or expect to reach the top of the world. She never believed that losing a game reflected poorly on her character or intellect, both of which were nourished from other sources.

Bain was more focused on her own chess potential, which frustrated her because she was unable to unleash it. She was furious with herself and the U.S. Chess Federation for being under-prepared. Bain may have overreacted, causing her to spiral downward faster.

Many players have trouble striking that fine balance between debilitating despair and nonchalance. “If it doesn’t hurt, there’s something wrong,” said American Grandmaster Joel Benjamin, who expects to be in pain after losing a crucial game. However, professionalism requires that even the most distraught players pick themselves up after a tough loss and get ready to play their next game at full strength.

My own experience in finding the appropriate emotional involvement with the game has been an ongoing struggle. As a teenager, my identity was closely intertwined with my chess results and rating, so a poor result would set me back for days, or even weeks, leaving me in a state of near depression. I vividly remember feeling the world was over after losing a crucial game in the U.S. Championship of 1998. A perceptive observer berated me: “You put too much pressure on yourself,” suggesting, “Your results will improve if you relax and allow your talent to show.” His advice was accurate, but it would take a while for me to implement it.

After winning my first U.S. Women’s Chess Championship in 2002, gaining my first IM norm and performing much better than even I expected, many people asked me how I had prepared. The truth was that I had not studied much chess, but instead had had four days of raucous fun celebrating the New Year with my friends in Brooklyn. We went to house parties, drank coffee all day, and planned decadent art projects. Entering the tournament in Seattle, I was happier than I’d ever been. I was more relaxed playing than I had been in the past, knowing that if I lost I’d still be happy. It retrospect, I see that the superior play I exhibited in that event had been hidden inside me for years.

The emotion attached to my chess results loosened after Seattle. I still feel pain when I lose, but it usually goes away within a few hours. This might now detract from my performances, because knowing that I would feel bad if I lost motivated me to study. However, I am thankful that I don’t care as much as I did when I was sixteen.

How much a player identifies with results depends as much on disposition as chess strength. At weekend tournaments, it is common to see grown amateurs knocking their heads against walls or young beginners crying uncontrollably. Professionals, though, can often calmly pick up the pieces, even after the most excruciating losses. Some even channel their disappointment into renewed vigor for following rounds, like Garry Kasparov, who is renowned for recovering from losses by crushing his next opponent.

Though elite players may appear to be less sensitive to the visceral pain of losing, they care more than novices. Their intellects are fully engaged and thus fully on the line. Furthermore, their livelihoods are dependent on their results.

American chess pioneers Bain, Gresser, and Karff did not have professional approaches to the game, either in disposition or lifestyle. A further reason for their mediocre results may have been their ages. By the time all three were playing in the post-war world championships, they were in their forties and fifties. The peak years of their careers would have been in the l940s, but the war precluded international championships during this time.

The grueling nature of contemporary chess rewards youth, which is why most top players consider it to be more a sport than an art or science. Women’s chess is even more extremely skewed toward youth. One reason may be that older women are likely to retire after starting families. Another is that the bar for the standard of the best female chess players is rising so rapidly that young players begin with far higher ambitions than their predecessors. Adjournments were phased out in the 1980s, all but disappearing by the late 1990s. Time controls have shortened, and women jog and lift weights before tournaments in order to prepare physically for the grueling pace of an event. The next bright light of women’s chess in America after Bain, Gresser, and Karff was an outspoken upstart from Philadelphia, young enough to be the daughter of her competitors.

“Each move seems to be weighted with some cosmic significance to her,” wrote Robert Cantwell, a reporter for Sports Illustrated. “At such moments she seems…beautifully serious, or seriously beautiful, a side of feminine loveliness that Hollywood has rather neglected.”

The woman so memorably described was Lisa Lane. Lane got hooked on chess as a nineteen-year-old and became U.S. Women’s Champion just two years later in 1959, edging out veteran players Karff and Gresser.

Lisa was not surprised by her success. Nor was she overwhelmed by the spate of journalists who began to call her for interviews. Young, ambitious, and arrogant, Lisa felt she was entitled. “I’m the most important American chessplayer. People will be attracted to the game by a young, pretty girl.” Lisa believed she deserved all the recognition and support she got, since she was “bringing publicity and ultimately money” to the game.

Lisa Lane. (Photo by John G. Zimmerman, courtesy Sports Illustrated.)

Born in Philadelphia, Lisa had a difficult childhood. She did not know her father, and her mother worked two jobs. Lisa had to stay with foster families as a schoolgirl: she did poorly in school and dropped out, and then she moved from low-paying job to low-paying job. Anxious to continue her education, after dating an older, well-educated man, Lisa enrolled at Temple University, where she began a special program in which she would complete her high-school diploma while beginning her college coursework.

At the same time, Lisa discovered chess while on a date in the Artists’ Hut, a bohemian coffeeshop in downtown Philadelphia. She began to play there regularly, and was discovered by an active player, who introduced her to Attilio Di Camilo, a charismatic Italian-American master, who was also a passionate and affordable coach. Di Camilo started to coach Lisa in the mornings. When “Di-cam” was asked why he only charged his students two dollars an hour for lessons, he responded: “When I teach, I learn more than my students.” Di Camilo was impressed by Lisa’s talent and assured her that, with hard work, she could become U.S. champion in two years—a dead-on prophesy. Lisa was soon a chess addict, dropping her studies at Temple to concentrate on the game. She worked up to twelve hours a day at chess, often staying up until three or four in the morning analyzing or playing at the club.

Because of her volatile temper and fiery personality, Lisa was involved in scrapes and scandals. The details of one after-game dispute were murky, but Lisa was quoted in Sports Illustrated as saying, “I never hit that guy with an ashtray!”

Lisa’s defiant attitude made her all the more exciting to the press. Lisa declared, “I hate anyone who beats me.”

“If talent alone won championships, I’d be world champion now.” Lisa was obsessed with chess and eschewed talk of politics: “I don’t care what’s going on in the world.”

“Her main role in the chess world is social. She is pleasant to look upon,” was the double-edged compliment of one American master. Certainly, Lisa had scores of suitors, which seemed to amuse her: “I get a lot of love letters from other chessplayers,” she said to a New York Times reporter. “I read them, I laugh, and then I file them. Letters from grandmasters go on top.”

Lisa’s victory in the U.S. Championship in December 1959 earned her invitations to the Olympiad in the Netherlands and to the World Championship in Vrnjacka Banja, a mountain resort in Yugoslavia, both held in the fall of 1963. In preparation for these events and with the help of a public sports grant, Lisa moved from Philadelphia to Greenwich Village in New York City, the center of American chess activity. She amassed a huge collection of chess books and studied day and night. She also studied Russian at the nearby New School so that she could read Soviet chess magazines.

The media hoopla over Lisa, articles in The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, the dailies such as the Post and the Sun, along with chess magazines, scared her Russian opponents, who were reportedly just as afraid of Lisa as they were of better-established foreign contenders. Their fears were unjustified: Lisa only tied for twelfth out of eighteen players in Vrnjacka Banja.7 It was becoming clear that Lisa had a way to go before she could be a serious competitor for the world crown.

Lisa stayed in Europe for the rest of the winter, having received an invitation to the prestigious Chess Congress (challengers’ section) in Hastings, England. In a shocking move, Lisa dropped out midway through the tournament after two losses and a draw. Her explanation was that she was “too much in love” to continue play. When Lisa left New York in October for her European chess tour, she had abandoned a burgeoning romance with Neil Hickey, a journalist who interviewed her for the American Weekly. Hickey wrote passionately about Lisa’s “lissome beauty,” which “confounds all customary notions of bookish, brainy females.” Clearly, Hickey’s article reflected feelings deeper than the detached admiration of a reporter. Lisa was missing Neil and quit the tournament to return to New York. “I could not concentrate—my thoughts kept wandering.”

Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic had a field day with the story, joking that Lisa Lane had “flipp[ed] her chessboard.” Another wrote that it was understandable for a brilliant girl to give up the game, “especially if she really was in love.” Lisa’s return to normalcy, a state in which girls put love above chess, elicited bemused pleasure from the public. There was little outrage at the breach of sportsmanship it is to quit a tournament in the middle of an event, or sadness over the declining interest of such a dynamic talent.

In fact, Lisa was not done with chess. Two years later she caused a stir when she was overlooked for the 1963 Olympic Team in favor of Mary Bain and Gisela Gresser.8 The Associated Press ran a story on Lisa’s reaction with the cheeky headline “Scorned Woman Gets Something Off Her Chess.” Lisa had assumed that since she was the first runner-up in the 1962 U.S. Championship (to Gresser) and the second highest-ranked player in the country, she would be selected for the team. Lisa was only able to think of one explanation for being left out: “They were sore from all the publicity I’ve been getting. Everywhere I go, people want to take my picture and get interviews with me.” The wealthy Gresser assured reporters that she was happy about any press coverage chess got, though she admitted that selection was based on factors other than merit, such as the player’s being able to meet expenses. This explanation enraged Lisa. “Since when did you have to be a millionairess,” Lisa fumed, “to represent your country in sport?”

Lisa Lane. (Photo courtesy Chess Magazine.)

Lisa’s approach to chess had changed by the time she made her next attempt in the Women’s World Championship in 1964. Having opened a chess club, The Queen’s Pawn in Greenwich Village, Lane played blitz chess for hours every night, but gave up the nightly grind of studying chess books: “This time I am preparing by not preparing.” Again she had a bad result—twelfth out of eighteen. Soon after this, The Queen’s Pawn closed, and Lisa disappeared from chess.

Lisa has been called the “Bobby Fischer of women’s chess,” a tempting comparison. Both were good-looking, defiant, eccentric, and magnets for a press that till then was uninterested in the chess world. Like Fischer, Lane suddenly dropped out of chess and has not played since the late 1960s. Bobby did not have kind words for Lisa or for any woman in chess. “There isn’t a woman in the world I couldn’t give Knights odd to and still beat,” he said in an interview with Harper’s. In Newsweek, Bobby Fischer used different words to express the same sentiment: “They can’t concentrate, they don’t have stamina, and they aren’t creative. They’re all fish [an ineffective chessplayer]. Lisa, you might say, is the best of the American fish.”9 Fischer concluded that women should not be allowed in open tournaments. Lane retorted that adults like herself shouldn’t have to play with children like Bobby.

As similair as their personas were, Lisa and Bobby’s accomplishments were not comparable. While Bobby’s strength made him one of the best players of all time, Lisa Lane’s standard did not even place her in the top ranks of women.

Diana Lanni. (Photo by Val Zemitis.)

Lisa, still married to Neil Hickey, runs a metaphysical store, where spiritual items and books are sold, in upstate New York. I called to see if she wanted to chat. Lisa had not played chess in decades, but her competitive streak was still intact—she commented that a young woman player had bragged that she could easily defeat Lisa Lane. “I think it’s absurd to compare the women players of today with those of my generation. It’s like comparing apples with oranges. Chess was different then, women were different then.” I assured Lisa that I was not the person who said that, but still Lisa did not want to meet me in person for an interview. She no longer has any interest in fame and has completely abandoned her former identity as a chessplayer. She seems to have nothing but bitter feelings toward the game. What Lane values most in her life now is directly opposed to what was written about her in the press: “I got a lot of attention from the press,” she reminds me, remarking wryly, “I guess I was good copy.” “I don’t think the things I did in chess forty years ago are the most important things in my life.” Lisa quit chess partly because she was annoyed with being identified as a chessplayer. “It got embarrassing—constantly being introduced as a chess champion at parties.” The fame brought on by Lisa’s shockingly blunt speech, beauty, and skill no longer seem important to her.

Lisa Lane had a relatively short career on the professional circuit, but her wild ways, tough-luck history, and glamorous lifestyle made an impression on girls and women who read about her in the press. Diana Lanni was one of these. Superficially, she was similar to Lisa. Both were born to troubled, working-class American families. Lanni, like Lisa, was beautiful, which proved to be a mixed blessing.

Diana’s father showed her Lisa’s press clippings, and Diana saw how much fun Lisa had had with chess. “My dad pointed out that women were such novelties in the chess world, that if I spent a few good years of work, I could travel the world, and achieve rock-star status.” It wasn’t until Diana graduated from high school and left home that she took her father’s advice. Grateful to her father for introducing her to chess, Diana describes an otherwise terrible relationship with her dad. “Having such a poor father figure and seeing my mom struggle so much made me a feminist very fast.”

Immediately after high school, Diana found herself in a series of unsavory jobs, including “the drudgery of $1.60-an-hour retail work” at Lord & Taylor’s. One night Diana went with a couple of friends to a strip club in Washington, D.C. The owners encouraged the girls to audition, and they complied. Diana was offered a job. “We dared each other to try it out for a while.” Diana did, and ended up making four times as much stripping as she did at her various day jobs. Setting up a Christmas display at Lord & Taylor’s with a chess set, Diana remembered how her father had encouraged her to pursue chess. Soon thereafter she became friends with a strong player who was moving to Miami. Frustrated with all her jobs in D.C., she went with him to Miami, telling all her friends that she was “running away with chess.”

Her stay in Miami was disastrous. Diana got heavily involved in alcohol and cocaine. “I drank my brains out.” In Miami, Diana took another job as a topless dancer, but she found that stripping in D.C. was far different from in Miami. “In D.C. we stripped for government officials, but my job in Miami was far seedier. We were encouraged to hustle for drinks, ordering the most expensive drinks on the menu, and then charging men fifty dollars for them.”

At one after-hours party, a drunk Diana noticed three fat Italian men playing chess. She offered to play them for high stakes. The winner would receive an “eight-ball” (an eighth ounce of cocaine). Diana, who was by then a strong amateur player, won easily, but the men refused to give her the drugs. “I was so angry when they didn’t give me the cocaine that I ran around the party complaining.” Her antics caused the men to threaten her. Shortly thereafter, Diana, scared for her safety, fled Miami.

She didn’t know where to go, so her default plan was to drive back to D.C., where her parents still lived. “My father was abusing my mother at home, and I didn’t want to go back, but I didn’t know where to go.” On her way, Diana stopped off at a chess tournament in South Carolina, where she met a man who offered to put her up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was a fortuitous move for Diana.

In Michigan, Diana immersed herself in chess, playing as often as she could. When a few cocky masters teased her about her play, Diana was determined “to get good and prove them wrong.” As she immersed herself in chess, Diana felt her self-esteem soar. Diana improved rapidly and realized how smart she was. “Academically hopeless” in high school, Diana had assumed that she was dumb before she started playing chess. Her father had always given her that impression. “He always told me how stupid I was and how ashamed he was of me.” Her success in chess gave her confidence to enroll at a community college in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she got straight As. After completing the two-year program, she pursued a B.A. at the University of Michigan, in which she investigated the psychology of female chess players, surveying dozens of American women chessplayers. Diana found that many women chessplayers had come from broken homes, and had “messed-up” relationships with their fathers. She told me, “Chess was a way for them to express their feminism, as well as gaining belated approval from their fathers.”

She won a tournament in Michigan in 1977, and qualified for her first U.S. Championship to be held in Los Angeles. Her chess career was on the move. After finishing with the University of Michigan, twenty-three-year-old Diana moved to New York City to live with some chess friends. New York City, then as today, is the closest thing to a chess Mecca in the United States.

In New York, Diana still had “drug problems up the ying-yang,” especially with coke, to which she had developed a serious addiction. She was forthcoming about her most sordid moments in an interview in Ms. magazine, in which she said, “I wound up living in a sleazy hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, hooking for cocaine. I became increasingly suicidal.” After realizing how low she had sunk, she checked into Bellevue Hospital and entered a rehabilitation program. At this point, chess was a lifeboat for Diana. “The logic of chess was an alternative system to the chaos of life.”

After Diana checked out of Bellevue, in 1980 on New Year’s Eve, she began to take chess more seriously, earning an expert’s rating and qualifying to play for the U.S. women’s team in the 1982 Olympiad in Lucerne, Switzerland, an event for which Diana has particularly fond memories. In Lucerne, Diana found the comforting social network she craved. “We got drunk every single night and partied. It felt like having a family.”

Lanni tended to land in relationships with other games players, such as Grandmaster Roman Dzindzichasvili, a great chess talent and obsessive gambler, and Paul Magrill, a backgammon champion. The guys she dated tended to be more successful than she, and in describing one such relationship, Diana said, “He was the star. I was just the girlfriend who took too many drugs.”

Diana became a bookmaker in New York City, a job she excelled at immediately. In speaking with Diana over the phone, I could understand why. Diana’s voice is both warm and authoritative, while her analytical mind is well suited to calculating odds and point spreads. “Chessplayers make good bookies,” says Diana, who had a great time in New York in the games world, though “it was hard to make ends meet in Manhattan.” She often wound up sleeping on the couch at the Barpoint, a game room, where ping-pong, backgammon, and chess were played till late at night. In the early eighties, rents on the Upper West Side skyrocketed, the club closed, and Diana realized she could not afford to live in the city anymore. In 1985, at the age of thirty, Diana moved to California.

In northern California, Diana worked as a poker dealer, “a completely legitimate job.” Diana still speaks fondly of poker, offering to give me lessons when she finds out I don’t play. “Poker is a very deep game, and it’s something you can use to make money all your life.” Diana feels that chess led her to more lucrative activities in poker and bookmaking and “saved me from choosing between the drudgery of nine-to-five minimum-wage work and the humiliation of stripping and prostitution.”

Diana resumed bookmaking after she relocated to Santa Cruz some years later and soon got into trouble with the law. Since moving to California, she had been arrested for possession of opiates and driving under the influence. When her bookmaking ring was busted through an informant, she landed in jail.

Diana’s time in prison was both wrenching and enlightening. She was incarcerated in the Dublin prison, the largest women’s facility in America. There were three thousand prisoners, many of whom, Diana tells me, were young Hispanic girls. “It was so sad. They were arrested as mules smuggling drugs across the border. They had been totally sacrificed by their boyfriends.” The atmosphere brought out Diana’s progressive and feminist inclinations. She has always wanted to help other women, especially around issues of pregnancy.

For Diana, jail life was not so miserable. She took opera appreciation and Spanish, and attended ice cream socials. Diana did have to work forty hours a week, like all inmates. “Since I was white, the guards gave me a good job in the gardening department.” Diana even started a chess club in jail, hoping to introduce chess as a popular pastime like it is in men’s prisons. Diana ordered chess sets for the inmates and advertised it in both English and Spanish. The club was given space in the pottery room. “The recreation department was very supportive of my project.” Some of the women already knew how to play, and Diana gave lessons to the others.

She was incredibly relieved when her four-month sentence ended; it was the small comforts she missed most: “I couldn’t wait to get out and have a real cup of espresso instead of the awful coffee they serve you in jail.” Diana regrets the long-lasting repercussions. She is not allowed to vote, and her record puts off some employers. She is terrified of a future arrest, admitting, “I am walking a very straight line these days.”

Now Diana teaches chess to kids, with a keen eye on her female students. She wishes she could play herself, but chronic back problems—the aftermath of a knee injury—preclude long periods of sitting.

Lanni is one of the most explicitly feminist chessplayers I spoke with, declaring, “I think women play better than men. Chess is a language, and women are better at languages.” She rails on “the testosterone baloney,” saying, “They still don’t have a clue about how it affects people.” But in her work of teaching girls, Diana does observe differences: “Winning is so important to men. Women don’t play as hard to win. They sometimes feel bad to beat their opponents. I have to remind my girls: ‘Someone has to win, it might as well be you.’”

Rachel Crotto was the first adolescent star of American women’s chess—she played in her first U.S. Championship as a twelve-year-old in 1972, and five years later she tied for first at seventeen. As it was for Lanni, chess was for Rachel a route to higher self-esteem. The ideas of the two women on the subject are uncannily similar. “I used to think I was stupid,” Rachel tells me. “But when my dad taught me chess, I began to beat everyone during the breaks at lunch. Classmates and teachers told me, ‘You’re such a good chessplayer. You must be really smart.’”

Rachel was on her own from the age of sixteen, when she ran away from home. She tried to make a living on her winnings from chess, giving up her studies at NYU to play in a tournament in Israel. “My family was not very happy with my decision,” Rachel jokes, “to become a chess bum.”

Rachel became a close friend of Ivona Jesierska, an immigrant from Poland. Ivona spoke only Polish and Russian when she arrived in New York, and Rachel, who spoke some Russian, became a close confidant. Ivona describes to me how tough it was for her at first: “I would wait tables at a restaurant, and I spoke no English so it was hard to understand what the customers wanted.” The two played countless games of blitz and frequented chess clubs and roomed together at tournaments. Ivona has fond memories of late-night blitz marathons at Barpoint, a chess club in downtown Manhattan: “Diana Lanni used to sleep on the couch there—people were up till three in the morning playing blitz, ping-pong, gambling. Lots of Russian was spoken. It felt like home to me.”

Rachel and Ivona were both in love with chess and the jet-setting lifestyle it offered. But with no independent means, they struggled to get by. Rachel says, “I was always living on the edge. It was a struggle to pay the rent.”

At the 1986 Olympiad, held in Dubai, Rachel, at the age of twenty-seven, abruptly decided to give up the game. “I had a bad tournament and realized that if I hadn’t applied myself to studying by then, I probably never would.” I ask Rachel if she misses chess, and she tells me, “I miss the traveling,” adding, “and not having to work nine to five.” Ivona also quit semi-professional chess when her minimum standard of living was raised as she matured. Now Ivona makes a good living working as a chess coordinator and coach, but lacks the energy to play seriously. She told me wistfully, “If I was wealthy I would play chess all the time.”

Rachel Crotto. (Photo by Val Zemitis.)

Rachel felt estranged from the male-dominated and sometimes chauvinistic atmosphere at open chess tournaments. She once called into a radio advice talk show to say, “I am a woman chessplayer, and every time I play a man they underestimate me, assuming that I will play badly because I am a woman.” Rachel recalls that the host advised her to “dress very sexy, wear a low neckline, and put on a lot of makeup to use my femininity against them.” Rachel, a lesbian, says, “Obviously, I was not about to do that.” Rachel was neither open nor secretive about her sexuality, though she assures me that she never encountered any discrimination in the chess world as a result of it. Rachel debunked rumors I had heard that the large majority of female chessplayers in the 1970s and 1980s were lesbians: “I think that some players who were just not particularly feminine got mistaken for lesbians.” “If ten percent of the population is homosexual, I think the chess world reflects that number pretty closely.”

Diane Savereide. (Photo by Val Zemitis.)

Rachel’s ego was boosted by the attention she got as a young girl, but later, the scrutiny interfered with her relationship to the chess itself. She wanted to concentrate on the game, but was distracted by the attention she got. Despite lingering feelings for the game, Rachel hardly plays at all now. But she has a comeback fantasy. “I’ve always wanted to play chess as a man—in one of those big open tournaments with 400 people.” Rachel says, “I would like to know how it feels to be invisible. To be just one of 400 players. I always felt like I was on trial at tournaments. If I were to make a mistake, it would prove that I really was a stupid woman.”

The most dominant force in women’s chess during the time of Rachel Crotto and Diana Lanni was Diane Savereide, who won, or shared, a total of seven U.S titles from 1975 to 1984. (Crotto shared two of her three U.S. titles with Savereide.) Savereide had a major influence on fellow U.S. championship contender Diana Lanni also. “She was my hero,” Lanni gushes. “I remember being so psyched to ride with her each morning to the tournament hall on her motorcycle.” Savereide was the first American woman to maintain a national master rating, “the first strong female master in American chess,” said IM Jack Peters, also from L.A.

Saveriede describes living in a positive chess environment as a young girl, along with many active, prominent women in the American chess scene, including player and organizer Jacqueline Piatigorsky, whose husband was famous cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Diane says, “When I traveled to other parts of the country, I discovered that chess players were not always so hospitable to women, but it was too late to discourage me.”

In 1975, Diane won the first U.S. Women’s Chess Championship that she played in, earning her a spot in a world-title qualifier. Diane won six more national titles and traveled from Hong Kong to Haifa to represent the U.S. in international events.

Nearing thirty, with seven national titles under her belt, Diane tried to make a go as a professional chessplayer. In the summer of 1984, she took time off from her job as a computer programmer to play in tournaments, but didn’t make enough money. She quit. “It came down to being thirty and deciding I had to make a living.” At the time, the first prize for the U.S. women’s champion was tiny. For becoming the best female player in the nation, Diane would get somewhere between $300 and $600.

For the past twenty years, Diane has played chess rarely. She sometimes misses the friends, travels, and intensity of chess. But she has always been too passionate about the game to play casually. Many professional chessplayers quit when they get real jobs, not because they don’t have time to play chess, but because they don’t have time to prepare and play their best. In 1990, Ilya Gurevich became the World Junior Championship. He was one of the most promising GMs in American history. He spent a few years as a pro player, but gave it up after earning a business degree at NYU and accepting a Wall Street job. He told me he quit because “I remember what it’s like to be in good form, but I can’t play that well now and it feels awful.”

Irina Krush. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)

Many talented American players quit chess because they cannot make a decent living at the game. The few who stay with it tend to be male.“The reason chess never became popular among women in America, while they broke barriers and proliferated in so many other fields,” Diana Lanni muses, “is that women still needed money as an excuse to use their brains. Thinking for free was unacceptable.”

After Saveriede quit chess, the U.S. championships began to be dominated by Russian immigrants, who had been strong players in the Soviet Union. However, these women came to the United States for a better life, hoping to make more money than they did as professional players. Many of them quit or played only casually so they could devote their time to more lucrative pursuits. Irina Levitina, three-time U.S. Women’s Champion, gave up chess for a career as a professional bridge player. Elena Donaldson, three-time champion, found a good job in computer programming and stopped playing for a while. Angelina Belakovskaya, another three-time champion, slowed her participation in her thirties to pursue a career in finance.

The highest-rated American woman player, Irina Krush, literally learned the moves between worlds, when her father taught her chess on the journey from Odessa to New York City. Irina is introspective about her split identity: “I am half American, half Russian.” Even her voice contains a curious mix of accents from Brooklyn and Russia. She expresses the most fondness for the Russian language. “I consider English a utilitarian language. When talking about emotions, I need to speak Russian—or at least English in a Russian accent.” As for playing chess, her coaches are usually Russian, and her early play was very strategic, marked by a keen understanding of the endgame. Her style has changed recently: “I used to always play against strong players as a kid, so I was used to defending.” Now her style is much more aggressive. “No one could call me a passive player.”

Over the board, Irina enters another realm, one of deep mental focus, but she also seems to savor the physical process of making moves. After selecting her move, she places her piece on the square with a determined yet tender touch, as if she is playing adagio piano. In immaculate handwriting, she records her move and then turns her concentrated gaze to the board. When playing Irina I feel particularly conscious of my own sloppier habits, like the faces I make and the scribbles I use to record my moves that are so difficult to decipher that one arbiter called them Chinese.

Irina is a scrupulous and independent thinker, both traits that she says come from her American upbringing. She is disturbed on a visceral level by lying and cheating. Irina once witnessed a competitor offer me a draw before a game that would affect the final standings of the tournament. I declined, but Irina was emotionally floored: “I am so upset I had to see that.”

Irina was so precocious in chess—she earned the master title as a twelve-year-old, her first U.S. title at fourteen years old, and the IM title at sixteen years old—that she and her parents arranged for her to take half her classes at home in order to accelerate her chess career. After graduating from high school, Irina took a year off to devote herself entirely to chess. She had some major successes, including the first norm toward her GM title. But her results were inconsistent and, more significantly, Irina was not happy. “I spent all day studying chess at home.” She felt alienated. “I realized I wanted to go to college.”

She decided to enroll in NYU, because along with her passion for chess Irina wanted to learn about business and politics and to improve her writing skills. “It takes me a while to write anything, because I have to choose just the right words.” Her perfectionist character is borne out by her record at NYU, where she earned a 4.0 average in her second semester, even though she was absent for two weeks to play in tournaments.

Soon after entering NYU, Irina began to date a chessplayer, Canadian champion Pascal Charbonneau, who was at about the same level as she. Pascal drove to visit Irina each weekend from his studies at UMBC in Baltimore, and they soon became a serious couple. Both have strong opinions about chess positions, and often disagree. In contrast to Irina, who has a solid foundation in chess theory gained from years of training, Pascal’s knowledge is more of a pastiche of things he has picked up from grandmaster friends, tournaments, and books. He is attracted to the geometric aspects of the game, and once told me, “The Bishop is really strong when it is three squares in front of a Knight,” the kind of adage that would be glib coming from an amateur, but was profound from Pascal.

Pascal’s listening skills and good manners have influenced Irina, who recently confessed in an interview with New In Chess that her biggest flaw was “selfishness,” a trait that in her youth she exhibited at times with anti-social behavior at tournaments. I’ve had several heated arguments with her about whether or not she should have read at the playing hall while her opponents were thinking or ignored people just because she didn’t feel like talking. Irina often got away with such antics, not only because of her status but also because of a depth of sincerity that both strangers and friends alike saw in her. Irina is and was straight-up. These days, Irina has adopted more traditional manners, possibly an influence of Pascal’s. I was alerted to the change when Irina called me and, in an urgent tone, asked me about flight arrangements for an upcoming tournament. I hadn’t heard from her in months. Five minutes later, she called me again to ask how I was, apologizing for being so curt. Meanwhile, Pascal was affected by Irina’s perfectionism. He started college with lackluster ambitions, but now he gets 4.0 averages each semester: “Irina convinced me that if I were taking classes, I might as well get As.”

Will Irina throw her talents into chess after college, or will she abandon it for more lucrative pursuits? Irina is conflicted, and is both envious and critical of professional chessplayers. “It’s so great to study and play chess all the time, but part of me doesn’t understand why they’re not aiming for a better life.”

Irina would love to play chess for a living, but worries about the limited financial resources. “The problem with chess is that sometimes it feels like begging.” Pascal said, “You have to depend on rich people who are chess fans and sponsor tournaments and players out of the kindness of their hearts.” Irina is intent on making a comfortable living, explaining, “I identify with a subculture of first-generation Russian-Americans, who aim to go to elite colleges and make a lot of money after graduation.” Her parents are successful accountants, and though they have encouraged her in chess, they ultimately want her to have a secure career. Irina, in trying to convey to me just how rich she would like to be, tells me, “Remember the hotel we stayed at in Shanghai, Jen?” I tell her I do, an extravagant five-star hotel. “I want to be able to afford to go on vacation to places like that without flinching.” On another occasion, Irina described her love for shopping as a “passion for finding that perfect item to complete my wardrobe.” Irina sarcastically describes herself as “degenerating into a materialistic parasite.” Chess is the counterpoint to all this, and what keeps her life spiritually fulfilling. “It’s a panacea with which I combat the emptiness.”

When I ask Irina about her dreams in chess, I get a passionate response. “My ultimate fantasy,” she says, eyes flashing, Russian accent on full, “is to play e4 and d4 equally well…to be a two-headed monster. That’s a dream with some soul in it.” Although she plays in occasional women’s tournaments, her goal is to become one of the best players in America, male or female. She’d like to become the first female to earn a seat on the six-person U.S. Olympic team. “That would be historic.” Sometimes, Irina prefers to focus on the chess itself: “I think that if I understand a lot of different positions, the results will come.” Irina has similar ideas on fame. “I do want to be famous, give interviews, be in magazines,” Irina tells me, “but not because I’m a young woman who’s good at chess. I want fame as a result of impressive tournament results that I can be proud of.”

The opportunities for money in women’s chess in America today are improving. The prizes for U.S. championships have increased dramatically since the eighties, when the sums were in the three-figures.

Women have a strong presence in the American chess politics—in 2003 Beatriz Marinello, an inactive master, was elected president of the USCF. Two non-profit organizations, America’s Foundation for Chess (AF4C) based in Seattle, and Chess-in-the-Schools (CIS) in New York City, are attracting major sponsors. The first CEO of AF4C was Michelle Anderson. Marley Kaplan has been the executive director of CIS since 1999. The organizations, while not explicitly focusing on women’s chess, have promoted the interests of girls. The prizes for the U.S. Women’s Champion more than tripled after the AF4C took over—from $4,000 in 1998 to $12,500 in 2003.

CIS teaches chess to as many inner-city children as possible. Some stars have been born in the process. Particularly impressive is the rapid progress of Medina Parilla, a mature, sweet girl from the Bronx. At twelve, Medina became the first African-American female to win a national title in the Grade Nationals in Chicago. She was well prepared, having just returned from representing the country in the World Youth Championships in Crete. Throughout the international event, Medina was battling on the top boards with girls from Russia and China and realized that she could compete with the world elite. Medina’s achievements were recognized on the cover of the New York paper Newsday.

The increased sponsorship of chess in America and the growing subculture of well-rounded child participants are slowly changing its reputation. But all is not rosy, in my opinion. Chess in America is still suffering from an identity crisis, an intellectual endeavor in an anti-intellectual society. Chess is often praised for combining aspects of art, science, and sport. Unfortunately, what that means right now in American society is that it doesn’t fit easily into any category. Chess is not on TV or represented at the Olympics, nor is chess well represented in artistic or academic communities. The negative image of chess in America may prevent many young girls from pursuing it. In Europe, recognized chess players can range from a respected sportsman to a young, hip teenager, but to the America public, the stereotype of a chessplayer as geeky and monomaniacal lingers.

Ironically, it might be that emphasizing the eccentric elements of chess, but with a positive spin, could increase its popularity. Marcel Duchamp, an influential artist of the twentieth century, liked chess because, in comparison to the glitzy elite of the art world, chessplayers were “madmen of a certain quality, the way the artist is supposed to be and generally isn’t.” He believed that artists were often pressured to repeat their styles and successes in order to promote themselves and make money; chessplayers, on the other hand, were less likely to be corrupted. Most important to Duchamp was that chess games, unlike art, could not be turned into commodities. “Chessplayers at least,” he remarked wryly, “cannot make money.” Chess might just be the right activity for anyone seeking an alternative to the more media-driven subcultures.

One of my students, Venice Adrian, was an eccentric, glamorous woman, who managed the downtown New York City nightclub called Plaid. Blond with plump lips, a Barbie-doll figure, and feline gestures, Venice was described in a gossip-and-style glossy, Paper, as “the chicest person in New York City nightlife.” I met Venice in 2003 at the Man Versus Machine match between Garry Kasparov and Deep Junior. Venice attended with friends who were working on a documentary about the chess scene in New York City. “I always had an attraction to chess, but never really got around to pursuing it,” Venice told me, “and then one day I opened the phone book and looked up chess, and called the biggest number I saw.” For a while she took lessons with a Russian grandmaster. After watching Kasparov live, Venice’s interest in chess was rekindled. She wanted to take lessons with me, and I wanted to teach her.

At ten o’clock on a Wednesday night, I met Venice at the Hotel Chelsea, what had been New York’s bohemian epicenter in the 1960s and 1970s. This was where Dylan Thomas lived and Sid Vicious killed Nancy. Venice’s apartment is decorated with her extensive taxidermy collection, but when I arrived, the centerpiece of the room was a wooden chessboard, set up between antique couches. Venice was just starting out in chess, so I showed her some basic checkmates. She was intensely interested in the positions I set up: sometimes she got up and pounced eagerly to the opposite side of the board to get a better look. Deeply involved in the media and nightlife culture, Venice was disenchanted with many of the fame-seeking New Yorkers she knew at her nightclub. Venice viewed chess as a purely intellectual activity, balanced her lifestyle.

In the winter of 2003, nearly a year after we had met at the Kasparov-Deep Junior match, I ran into Venice on a plane to Chicago. She was poring over horseracing magazines. We hadn’t had a lesson in several months; her interest in chess had been replaced by a new addiction for horse-betting. I told her I’d read about her in some recent magazines, to which she responded, “I hate fashion magazines. It’s all superficial—all about being hip and beautiful.” She asked about my chess career, and at one point, grabbing my arm, she confided, “I wish I could be as smart as you.” Usually, when people confuse skill at chess with intelligence, I take pains to explain that chess does not always correlate with general mental abilities. This time, I decided to let Venice’s mistake go uncorrected.

12

Gender Play:

Angela from Texas

(S)he was a man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in. The comforts of ignorance seemed utterly denied to her. She was a feather blown on the gale.

— Virginia Woolf, Orlando

In Medieval chess, when a pawn reached the eighth rank and became a Queen, a moral quandary arose. How could a male foot soldier change sex to become a woman? In 1912, the great chess historian H.J.R. Murray wrote about the dilemma: “The pawn had to change its sex…the moral sense of some players was outraged…the usual practice was to use a different name for the promoted pawn from that of the original Queen.”1 The pawn promoted into a piece that moved like a Queen but was given a masculine name, reserving the title of Queen for the original. Now, sensitivity to gender has shifted to the players themselves. The gender of each player in the U.S. and World Chess Federations is carefully registered, and usually—but not always—maintained till the end of his or her career.

In Texas a chess expert ushered in the twenty-first century by transforming from a man, Tony, into a woman, Angela. Angela Alston calls the day she got her sex-change operation “the happiest of her life,” echoing what millions of pawns must have felt when they reached the eighth rank. And like pawns, Angela struggled against ranks of adversity.

“I was born aspected of both genders,” Angela says. “I have more testosterone than most women, but less than most men.” Angela’s condition is known as pseudo-hermaphroditism, in which a child is born with ambiguous genitalia. The incidence is estimated to be 1 in 20,000. In the more rare case (approximately one in a million) of “true hermaphroditism,” a baby has tissues of both male and female sex organs.

Angela’s wavering between the male and the female and eventual transformation has been painful, expensive, and ultimately redemptive. In my first e-mail communication with Angela, she referred to herself as “two spirit.” In Native American culture, a two spirit is a revered person who has special insights into both the male and female psyches. Angela, who grew up in a traditional family in the fifties, feared that revealing her gender confusion would elicit more scorn than admiration.

On a visit to Austin, Texas, I got a chance to speak with Angela face to face. We met in a dim, laid-back café, where Angela had driven from her home in San Antonio. She arrived dressed in white jeans and a black-and-white knitted sweater. She wore glasses and her long hair was crimped. She is self-conscious about her voice, which she worries sounds like a man’s. “My voice is the one thing I cannot change.” I did not notice anything about Angela’s voice. Only her large, masculine hands might have led me to guess her history.

Angela Alston. (Photo by Jennifer Shahade.)

Angela and I immediately felt comfortable with each other. We settled into couches on the smoking side of the café. Angela ordered a latte, lit up a menthol cigarette, and began to rhapsodize about the Texas capital. “I love getting a chance to visit Austin—it’s an oasis in Texas,” she raved. “In this state, intellectual activity is like water in the desert.” Austin has a liberal, artistic community. The largest branch of the University of Texas draws 50,000 students, and the downtown is scattered with independent bookstores, country-music bars, and coffee shops. I spotted a vegetarian restaurant offering ten percent off to anyone with a mullet haircut. George W. Bush’s face was silk-screened onto T-shirts that read One-Term President, while Keep Austin Weird was the bumper-sicker slogan of choice. Angela thrives in such an accepting environment. “In Austin you can do anything without being persecuted. Intellectual activity is what life is about for me.” Angela is drawn to chess for its challenge, pointing out, “I could play this game for my whole life and never near the pinnacle.”

Born in Boston on December 14, 1955, with both male and female genitalia, Angela was quickly designated as a male and named Tony. “After that, no one bothered to look for years.” Early on, Tony knew that he didn’t fit in. “As a six-year-old, I realized that something was very wrong. I did not fit in with the boys. I thought I was mentally ill.” A ten-year-old Tony would browse in the psychology section of the public library, hoping to find some clues to the nature of his condition. At thirteen, he chanced upon a copy of a book by Christine Jorgenson (1927-1989), a photographer who traveled to Denmark to get a sex-change operation. When the story leaked out to the press, the charismatic, multi-talented Jorgenson instantly became a public figure—an object of ridicule for some and an inspiration to others, like the young Tony, who said that finding Jorgenson’s autobiography “was like a revelation. Finally, I saw someone who was like me.”

Throughout her life as Tony and as Angela, she has maintained a passion for chess. Tony learned the moves from his sister when he was six and played in his first tournament as a teenager. Tony became quickly hooked on the game, particularly attracted to its psychological aspects. He devoured the writings of his favorite player, the second world champion, Dr. Emmanuel Lasker. Lasker was well-educated in math, philosophy, and psychology and was friends with major intellectuals, such as Einstein. “If I could be a fly on the wall, anywhere, anytime, it would be during the conversations between Lasker and Einstein.”

Tony had a frenetic lifestyle as a youth, switching from job to job: taxi driver, land-surveyor, cook, and Navy payroll officer. Throughout all of this, Tony was depressed. In his stint as a cab driver, passengers used to recount their woeful tales to Tony. “I listened, and thought, I could live your life standing on my head.” Tony used to drive into the worst neighborhoods of San Antonio in the dead of the night, which he now sees as a “subconscious suicide attempt.” He told me, “Part of me just wanted my life to be over. When I was eighteen I thought I would never make it past twenty-one, and when I was twenty-one I thought I would never make it to twenty-five. But, somehow, I kept going.”

Tony’s lack of comfort in his masculine body led to his indulging in reckless behavior from hitchhiking to alcohol and drug abuse. Reminiscing, Angela assures me, “I did have fun.” But the troubles outweighed the good times. Tony didn’t feel like a man, so he created a male persona “imitating different aspects of dozens of the men I knew in my life—it was like making myself schizophrenic so I could fit in.” Tony lived in constant fear that his carefully constructed masculine identity would be unmasked: “I sometimes used feminine gestures—women tend to move their hands around a lot more when they talk, and one time, a tournament director told me, ‘You behave like a woman.’ I was terrified that I was going to be found out.” After such incidents, Tony would retreat, desperate to iron out the kinks in his personality.

When Tony settled down in San Antonio, he set himself two goals: he wanted to become the top player in the city and the president of the chess club. He accomplished both feats in just four years. Instead of feeling joy, Tony felt only restlessness, wondering what to do next.

In order to truly fit in, Tony decided that he would have to start a family. He met Teri in San Antonio while employed as a land-surveyor. They married and had two children, Ian and Sean. “Doctors told me the chances of me having kids were very low, but it happened.” Tony kept his birth condition secret from Teri: “She told me that I didn’t look or feel like other men, but she didn’t realize the extent of it.” During this time, Tony stopped using drugs, although he was drinking a lot. “I replaced one vice with another.” The relationship was problematic and, though Angela does not reveal exactly what went wrong, she claims, “We never really got along.” In 1993, after twelve years of marriage, Tony and Teri divorced.

Angela recalls being in a constant state of depression while living as a man. “I used to be so jealous of people who were born into one sex, and did not have to go through what I had to go through.” In May 1996, a few years after his marriage with Teri fell apart, Tony became determined to pursue the dream he’d had since he was twelve years old. Tony yearned for an external body and social identity to match his internal female self. “I had tried everything else. I had to either live as I really was or die.”

Tony was well aware of the obstacles he would face along the way. “Some people thought I was just insane to give up being a white man in this culture. They did not understand why I would voluntarily descend the socio-economic ladder.”

Tony let it be known that he’d decided to let his female self emerge. As there were no laws in Texas to protect the rights of transgender individuals, employers cut back Tony’s hours as a cook and were openly nasty. In March 1998, Tony went to a medical doctor, who confirmed the existence of his rare medical condition. Then he went to the courthouse, changed his birth certificate designation to female and renamed himself. “When I was seventeen years old, I decided I liked the name Angela, and wanted it for myself. It took me twenty-five years.” Once she legally became a woman, her rights were protected at work, since she could claim sexual discrimination based on gender. This attracted the immediate attention of worried managers. Angela said they walked on eggshells once they understood her new legal rights. They gave Angela her hours back and were careful not to say anything offensive, at least not to her face.

A practical obstacle to Angela’s transformation was financing her sex-change operation. To remove her phallus, she had to save for three years, working overtime as a cook. After saving approximately $10,000 for the operation and related drugs and therapy, Angela traveled to Montreal, where her surgery was scheduled.

The operation lasted two hours. Angela recalls, “That day was the happiest day of my life.” A Billy Idol lyric from “White Wedding”—“It’s a nice day to start again”—played repeatedly in Angela’s head.

Born into a conservative family, Angela tells me, “I was brought up on the idea that you don’t just accept everything. No one ever talked about ‘celebrating diversity.’” Her siblings (one sister and two brothers) and her late father did not support her transformation, but when her father was dying of cancer in 1998, Angela accepted the responsibility to take care of her ill mother, Mary, with whom she now lives. “When my father was on his deathbed, I promised to take care of Mom,” she recalls. “And I will keep my word.” Initially her mother was upset with Angela, but gradually began to accept her. Angela knew her mother was ready to love her as she was after receiving her forty-second birthday card. Her mother wrote, “To my daughter.”

In San Antonio, Angela has settled into two stable, part-time jobs: teaching chess and working as a real-estate advisor. Teaching chess is Angela’s favorite: “I love to see the light in my students’ eyes and realize I reached someone.” Angela’s students, who range from six to twelve years old, sometimes ask her, “Are you a man or a woman?” Struggling to answer the awkward question is worth it for Angela:

“I think it’s good for young people to understand that some people are born different.”

The United States Chess Federation has considered Angela a female player since 1998, but she assures me that until her operation, she would not have played as female—“It wouldn’t have felt right.” The USCF began to communicate with Angela, who was suddenly eligible to qualify for the U.S. Women’s Championship. Though some state delegates argued with Angela’s participation in women’s events, the USCF calmly accepted her changed status. According to Angela, Tim Redman, the president of USCF at the time, was well informed of precedent-setting cases such as that of Reneé Richards (formerly Richard Raskin), a tennis player who was barred from playing in the 1976 U.S. Open by the United States Tennis Association, because she could not pass the chromosome test. Richards—urged on by fans and supporters—fought the decision, resulting in a yearlong battle that Reneé finally won in the Supreme Court, clearing the way for her to play in the 1977 U.S. Open.

Angela has not yet qualified for the U.S. Women’s Chess Championship, though this is one of her major goals. Her rating places her between the top twenty and thirty women in the country, so her chances to qualify are high. The new qualifying procedures for the U.S. Championship, set up by the American Foundation for Chess in 2002, require Angela to earn her spot in preliminary tournaments. These tournaments are never in Texas, and Angela does not have the money to travel to Philadelphia or Las Vegas, two frequent sites for the qualifiers. Angela is now most active in e-mail chess, where she often juggles more than fifty games at once. In e-mail chess, the length of time between each move ranges from one day to two weeks, so games last anywhere from a month to a year.

Some of Angela’s chess peers thought that her sex change would affect her play. One chess buddy warned her, “Your rating will plummet after you change your sex.” Angela tells me she sees no difference between her style today and her style as Tony. In her first tournament game after her operation, Angela crushed a master—in twenty-nine moves. Selby Anderson, a friend of Angela’s and a chess master, said the transition was “a surprise, but not entirely out of character. I think she enjoyed being a lightning rod.” The most difficult thing for Selby was “to stop calling her Tony.”

Though she is talkative and candid, I gather that Angela is lonely and feels a little out of place in both the chess world and San Antonio. “The person I’m closest to is my mother. I don’t have a lot of friends, though my closest are from chess—we have a point of reference so we can all relate.” After hearing about Angela’s operation, her ex-wife had a nervous breakdown, feeling that she must have been homosexual to spend so many years with Angela/Tony. Angela is not optimistic about her future romantic prospects: “At my age, it is hard enough to find a life companion, but with my condition I suspect it is nearly impossible.” However, the operation did leave Angela multi-orgasmic. “After the procedure I was able to experience more pleasure than I could as a man.”

The misconception that irritates Angela most is the frequent confusion that arises between gender and sexuality. That Angela wanted to change her sex did not mean that she wanted to date men. She changed from a lesbian woman living in a man’s body to a lesbian woman living in a woman’s body. But many friends did not understand that, assuming that she changed her sex so that she could sleep with men. One woman even told Angela, “If you want to find a man, you better stop acting so intelligent.”

Angela is suspicious of men. After the operation, the first thing she did was look to make sure “it was gone.” Sometimes her rhetoric devolves into absurd invectives. “Ninety percent of men ought to be flushed down the toilet immediately,” she tells me, adding that “the other ten percent are very good people.” Angela said that, living as a man for thirty-five years, she heard things that men only say amongst each other. “Many men really do think that women are stupid,” she told me. I press her for details, but she refused: “If I told you, Jennifer, you’d want to become lesbian.”

Angela is not active in any transsexual or transgender activist groups. “Being a transsexual is not my life,” she says. Though she reads voraciously on topics like religion and history, she rarely reads about feminism or sexuality. Angela considers herself a feminist even though “many male-to-female transsexuals are not feminists and still have a rigid conception of what a woman or man should be.” Angela is happy to educate the curious, but she does not want to spend the rest of her life thinking or talking about her gender. “I took care of my problem, so that I wouldn’t have to think about it all the time.” Angela is so much happier after her operation that she swears if she ever became rich, she would set up a fund to finance sex-change operations for people who could not afford them.

Angela, often surprised by the reactions of her friends in the chess world, could not have guessed who would be supportive. “At least I know who my real friends are.” Angela was shocked when one of her most liberal friends told her she was “sick and perverted.” The friends who touched Angela the most were the ones who focused on her struggle, rather than on their relationship to her. One friend from the chess world looked at Angela and said, “Oh my god, you must have been in so much pain.”

In San Antonio the population is conservative. “Many people here only know about transvestites from The Jerry Springer Show. They lack exposure—it’s as if I’m the first person they met who was different. Hundreds of people, once they get to know me, say, ‘You’re not like I thought.’” It is Angela’s belief and experience that people will often open their minds to her if she is patient with them. When Angela worked at a Mexican restaurant, one cook called her “it” within earshot. Angela turned to him and said, “For you to call me ‘it’ feels like it would feel to you if I called you the ‘n-word.’” After a couple of weeks of awkward silence, the same cook began to ask her questions. During one of their conversations, “He looked at me, pulled up his sleeve, pointed at his black arm, and declared, ‘We are among the unfortunate.’” Angela was moved that she had made a person who ridiculed her understand the parallels between racism and the persecution she had faced.

According to Angela, specifying gender is not an effective way to classify people. In her view, gender expression lies on a flexible continuum, pointing out commonplace examples. “When a woman wears pants or when a man cries in public—these are transgressions of traditional roles,” and so, concludes Angela, “if you really think about it, we’re are all a little transgender.”

13

Worst to First

The essence of chess is thinking about what chess is.

— Grandmaster David Bronstein

In the spring of 2004, Irina Krush and I were invited to the Women’s World Championship in Chess City, Russia. When I told my friends that I was going to Chess City, they thought I was joking, renaming my destination “Chesstonia.” But this was for real. Irina and I were among sixty-four of the best female chessplayers in the world contesting the world title, up for grabs for the first time since 2001. The tournament would be held near Elista, the capital city of Kalmykia, one of eighty-nine semi-autonomous regions in Russia. Kalmykia is led by the president of FIDE, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who has taken his double presidency seriously, building a city in which to play chess on the outskirts of Elista. Since 1998, when the prestigious Olympiad was held there, Chess City has been a common site for world-class tournaments.

I usually love traveling, but I was not thrilled to visit Russia again. I had developed an irrational fear of the country two and a half years before when I was there in the dead of winter for the Women’s World Championship. The first day I arrived, I walked around Red Square smiling, excited to be in Moscow. A tall, blond Russian laughed at me and asked if I was American. I asked how he knew and he said because of my smiling, which seemed demented to him. I had not brought sufficiently warm clothing, and knew only enough Russian to order food and read street names. There were things I liked about Moscow—the energy, the subways, the art museums, and the circus. Still, at the end of the tournament, walking through the security gate, I was happy to be going home.

The customs agent asked me where my visa was. I replied that it was inside my passport. She told me it wasn’t and said that I should check my bags. After twenty minutes of fruitless searching, I still couldn’t find it. She told me I would not be allowed to leave Moscow until I found it. I began to panic. I asked if I could pay a special fee to leave. She said no. I missed my plane, still looking for the godforsaken piece of paper. After searching every crevice of my bag, I gave up and took a cab back to the city center. I spent the next four days waiting in lines at the police station, travel agencies, and photo shops in order to compile the mountain of paperwork required to obtain a new visa.

I relived all this four days before leaving for Elista when applying for my new visa at the Russian Embassy, located in uptown Manhattan. On my way from the diner where I had been filling out my application to the visa office it began to pour, soaking through my bag. When I tried to hand in my damp form, the visa officer screamed at me and called the application unacceptable, sending me to the back of the line to fill out a new one.

I traveled to Russia with Irina and Pascal, her boyfriend and second during the tournament. I was glad to be with friends and also figured that Irina’s fluency with the language would make my second trip to Russia smoother than the first.

When the three of us stepped off the plane in Elista, after the thirty-hour-long journey from New York City, a smiling woman dressed in a purple robe served us Kalmyk tea, black tea with milk and salt. She draped a gold-trimmed white scarf around my neck and handed me a single rose. Irina and I were besieged by interviewers. It seemed as though we had arrived in the fairytale land of Chess City, Kalmykia, where women chessmasters are treated like queens. “[Gather] all the flowers of Kalmykia for Chess Queens” read posters all over the city. As it turned out, Elista was another world from Moscow. Kalmyk people have Asian features, their ancestry most closely linked with Mongolians. It is one of the few areas of Russia in which Buddhism is the predominant religion. One of the poorest areas of Russia, it is also thought to be one of the most hospitable.

Chess City is a fenced-off suburb of Elista with nothing much but look-alike cottages and an empty bar called Café Rook. I felt out of my element in the remote surroundings. During tournaments, I like to jog, play basketball, and take long walks, but Chess City was so isolated that there was nowhere to walk except in half-mile circles.

We certainly didn’t have to worry about our safety. There were about three security guards for each player, most of whom stood around smoking cigarettes and chatting all day. “What’s your name?” they would ask me as I walked to the dining or playing hall, “Jennifer?” “Jennifer Lopez!” they shouted, followed by uproarious laughter.

Irina, Pascal, and I shared a large cottage, with a Western-style kitchen and bathroom. At first I thought our accommodations were simply comfortable, but then I learned how extraordinary they were compared to those of the residents of rural Kalmykia. Irina, Pascal, and I traveled to a small town, Yashkol, to meet some Kalmyk players. We were treated like celebrities. We visited a school and were mobbed for autographs and given gifts by Kalmyk children who had never met foreigners. After playing chess with some local players, the three of us were invited to the mayor’s house for lunch. Our gracious hosts had prepared a splendid lunch of fresh meat—“the sheep was killed this morning”—cheese, pirogis, and vodka. As we ate and drank, guests and hosts were all called on to give the customary lengthy toasts. Our hosts lavished praise on us—“I can’t wait to read about you in the papers in the coming years”—while Irina, Pascal, and I declared in turn our affection for Kalmykia, chess, and the most delicious pirogis of our lives. Despite the joyous pitch of the afternoon, we saw that the conditions of even the most powerful in rural Kalymkia were rough. The rooms in houses were tiny and there was no bathroom—even in the office of the mayor—only a rancid outhouse that seemed not to have been cleaned for months. Most Kalmyks, I later learned, do not have electricity.

After that afternoon I understood that, in contrast to the rest of the region, Chess City was a place of luxury. A few weeks after the tournament, a New York Times article, “Where Chess Is King and the People Are Pawns,”1 described the chess palace in which we played as a “glassed-in biosphere on Mars, where the most brilliant minds of chess compete for diamond crowns. For miles around, 300,000 live in poverty in the barren plains.” Upon walking just meters outside of Chess City, protesters pass out fliers in Russian and English denouncing Kirsan Ilyumzhinov and the chess championship. Awkwardly translated excerpts include: “The citizens of our republic take the financial consequences due to these chess festivals,” “The majority of the children cannot eat to their heart’s content while you are taking pleasure by the concerts of the poverty artists.” Though Ilyumzhinov claims that chess is a religion and a gift to humanity, he seems to believe it is a gift reserved only for the elite. Ordinary Kalymk citizens need special permission to visit Chess City, and the only spectators at the event were the friends, families, and coaches of the players.

As intrigued as I was by the politics and history of Kalmykia, I had to shift my thoughts to my first match. Two weeks before the start of the tournament I had learned that my opponent in Elista would be a young Georgian, Nana Dzagnidze. Busy with coaching my students, I had little time to prepare in America. Settled in Elista three days before the start of the tournament, I began to study Nana’s games.

The other reason we decided to arrive early in Elista was to adjust to the nine-hour time difference, a change that affects some players more drastically than others. Irina can sleep soundly regardless of the time or location. Red-eyed and miserable on planes, I am jealous of Irina, who can go into R.E.M. as soon as the plane takes off. Pascal and I have more trouble adjusting, so the night after we arrived in Elista, we stopped at the bar in the Chess Palace, hoping a glass of wine would help put us to sleep. One of the most active and popular women players, Bulgarian Antoaneta Stefanova, was there with her trainer and compatriot, GM Vladimir Georgiev. Antoaneta had just come from the Dominican Republic and looked tan and happy as she smoked a cigarette and sipped a whisky on the rocks. Chatting and drinking with them relaxed my nerves a bit.

Two days after settling in, we attended the opening ceremony, which was held in a field in the middle of nowhere; the bus to take us there was two hours late, and the drive itself took an hour. All the players were grumpy and hungry by the time we arrived. There were traditional Kalmyk dances, speeches, the Russian and FIDE national anthems, and Kalmyk models dressed in custom-designed black-and-white-checkered dresses. “Why don’t they give each player such a dress in their own size?” wondered Elisabeth Paehtz. “That would be a really good present.”

Humpy Koneru, the Indian grandmaster, who was the top-seeded player in the tournament, was invited up to the stage to determine the colors for each board of the tournament. Without cracking a smile, the serious teenager drew the colors: each odd-numbered player (which included me) would have the white pieces in the first game. As soon as I learned this, my mind started to focus on the next day’s game.

The next morning, my sleeping schedule was still a bit out of whack—I woke up just before seven. Too early. The round was not until two. Too many hours to kill before game time. In preparing, I find it important to strike a balance between relaxation and study. Studying for six hours before a two o’clock start is dangerous, because it’s important to save energy for the game. On the other hand, I am occasionally mad at myself for studying too little, especially when a position I only glanced at appears on the board. More often, I tend to overprepare, sometimes looking at games on my laptop until minutes before start-time. In Elista, I studied the Najdorf, the dynamic opening that my eighteen-year-old opponent had played since she was ten years old.

At two o’clock I sat down at my table, where the traditional, wooden pieces were set up on a high-tech board that was wired to the Internet. Our moves would be instantly relayed to chess sites on the web. I began the game with confidence, expecting to improve on the play of a previous opponent of Nana’s. Nana had played the Najdorf in more than fifty games, but against me she tried a different opening. My heart started to beat more rapidly. I had not prepared for this line, but had no choice but to pretend I was confident. I made a mistake on move eight and lost all the advantage that comes with the first move. After that, I began to calm down and play well. My position improved, but she was solid, and it was not easy to find ways to break through. I definitely did not want to get short on time—each player had only two hours, and I had already used more than one. I played a move and hit the clock. Instantly, my heart dropped. My move was a huge blunder, allowing Nana to win a Rook for a Bishop. The mistake would cost me the game and most probably the match. The only thing to do was pray that she would not notice. It was a vain hope—she won my Rook, and soon after, the game.

The tournament was single-elimination knockout, and the only way for me to advance would be to win the next game with black. I tried hard the next day, and even got a double-edged position in which I had full chances to play for the win. Unfortunately for me, Nana was determined to advance to the next round. She played well, rebuffed my activity, and gained an edge in an endgame. I had zero chance to win. We agreed to a draw. Nana advanced.

The pain was not all-consuming, but there was a lingering sense of incompetence that stayed with me for the whole week, and only began to dissipate when I returned to America. I stayed in Elista for a few days to watch the other games, and support my teammate Irina, who had made it to the second round. I both hoped and expected to see Irina go far. However, having just finished classes at NYU, she was rustier than usual, and missed some tactics in her second match. She was knocked out.

Irina and I were eliminated, but I still followed all the games of the tournament, hoping for a deserving champion who would be good for women’s chess. I was therefore thrilled with the winner: Bulgarian bon vivant Antoaneta Stefanova.

In Elista, Stefanova abandoned her typically wild lifestyle to approach the tournament professionally. She brought a coach. Satisfied with ties in each two-game match, she relied on her superior nerves and tactical alertness to prevail in the tiebreaks. In the third round, Antoaneta was matched against a close friend, Ukrainian Natalya Zhukova. Antoaneta and Natalya made a controversial decision. Instead of playing out their match games, providing excitement for hundreds of spectators on the Internet, the two women agreed to draws after just ten moves, in less than fifteen minutes. Clearly, they had arranged this before the first game of the round. In the rapid tiebreak, Antoaneta won. But she had saved herself two days’ worth of grueling games, giving her an edge over less-rested players. When I saw what Antoaneta had done, I was not particularly surprised: she was tired, needed rest to maximize her chances, and didn’t care what people thought. Antoaneta described the tournament as “exhausting mentally and physically.”

In the fourth round, Antoaneta beat my first-round opponent, Nana Dzagnidze, leading her to the semi-final match, where Antoaneta met her most famous victim in Elista, four-time world champion Maya Chiburdanidze. Stefanova clinched the match victory with a steady game in which she snatched a pawn and played actively to triumph against the Georgian legend.

In the final four-game match, Antoaneta played a lesser-known competitor, Ekaterina Kovalevskaya, a thirty-year-old from Moscow. Ranked only twentieth going into the event, Kovalevskaya had climbed to the top by scoring upset victories over teenaged prodigies Katerina Lahno from Ukraine and the top-seeded Indian, Humpy Koneru. Antoaneta was convincing against Kovalevskaya. She won the first two games, and then drew the third to clinch the title. When the final game was over, she lit up a cigarette and called her family back in Sofia to tell them that she had become the ninth world women’s chess champion.

Antoaneta’s jet-setting lifestyle became even more packed with publicity and tournament engagements. Just two months after winning the diamond-studded crown and $50,000 check, she had made stops in her native Bulgaria and also in Libya, Russia, Spain, and Poland.

Pascal, Irina, and I had intended to spend a few days in Russia after the tournament, visiting Moscow and St. Petersburg. Those plans were waylaid because Irina and I had an appointment back in New York City: our second training session with number one in the world, Garry Kasparov. As thrilling as this should have been for me, I was not looking forward to it. At the session, I would have to show the games I had just played in Elista, which I dreaded. To show the world champion a game in which I’d blundered so horribly felt like a punishment fit for chess hell. Kasparov was easier on me than I was on myself: “I understand why you blundered—you were better all game—this was the first moment of the game she had a threat.”

Despite the Kasparov training, I felt my confidence and spirit at a low point. My roommate, who was moving out, told me that the landlord would not allow me to take over the lease. I needed to find a new place to live. I was also anxious about the upcoming 2004 U.S. Women’s Chess Championship, which would assemble the strongest female field in U.S. history. My performance would determine whether I would play on the 2004 Olympic team, for which I had trained all year. In a rotten mood, I enveloped myself with negative thoughts. What if I didn’t make the team? What if I lost all my games?

I needed more training, so I called an old coach and friend, International Master Victor Frias, who lived in Chappaqua, New York, and asked if he could help me. “Come on over!” he said. I showed up at Victor’s home with my laptop, a dozen chess books, and a bottle of red wine. The chessboard was already setup on his dining room table, where we immediately began studying my opponents’ games. Victor was no longer an active player, but I have always admired his approach to chess, which is very different from my own. When I first look at a position I check for tactics and specific variations. Frias, on the other hand, goes straight to the pawn structure and attempts to decipher the essence of the position. This way of studying chess is good for me. After just a few hours of studying with Victor, I begin to look at chess in a more complete way.

Victor and I stuck to an intense regime. Every morning I woke up at about seven in the morning, to study until about noon. Then we went to the gym for a couple of hours. After lunch we worked on chess until eight or nine in the evening. Most of the time we spent checking out the games of my opponents, or games with positions similar to the ones I expected to get in the tournament.

The training stopped after five days because I wanted to go back to Brooklyn to figure out where to live. I was also throwing a farewell party for my friend Ben, who was moving to California. Ben is my former high school teammate, who has since given up chess for poker. Many of my friends from chess, including my brother, have shifted their focus to poker, hoping that their intellectual skills (no doubt in part developed from their experience in chess) might make them rich at the card table. For a little over a year, Greg had been earning a good living playing on the Internet and occasionally flying off to play in tournaments.

My father had also gotten into it. When I was playing at the World Championship in Russia, Greg and Michael were in Las Vegas at the World Series of Poker—Greg as a player, Michael as a spectator. Greg still played blitz and rapid chess occasionally, but was more concerned with organizing tournaments and improving the state of chess in America than his own progress. “It’s very sad to compare the situation of poker players with chessplayers,” Greg said. “Chess will probably never be as big as poker, but it could certainly get more attention and sponsorship than it does now.”

After the party, my floors were littered with broken glass and covered in a sticky film from spilled drinks, a mess that seemed to symbolize the state of my life at that moment. I still didn’t know where I was going to live. My bank statement recorded the lowest figure it had in years. Even after my hard work with Victor, I was nervous about the upcoming tournament.

The first sign that things were turning my way came when my landlord had a change of heart and I was allowed to sign a one-year lease for my loft, a big space with high ceilings and skylights in place of windows, located in the center of Williamsburg. Once an industrial haven with factories, populated by Polish and Dominican immigrants, in the late 1990s, Williamsburg gentrified. The rents went up, and the ’Burg was now filled with the young and hip—the streets lined with sleek bars, numerous Thai restaurants, and the occasional yoga center or art gallery. It was located right next to the subway, allowing me to arrive in Manhattan in ten minutes flat.

Relieved and in slightly better spirits, I invited my brother over to play some blitz. After a few games I confessed to Greg that I was a little jealous that he had found another subculture in which he could thrive. Sometimes I feel burned out by the chess world, frustrated by the lack of popularity of the game. Because of the glamorous TV coverage of poker events and the steady stream of Texas Hold ’Em cash games and tournaments on the Internet, it seemed like Greg might have taken the better course. Also, I was so stressed out and nervous about the upcoming championship that my feelings toward chess were ambiguous. At that moment, chess was just not making me happy. My brother said, “Jen, you have to figure out a way to play for fun.”

Greg was right. Too often, I played chess scared to blunder, as I had in Elista. Playing chess scared to make a mistake is the intellectual equivalent of walking around in the perpetual fear of falling.

2004 U.S. Women’s Championship

Round 1

In the first round of the U.S. Women’s Chess Championship, I played Rusudan Goletiani. Despite my brother’s advice, I was extremely nervous all through the game. From time to time, I would remind myself, “Play for fun!” but the tension was so high that the advice seemed absurd. I got a better position with an attack on her King, but Rusa defended well and I was unable to find a knockout blow. I sacrificed a pawn, a dubious decision. Rusa called my bluff and captured it. I fought back and found a drawish endgame. Rusa played on for the whole six hours, hoping to find a win. It wasn’t there. She stuck out her hand and we split the point. I went home with my half point slightly relieved. It was now impossible for me to lose all my games!

Unlikely as it would seem, this game turned out to be the sole draw of the twenty-game tournament. In most prestigious tournaments, draws are as frequent, if not more common, than decisive results. Such gluts of draws (some of these are good fights, but many are dull and quick) detract sponsorship, galvanizing Grandmaster Maurice Ashley, the first African-American grandmaster in history, to warn of “Draw Death” and start “Generation Chess,” an organization that promotes fighting chess.

Round 2

In the second game, I played against Tsagaan Battsetseg (Baagi for short), a cheerful master originally from Mongolia, where she had won seven national titles. I knew she was a tough player and a creative tactician, but her handling of the clock was impractical—she would often leave herself with less than one minute for more than ten moves. In such situations, it’s nearly impossible for a player to hold on to all her pieces. Baagi and I played a theoretical line that had been played dozens of times by the best players in the world, and I instantly regretted not studying the position more thoroughly. I knew she might play this line, but I had spent most of my energy that morning on another opening.

Baagi played creatively, and I found myself up a pawn but in a terrible position. The only plan, it seemed at first glance, was to shuffle my pieces back and forth, forcing her to figure out how to break through. I started to look at a risky move, placing my Rook in the center of the board, where it could be taken by three pieces. After twenty minutes of analysis, I saw that the sacrifice was unsound, but I wanted to play it, because the move was funny and aesthetic. My fingers were itching. I played the move and took my hand off the piece. Is this a death wish? Baagi thought for almost thirty minutes and captured my Rook. Her position was winning, but it was complicated. Luckily for me, she could only choose one move out of all the attractive possibilities. She began to run low on time and chose a second-rate line, allowing me to get back into the game. Her advantage was beginning to evaporate, and the best course for her was probably to take a forced draw. On move forty, we each got an extra hour. I got up from the board feeling as though my brain had been squeezed to the limit. I laughed nervously, had some water, and paced around. Baagi still had a good position—she was down two pawns, but my King was vulnerable. I would have to fight hard. She began to play too slowly, using nearly all the time she was allotted for the rest of the game in just a few moves. Her clock began to tick down. I was mesmerized, smelling victory. By the finish, I had a winning position, but really I was just waiting for her flag to fall. It did. The game lasted nearly six hours, the maximum time length.

I was happy, but there was so much unreleased tension in my body that I was longing for a jog. I got home and around ten o’clock I went to the nearby track. On my way, I passed several bars and cafés teeming with New Yorkers enjoying the delicious summer evening. It was Friday night. After jogging and listening to an hour’s worth of pop songs on the radio, I went home to prepare for my next game.

Round 3

I was playing white against a sweet, shy teenager, Tatev Abrahayman, originally from Armenia. Uncomfortable with all the variations against her favorite set-up, the French, Victor and I had spent hours searching for the right way to play against her. I still wasn’t happy with any of my regular choices. Then I remembered that my brother had told me her nickname on The Internet Chess Club, “axves.” Tatev, under axves, had played hundreds of blitz games on the ICC, all of which are archived into a database. I logged on to the server and searched her recent history of games in the French opening. I felt sneaky using those games as preparation, as if I were reading a private letter. Many players don’t know that their opponents can access their ICC matches, and often try out new ideas. Through my last-minute online preparation, I saw that Tatev played very badly against one pawn sacrifice. I made a snap decision. I would play the same sacrifice.

Tatev was uncomfortable in the opening I chose. She used too much time and played badly. I was very confident in this game and won in less than thirty moves.

Now I was leading the tournament. With the title and my spot on the Olympic team within striking distance, my urge to win became intense, even animalistic.

Round 4

I was most afraid of the game in this round because I had the black pieces against one of the strongest women players in the world, Anna Zatonskih, a twenty-six-year-old Ukrainian emigrant. Zatonskih had always impressed me in analysis sessions: she calculates well, has an extensive knowledge of opening and endgame theory, and is assertive about her opinions on positions. Anna is a hard worker with a professional approach to the game, studying all aspects of the game year-round, often for up to six hours a day. After giving so much time to chess, it is hard for Anna to understand if she has an unsuccessful result. And this was, perhaps, the only weakness I could sense in her—in very high-pressure situations, Anna’s nerves sometimes give way.

Anna played an opening I hadn’t expected. It was a solid choice for white and secured a small but steady advantage. I had to find an active plan or I would get slowly squeezed. I found a good idea, opened some lines for my pieces, and the game was balanced. I started to dream of mounting an attack on Anna’s King. In fear of this, she traded Queens, and we reached a position that looked like it would be a draw. Anna’s position was still a little better, and she did want to win. My defense was sufficient, and as we neared the end of the sixth hour, it was clear that she would have to split the point. Then Anna made a strange offer—a trade of Knights. I hadn’t even considered the move. After thinking for a few minutes, I could hardly trust my calculations—Anna had just committed an appalling blunder. I took the Knight, simplified the position into a pawn ending, where I made a Queen after just a few moves. Anna was too upset after the game to analyze, but a few days later she seemed to have gotten over it or was at least able to joke about it, telling me with a laugh, “I had nightmares about that move!”

This game happened to be on Father’s Day, and my dad was in town to celebrate. He had left my game when Anna was still pressing for the win. When I called my father, he sounded excited. “I hope you called to tell me you held the draw!” He was in disbelief when I told him I’d won—as a Father’s Day present.

I was excited: with 3.5 points out of 4, I was leading the tournament. One more victory would probably clinch the title.

Round 5

Angelina Belakovskaya, a three-time U.S. champion, had hardly played any serious chess in the past few years, having given up chess for a more lucrative career in finance. While I was invigorated by my great start, Angelina was rusty, and I was hoping to take advantage of that. This time my preparation paid off as the line I studied all morning appeared on the board. The game was close, and it was clear that it was going to be a long struggle. I played well in the first part of the game, gaining an edge. Angelina made a mistake and lost a pawn. It was still tough to win—I had to muster all my energy and make sure that I successfully converted my material advantage. At some point during the endgame (Rusudan Goletiani had defeated the only person who could still catch me, Anna Zatonskih), I realized the title was at stake. Nightmarish thoughts of blundering horribly entered my brain. I breathed deeply and ejected the bad thoughts, forcing myself to play confidently. After nearly two hours my extra pawn was on the seventh rank, ready to become a Queen. With just a few seconds left on her clock, Angelina resigned. I had clinched my second national title with a round to go.2

Interviewing and profiling so many of the top women players in the world had diminished my own chess ego. Winning reacquainted me with my competitive streak. I was happy to see that part of myself again, the me who wanted to win so badly that I poured every shred of energy into my games and preparations.

I wandered around the streets and parks of the East Village, sipping an iced coffee. The weather that week was perfect, the type of weather that makes New York paradise. Why would I want to live anywhere else? A child jumped out of a newspaper bin and yelled, “Boo.” It struck me as funnier than it normally would have. My victory made everything appear to be shot in Technicolor: the emotional content of every experience was heightened. Every joke became funnier, every conversation more satisfying, and every dessert sweeter.

Soon after my victory, I visited my hometown, Philadelphia, to celebrate with friends and family. Whenever I return to Philly, I feel comfortable: I settle easily into the rust-colored couches in my living room; my feet navigate by memory the streets and coffee shops downtown. At the chessboard, my mind senses the same kind of familiarity. In such a relaxed state, I can often enter a zone. Not even conscious of my name or how much money I have in the bank, at times of peak performance I just let go. My sense of time relaxes, which can be problematic when the time limit approaches, but is ultimately my favorite aspect of the game. I’ve often awakened from deep thought wondering, Where was I? Chess thinking at its most pure is a realm where gender is not relevant. This is in sharp contrast to the culture and politics of the chess world, where women are such a minority that their gender is extremely visible.

Chess has also given me a gallery of fond memories and an unusually flexible lifestyle. I am twenty-four years old as I write this, and I have never worked in an office. Great chess moves can pierce me with momentary but intense pleasure like a smile in a dream. Then there are the worldwide travels and connections with people from Russia and China, half or three times my age. Still, I am distraught by how few women enjoy the freedom and pleasures that come with losing oneself in chess. To female readers, I pass the move to you.

Glossary

Adjournment. A game unfinished at the end of the playing session that is resumed at a later time; the last move is sealed in an envelope. Adjournments were gradually phased out in the nineties, partly because players could now use powerful computer programs.

Algebraic notation. System for labeling a chessboard so that each of the 64 squares is denoted by a number and a letter, from a-1 to h-8; files (left to right) are a-h and ranks (top to bottom) are 1-8.

Bishop. Piece that moves diagonally, as many squares as it wants. It’s worth about the same as a Knight, and significantly less than a Rook.

Black. Player with the black pieces. Black moves second, a major disadvantage when playing an experienced player.

Blindfold chess. Playing chess without sight of the board, indicating the moves orally in algebraic notation. Usually played in friendly exhibitions for fun and publicity.

Blitz. Chess games with extremely fast time limits, usually five minutes per player.

Blunder. A very poor move. Sometimes indicated on scoresheets or published analysis with two question marks; in contrast, an excellent move may be followed with one or two exclamation points.

Board one (also first board). The highest-ranked player on a team.

Castling. A special, composite move in which the King moves two squares toward the corner, while the Rook jumps to the square adjacent to the King. Castling brings the King to safety and centralizes the Rook, and experienced players castle in almost every game.

Check. The King is in immediate attack. The King must escape check by either capturing the attacking piece, moving, or blocking the check with another piece. It is not possible to capture an opponent’s King.

Checkmate. A position in which the King is in check and cannot make any legal move to get out of check. Few professional games end in checkmate, because players tend to resign long before checkmate. Often abbreviated to mate.

ChessBase. Company founded in 1987 in Germany by Frederic Friedel. ChessBase developed software that organizes millions of chess games and allows players to sift through all games played by a particular opponent or in any opening. Virtually every professional chessplayer uses ChessBase regularly. ChessBase.com is the most popular chess news source on the Net, run by the same company.

Chess clock. A double push-button clock to keep track of the time each player spends on a game; after moving, players stop their own clocks and start the opponent’s.

Closed position. Type of position in which there are few pawn trades and pieces are locked in behind pawn structures. Players who like long-term planning thrive in closed positions. See open position.

d4. White moves the Queen’s pawn two squares on the first move. The second most popular first-move choice, most often the choice of strategic players. d4 is favored by top women players such as Susan Polgar, Antoaneta Stefanova, Irina Krush, Zhu Chen, and the late Vera Menchik.

Dragon. An opening set-up for black in which the pawn structure supposedly resembles a dragon. A very risky and aggressive system.

Draw. Result in which the outcome is undecided or deadlocked. A draw is worth half a point. There are many ways to achieve a draw, e.g., upon agreement, when there is insufficient material for either side to give checkmate, or when the position is repeated three times.

e4. Moving the King pawn two squares on the first move. e4, usually the choice of attacking players, is the most popular move by a small margin, just ahead of d4. Its practicioners include Judit Polgar, Almira Skripchenko, Alexandra Kosteniuk, and Xie Jun.

Elo ratings. Rating system designed to estimate the relative strength of chess-players based on their tournament results. Named after Professor Arpad Elo.

Endgame. The phase of the game in which the material is reduced (usually Queens are traded) and the result often settled; players memorize the most common ones.

English opening. White starts the game by moving the Queen’s Bishop pawn two squares; commonly thought to be the safest first-move option.

Exchange. A common material imbalance, involving the difference in value between a Rook (a major piece worth 5 points), and a Bishop or Knight (minor pieces worth 3 points each).

Expert. Player with a rating from 2000 to 2199; the category just beneath Master.

FIDE (Federation International Des Eches). The worldwide chess federation, founded in Paris in 1924. FIDE assigns international ratings, awards titles, and organizes the most prestigious tournaments, including the Olympiad and World Championships. The president of FIDE since 1995, Kirsan Illymuzhinov, is also the president of Kalmykia.

First board. See Board one.

Fish. Slang for a weak chessplayer

Flag. Indicator on a chess clock that drops when a time is reached (even when using digital clocks). Players often shout out “flag” to announce a victory on time.

Fools’ mate. Black checkmates white in two moves; very rare, since it requires white to play the worst moves possible.

Gambit. Opening that involves the planned sacrifice of material.

GM. Grandmaster.

Grandmaster. The most distinguished title in chess. Awarded by FIDE, it is given to players who meet establised performance standards. A grandmaster usually holds a rating of 2500 or higher.

IM. International master.

International master. The second most distinguished title in chess. Awarded by FIDE, it is given to players who meet establised performance standards. An international master usually holds a rating of 2450 or higher.

Kibitzer. Players who hang around post-mortems or skittles rooms, offering often colorful—and sometimes unwanted—advice or comment.

King. The only chess piece that cannot be captured. The King moves one square in any direction. Because the King must be carefully guarded against checkmate, the King is rarely used as a fighting piece until the last stages of the game.

Knight. In many languages, the Knight translates to “horse.” A short-range but tricky piece that moves in an L-shape, the Knight is the only piece that can jump over other pieces, making it particularly valuable in closed positions.

Knockout. Event in which a player is eliminated after losing a match so that the field is reduced by half after each round.

Line. Synonym for variation, often used when talking about various opening possibilities.

Master. Player with a rating over 2200.

Material. Pieces and pawns. Material is counted by a relative value system, which players use a guideline when deciding whether to trade one piece for another. A large disadvantage in material often prompts experienced players to resign, because extra material is often the means to inevitable checkmate. The pawn, the least valuable piece, is counted as the basic unit, 1 point. Other approximate values are Knight (3), Bishop (3), Rook (5), Queen (9). Because the King cannot be captured, he is not assigned a point value.

Middlegame. The phase of the game between the opening and the endgame, where a player must rely on creativity, intuition, and calculating abilities.

Norm (grandmaster or international master). A prespecified rating performance against a specific number of internationally rated players. Three norms are required to become a grandmaster or international master.

Olympiad. Biennale team tournaments contested by teams representing the members of FIDE. The first Olympiad was held in London in 1927.

Open position. Positions in which there are many open files and diagonals, and fewer locked pawn structures. Often incites quick contact between enemy pieces, resulting in tactical play.

Open tournament. A tournament that is open to all comers, though there is often an entry fee.

Opening. The first phase of the game in which the pieces are developed. Strong amateur players have the basic ideas and moves of their openings memorized, while professional players memorize larger numbers of openings and variations, and often have new, never-before-played ideas, novelties. The names of openings can come from great players who invented or mastered the systems, such as the Najdorf Defense. Or they can refer to the opening’s origin, such as the Berlin or English Opening.

Pawn. The weakest piece on the board. Each player gets eight at the beginning of the game. Pawns are the only chess piece that cannot move backwards.

Pawn promotion. The exchange of a pawn that reaches the eighth rank (last row) for another piece, almost always a Queen.

Pawn structures. Locked formations that determine the pace of the game; often set up early in the game.

Performance rating. The rating level at which a player performs in a single tournament. For instance, a master (2200) level player has a 2500 performance rating if she has a tournament that would be average (e.g., three losses against 2500 players and three wins against 2500 players), and would not result in a rating point gain or loss for a player rated 2500.

Point. A unit used to give the result of a chess game; win, 1; draw 1/2; loss 0; in a 15-round tournament, a player who wins 8 games (8 points), draws 5 (2.5 points) and loses 2 (no points) has a total score that can be written 10.5/15 or 10.5-4.5.

Post-mortem. Analysis following a game.

Queen. The most valuable piece in chess, which can move on diagonals (like Bishops) and in straight lines (like the Rooks). In Mideval Europe, the Queen was the weakest piece on the board, and her sudden change in powers in the sixteenth century quickened the pace of the game. The presence of Queens allows for spectacular mating attacks and heightens the value of King safety. Trading Queens alters the nature of the game, usually transforming it into an endgame.

Rapid chess. Games with time controls that range from about 25 minutes a player to 60 minutes a player. This is in between the super-fast pace of blitz and the classical time controls, which range from a total of 2 to 3.5 hours for each player.

Rating. Numerical values used to rank chessplayers; classifications according to the USCF rating system include: senior master 2400+, master 2200-2399, expert 2000–2199, Class A 1800-1999, Class B 1600-1799, Class C 1400-1599, Class D 1200-1399, and Class E 1199 and below.

Resign. To give up by declaration. Often in view of inevitable checkmate or a tremendous disadvantage in material.

Rook. The most valuable piece besides the Queen. The Rook moves in straight lines and is particularly powerful in the endgame.

Round-robin. An event in which everybody plays everybody.

Sacrifice. Voluntary surrender of material in exchange for other advantages.

Scholar’s mate. A four-move checkmate that shows up frequently in scholastic tournaments.

Score sheet. Where all moves made by both player and opponent must be recorded by each player; moves must be written as they are made unless a delay is allowed due to extreme time pressure.

Skittles room. Room for post-game analysis where players discuss their tournaments games; a rich tradition in the chess culture.

Simultaneous (also simul). An exhibition in which a strong player is invited to take on many opponents at once. Can appear amazing to a lay observer, but depending on the strength of her opponents, simuls can actually be easy for a master chessplayer, who doesn’t really think on each board as much as make an instant intutive decision. This is usually enough for her to win.

Strategy. Long-term planning and maneuvering.

Style. A commonality between the opening systems, tactics, and strategies a player favors. Adjectives such as quiet, balanced, sharp, and aggressive are common ways to describe style: e.g., A sharp style is one that favors tactics and risky openings and variations. Talk of style can be misleading, since in many positions all strong chessplayers would choose the same move.

Swiss system. A popular tournament format for large fields, used for most open tournaments. Before the tournament, players (or teams) are ranked according to their ratings, and assigned seed numbers. In the first round, players are paired according to their seeds. If there are ten players in a Swiss system, in the first round the number-one seed will play the sixth seed, number two will play number seven, and so on. In following rounds, players are matched with opponents with the same or similar scores. A player and opponent can meet only once.

Tactics. Short operations requiring proficiency in calculating that force checkmate or a quick win of material.

Three-move repetition. The same position appears three times with the same player to move; either player may claim a draw.

Time control. Pre-determined time limit for a player to complete moves; if exceeded, the game is lost. Time controls range from blitz games, where each players has only three minutes, to classical games, in which each player has three hours.

Time pressure. When a player is forced to make a large number of moves in a short time, or else her time will run out and she will lose, regardless of how strong her position is. Time pressure often causes blunders.

Touch-move rule. Player who touches a piece must move or capture the piece.

Trade (pieces). Mutual agreement to give up pieces for opponent’s pieces, usually of the same value: e.g., a Rook for a Rook or a Knight for a Bishop.

USCF (United State Chess Federation). The USCF assigns national ratings and organizes national tournaments.

Variation. Long strings of projected moves.

White. Player with the white pieces. White moves first, a definite advantage for an experienced player.

WGM, WIM. Woman Grandmaster, Woman International Master.

Woman Grandmaster (Woman International Master). Gender-specific titles awarded by FIDE to women. The average performances and ratings are lower than the regular titles, and therefore the titles are controversial.

Women’s World Championship. World Championship in which participants are female. The first Women’s World Championship was a round-robin held in London in 1927 (won by Vera Menchik), in conjunction with the first Olympiad. From 1952 to 1998, a challenger was determined in a series of candidates’ tournaments and matches. The challenger would then play a head-to-head match against the title-holder. Since 2000, a three-week-long knockout format has been instated, under which three new Women’s World Champions have since been crowned (2000, Xie Jun; 2001, Zhu Chen; and 2004, Antoaneta Stefanova).

World Championship. Open to both men and women, though so far no woman has come close to the title. The World Championship is now in flux, because the classical format (where the two best players on Earth play a match of twenty or more games) has been rejected by FIDE in favor of the tournament knockout system. World number-one player Garry Kasparov and world number-three player Vladimir Kramnik have not participated in this FIDE format since 1998. Instead, the two played a twenty-game match in London in 2000, which Kramnik won.

Appendix — Games

Menchik - A Becker (Karlsbad, 1929)

1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.c4 c6 4.Nc3 e6 5.e3 Ne4 6.Bd3 f5 7.Ne5 Qh4 8.0–0 Nd7 9.f4 Be7 10.Bd2 Nxe5 11.dxe5 Bc5 12.Bxe4 fxe4 13.Qb3 Qd8 14.Na4 Be7 15.Bb4 b6 16.Bxe7 Qxe7 17.cxd5 exd5 18.Rac1 Bb7 19.Nc3 Qf7 20.Qb4 Rd8 21.Rfd1 Ba8 22.h3 Qe7 23.Qxe7+ Kxe7 24.b4 Rd7 25.Rd2 Rhd8 26.Ne2 Rc8 27.Rdc2 Rdc7 28.Nd4 g6 29.Nb5 Rd7 30.Kf2 h6 31.g4 a6 32.Nd4 Rdc7 33.f5 g5 34.Kg3 Bb7 35.h4 gxh4+ 36.Kxh4 Kf7 37.Kh5 a5 38.bxa5 bxa5 39.Nb5 Rd7 40.e6+, 1–0.

M Duchamp - Menchik (Paris, 1929)

1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.cxd5 cxd5 4.Nf3 Nc6 5.Nc3 Nf6 6.Bf4 e6 7.e3 Bd6 8.Bxd6 Qxd6 9.Bd3 0–0 10.0–0 Rd8 11.Nb5 Qb8 12.Rc1 Bd7 13.Qe2 a6 14.Nc3 Qd6 15.e4 dxe4 16.Nxe4 Nxe4 17.Qxe4 g6 18.Qh4 Kg7 19.Ng5 h6 20.Qxh6+ Kxh6 21.Nxf7+ Kg7 22.Nxd6 Nb4 23.Be4 Bc6 24.Bxc6 bxc6 25.Rc4 Rxd6 26.Rxb4 a5 27.Rc4 Rad8 28.Re1 Rxd4 29.Rxc6 Rd2 30.g3 Rf8 31.f4 Rh8 32.h4 Rb8 33.b3 Rxa2 34.Rexe6 Rxb3 35.Rxg6+ Kf7 36.Rb6 Rd3 37.Rbd6 Rb3, ½–½.

Menchik - Capablanca (Hastings, 1930)

1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 b6 3.e3 Bb7 4.Bd3 c5 5.0–0 Nc6 6.c3 e6 7.Ne5 d6 8.Nxc6 Bxc6 9.Qe2 Be7 10.Bb5 Qd7 11.Bxc6 Qxc6 12.Nd2 0–0 13.dxc5 dxc5 14.e4 Rad8 15.e5 Nd5 16.Nf3 Rd7 17.Rd1 Rfd8 18.Bd2 b5 19.Kf1 Nb6 20.Bf4 h6 21.Rxd7 Rxd7 22.Rd1 Rxd1+ 23.Qxd1 Qe4 24.Bg3 Qc4+ 25.Qe2 Qxe2+ 26.Kxe2 Na4 27.Kd2 Nxb2 28.Kc2 Nc4 29.Nd2 Nxd2 30.Kxd2 c4 31.Bf4 a6 32.Be3 Kf8 33.Bb6 Ke8 34.Ke3 Kd7 35.Kd4 Kc6 36.Ba7 f5 37.a4 g6 38.f4 h5 39.axb5+ Kxb5 40.g3 a5 41.Ke3 Bc5+ 42.Bxc5 Kxc5, 0–1.

Menchik - Graf (Semmering, 1937)

1.c4 e6 2.Nc3 d5 3.d4 Nf6 4.Nf3 Nbd7 5.e3 c6 6.Bd3 Be7 7.0–0 0–0 8.e4 dxe4 9.Nxe4 Nxe4 10.Bxe4 Nf6 11.Bc2 c5 12.dxc5 Qa5 13.Be3 Bxc5 14.Bd2 Qc7 15.Bc3 Be7 16.Qe2 b6 17.Ng5 g6 18.Qf3 Bb7 19.Qh3 h5 20.Rad1 Ng4 21.Rd7, 1–0.

Graf - Keres (Prague, 1937)

1.d4 e6 2.c4 Bb4+ 3.Bd2 Qe7 4.Bxb4 Qxb4+ 5.Qd2 Nc6 6.e3 Qxd2+ 7.Kxd2 f5 8.Nc3 Nf6 9.Nb5 Kd8 10.f3 a6 11.Nc3 f4 12.Nge2 fxe3+ 13.Kxe3 d5 14.Ng3 Re8 15.Rd1 Bd7 16.Be2 e5 17.Kf2 dxc4 18.dxe5 Nxe5 19.h3 Kc8 20.Rd4 b5 21.f4 Nc6 22.Rd2 Rb8 23.Bf3 Nb4 24.Nge4 Rb6 25.Nc5 Bf5 26.g4 Nd3+ 27.Nxd3 Bxd3 28.g5 Ne4+ 29.Nxe4 Bxe4 30.Re1 Bg6 31.Bg4+ Kb7 32.Rxe8 Bxe8 33.Rd8 Bc6, ½–½.½

Menchik - Graf (Women’s World Championship, Buenos Aires, 1939)

1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Nf3 Nbd7 5.e3 Bb4 6.Bd3 c5 7.0–0 0–0 8.cxd5 exd5 9.Bd2 a6 10.Rc1 c4 11.Bb1 Re8 12.Ne2 Bd6 13.Bc3 b5 14.Ng3 g6 15.Re1 Bb7 16.Re2 b4 17.Be1 a5 18.Ng5 Ng4 19.Nh3 f5 20.Nf1 Qc7 21.f4 Ndf6 22.Bh4 a4 23.Ng5 Qe7 24.Re1 a3 25.b3 c3 26.Nf3 Qg7 27.h3 Nh6 28.Bxf6 Qxf6 29.Ne5 Qe7 30.Nh2 Rec8 31.Nhf3 Nf7 32.Bd3 Rc7 33.Qe2 Qd8 34.Rc2 Qc8 35.Nxf7 Rxf7 36.Bb5 Rc7 37.Bd3 Bf8 38.Ne5 Bg7 39.Kh2 Bf6 40.Rg1 Kf8 41.g4 Bxe5 42.fxe5 fxg4 43.Rf1+ Rf7 44.Rxf7+ Kxf7 45.hxg4 Qd8 46.Kg3 Kg7 47.Qf1 Qe7 48.Rf2 Rf8 49.Rf4 Bc8 50.Bc2 Be6 51.Rxf8 Qxf8 52.Qa6 Qe7 53.Bd1 Kf7 54.Kf4 h6 55.Qf1 Kg7 56.Kg3 h5 57.gxh5 Qg5+ 58.Kf2 Qf5+ 59.Bf3 Qc2+ 60.Qe2 Qxe2+ 61.Kxe2 Bf5 62.hxg6 Kxg6 63.Bxd5 Bb1 64.Kd1 Bd3 65.Bc6 Kf7 66.d5 Ke7 67.e4 Kf7 68.e6+ Kf6 69.e5+ Ke7 70.Bb7 Bg6 71.Ba6 Be4 72.Bc4 Bg6 73.d6+ Kd8 74.Bb5, 1–0.

Gresser - Rudenko (Women’s World Championship, Moscow, 1950)

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Bc5 4.c3 f5 5.d4 fxe4 6.dxc5 exf3 7.Qxf3 Nf6 8.Bg5 0–0 9.0–0 Qe7 10.Bc4+ Kh8 11.b4 a5 12.Bxf6 Rxf6 13.Qd5 Rf8 14.b5 Nd8 15.Nd2 c6 16.Qd6 Qxd6 17.cxd6 b6 18.Rfe1 cxb5 19.Bxb5 Nf7 20.Nc4 Ba6 21.Bxa6 Rxa6 22.Nxe5 Nxd6 23.Nxd7 Rc8 24.Rad1 b5 25.h3 Nf7 26.Re7 Kg8 27.Rde1 Nd6 28.R1e6 Rxc3 29.Ne5 h6 30.Rd7 Rc5 31.Nf7 Nxf7 32.Rxa6 Ne5 33.Rb7 b4 34.Raa7 Nc6 35.Rxg7+ Kf8 36.Raf7+ Ke8 37.Rb7 Rf5 38.Rg8+ Rf8 39.Rxf8+ Kxf8 40.Rb6 Ne5 41.Rxh6, 1–0.

Bykova - Gaprindashvili (Women’s World Championship, Moscow, 1962)

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.0–0 Be7 6.Re1 b5 7.Bb3 d6 8.c3 0–0 9.d3 Na5 10.Bc2 c5 11.Nbd2 Nd7 12.Nf1 Nb6 13.Ne3 g6 14.Qe2 Be6 15.Bd2 Nc6 16.b3 a5 17.Nf1 b4 18.Bh6 Re8 19.c4 Bg4 20.Bd1 Nd4 21.Qe3 Bxf3 22.gxf3 a4 23.Ng3 axb3 24.Bxb3 Bg5 25.Bxg5 Qxg5 26.Kg2 Qh4 27.Rg1 Nd7 28.Kh1 Kh8 29.Ne2 Nxe2 30.Qxe2 h5 31.Qe3 Kh7 32.Rg3 Nf8 33.Qg5 Qxg5 34.Rxg5 Ne6 35.Rgg1 Ra3 36.Rgd1 Nd4 37.Kg2 Kh6 38.Rab1 Kg5 39.Rd2 Kf4 40.Bd1 Rea8 41.Bb3 Nxf3 42.Re2 g5 43.h3 Rg8 44.Re3 g4 45.Rc1 Raa8, 0–1.

Gaprindashvili - Chiburdanidze (Women’s World Championship, Pitsunda, 1978)

1.Nf3 Nf6 2.g3 d5 3.c4 c6 4.Bg2 dxc4 5.a4 g6 6.Na3 Qd5 7.0–0 Na6 8.Ne1 Qh5 9.Nxc4 Bh3 10.Nf3 Bxg2 11.Kxg2 Bg7 12.d3 0–0 13.h3 Qd5 14.Bd2 Rfd8 15.Qc2 Rac8 16.Bc3 c5 17.Rad1 h6 18.Qb3 b6 19.e4 Qe6 20.Nh4 Nb4 21.Bxb4 cxb4 22.Rfe1 Nd7 23.Qc2 Nc5 24.b3 a6 25.Nf3 b5 26.axb5 axb5 27.Ne3 Na4 28.Qa2 Nc3 29.Qa5 Nxd1 30.Rxd1 Qxb3 31.Qxb5 Rc3 32.Qb7 Rcxd3 33.Rxd3 Rxd3 34.Nd5 Rxf3, (time), 0–1.

Chiburdanidze - Gaprindashvili (Women’s World Championship, Pitsunda, 1978)

1.e4 d6 2.d4 Nf6 3.Nc3 g6 4.Nf3 Bg7 5.Be2 c6 6.0–0 0–0 7.a4 Nbd7 8.a5 Qc7 9.h3 Rd8 10.Be3 Nf8 11.Qd2 Bd7 12.Rfd1 Be8 13.b4 e5 14.dxe5 dxe5 15.Qe1 Rxd1 16.Rxd1 Ne6 17.Bc4 Qe7 18.Bxe6 Qxe6 19.Bc5 Nd7 20.Bd6 f6 21.Qe2 Bf8 22.Bxf8 Nxf8 23.Nd2 Qe7 24.Qc4+ Bf7 25.Qc5 Qxc5 26.bxc5 Rd8 27.Kf1 Rd4 28.Ke1 Ne6 29.Nb3 Rc4 30.Kd2 Nf4 31.a6 bxa6 32.Ra1 Nxg2 33.Rxa6 Be8 34.Rxa7 h5 35.Rb7 Nf4 36.f3 Kf8 37.h4 Ne6 38.Nd1 Nxc5 39.Nxc5 Rxc5 40.Ne3 Ra5 41.Rc7 Ra8 42.Nc4 Ra4 43.Ne3 Rd4+ 44.Ke2 Rd6 45.c4 Rd8 46.c5 Rd4 47.Ke1 Rd7 48.Rxd7 Bxd7 49.Nc4 Ke7 50.Kf2 Be6 51.Nd6 g5 52.Kg3 Kd7 53.Nb7 Bb3 54.hxg5 fxg5 55.Na5 Bd1 56.Nc4 Ke6 57.Kf2 Kf6 58.Na5 Ba4 59.Nc4 Bb5 60.Nd6 Ba6 61.Ne8+ Kg6 62.Nd6 Bd3 63.Ke3 Bc2 64.Nc4 Kf6 65.Kf2 Ba4 66.Nb6 Bd1 67.Nd7+ Ke6 68.Nb8 Ba4 69.Na6 Bb5 70.Nb4 Kf6 71.Kg3 Kg6 72.Nc2 h4+ 73.Kg2 g4 74.Ne3 gxf3+ 75.Kxf3 Kg5 76.Nd1 Bc4 77.Nf2 Bf1 78.Nh1 Bh3 79.Nf2 Be6 80.Nd3 Bg4+ 81.Kf2 Kf6 82.Nb2 Bd7 83.Kf3 h3 84.Kg3 Ke7 85.Nd3 Kf6 86.Nb4 Ke7 87.Nd3 Ke6 88.Kxh3 Be8 89.Kg3 Bg6 90.Kf3 Bh5+ 91.Ke3 Bd1 92.Nb4 Ba4 93.Nd3 Bb5 94.Ne1,½½–½.

Judit Polgar - Chilingirova (Olympiad, Thessaloniki, 1988)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 g6 4.0–0 Bg7 5.c3 e5 6.d4 exd4 7.cxd4 Nxd4 8.Nxd4 cxd4 9.e5 Ne7 10.Bg5 0–0 11.Qxd4 Nc6 12.Qh4 Qb6 13.Nc3 Bxe5 14.Rae1 Bxc3 15.bxc3 Qxb5 16.Qh6 Qf5 17.Qxf8+, 1–0.

Sofia Polgar - Chernin (Rome, 1989)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nc6 5.Nc3 Qc7 6.Be2 Nf6 7.0–0 Be7 8.Be3 0–0 9.f4 d6 10.Kh1 a6 11.Qe1 Na5 12.Qg3 Nc4 13.Bc1 b5 14.a3 Qb6 15.Rd1 Bb7 16.b3 Na5 17.Bf3 Rac8 18.Bb2 Rfd8 19.Nd5 Nxd5 20.Nxe6 g6 21.Nxd8 Qxd8 22.exd5 Rxc2 23.Rab1 Bh4 24.Qh3 Bc8 25.Bg4 Bxg4 26.Qxg4 Nxb3 27.g3 Be7 28.f5 a5 29.fxg6 hxg6 30.Qh3 Rxb2 31.Rxb2 a4 32.Rf2 Nc5 33.Rdf1 f5 34.g4 Ne4 35.Rg2 Bf6, 1–0.

Gaprindashvili - Xie Jun (Borshomi, 1990)

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Be2 0–0 6.Bg5 Na6 7.Qd2 e5 8.d5 c6 9.h4 cxd5 10.cxd5 Qa5 11.Rb1 Bd7 12.Kf1 Rac8 13.h5 b5 14.a3 b4 15.axb4 Nxb4 16.Nh3 Rc7 17.Be3 Rxc3 18.Qxc3 Nxe4 19.Qe1 Bb5 20.Ng5 Nf6 21.hxg6 hxg6 22.Rd1 Bxe2+ 23.Qxe2 Nbxd5 24.Bc1 Rc8 25.g3 Ne7 26.Rh4 Nf5 27.Rc4 Rf8 28.Bd2 Qd5 29.Nf3 Nd4 30.Rxd4 exd4 31.Bc3 Qc6 32.Bxd4 Re8 33.Qd3 Ne4 34.Kg1 Bxd4 35.Nxd4 Qd5 36.Qb5 Re5 37.Qd3 Ng5 38.Kh2 Re4 39.Qb3 Qc5 40.Qb8+ Kg7 41.b4 Qe5 42.Nc6 Qf5 43.Kg1 Qh3, 0–1.

Yudasin - Susan Polgar (Pamplona, 1990)

1.e4 c5 2.c3 d5 3.exd5 Qxd5 4.d4 Nc6 5.dxc5 Qxc5 6.Be3 Qa5 7.Nf3 Nf6 8.Bc4 e6 9.0–0 Be7 10.Nd4 Bd7 11.Nd2 Nxd4 12.Bxd4 Bc6 13.Re1 0–0 14.Nb3 Qg5 15.g3 Rad8 16.f4 Qh6 17.Qe2 Ne4 18.Qe3 b6 19.Rad1 Nd6 20.Bd3 Qh5 21.Be5 Nf5 22.Qf2 Nh4 23.Be2 Nf3+ 24.Bxf3 Bxf3 25.Rxd8 Rxd8 26.h3 Bb7 27.Kh2 Rd3 28.Bd4 Qd5 29.Qe2 Bf6 30.Rg1 Bxd4 31.Nxd4 Qe4 32.Qxe4 Bxe4 33.Re1 f5 34.g4 Kf7 35.Re2 Rd1 36.Kg3 h6 37.Nf3 Rd3 38.Rf2 g5 39.fxg5 hxg5 40.h4 f4+ 41.Kg2 gxh4, 0–1.

Tolnai - Judit Polgar (Hungarian Championship, Hungary, 1991)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 a6 5.Nc3 Qc7 6.f4 b5 7.Bd3 Bb7 8.Qf3 Nf6 9.Be3 Nc6 10.0–0–0 b4 11.Nce2 Na5 12.g4 d5 13.e5 Nd7 14.Kb1 Nc4 15.Bc1 0–0–0 16.h4 Nc5 17.b3 Na3+ 18.Ka1 f6 19.c3 fxe5 20.fxe5 Nc4 21.Nxe6 Nxe5 22.Qg3 Nxe6 23.Bf5 Kb8 24.Bxe6 bxc3 25.Nxc3 d4 26.Rhf1 Bb4 27.Na4 Rhe8 28.Bf5 Bc6 29.Bb2 g6 30.Bb1 Bxa4 31.bxa4 Bc3 32.Bxc3 Qxc3+ 33.Qxc3 dxc3 34.Rc1 Rc8 35.Rf4 Rc5 36.Rb4+ Ka7 37.Rb3 Rec8 38.Be4 R8c7 39.Rcb1 Nc6 40.Bxc6 R5xc6 41.Rb4 Rc4 42.a3 Rxb4 43.axb4 Rc4 44.h5 a5 45.hxg6 hxg6 46.Ka2 Rxb4 47.Rg1 c2 48.g5 Kb6, 0–1.

Xie Jun - Chiburdanidze (Women’s World Championship, Manila, 1991)

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Nf6 4.0–0 Nxe4 5.d4 Nd6 6.Bxc6 dxc6 7.dxe5 Nf5 8.Qxd8+ Kxd8 9.b3 Ke8 10.Bb2 a5 11.Nc3 Be6 12.Rfd1 Be7 13.h3 h5 14.a4 f6 15.Ne2 Bd5 16.Ne1 Kf7 17.Nf4 Rad8 18.c4 Be6 19.Nf3 Bc8 20.Re1 g5 21.e6+ Ke8 22.Ng6 Rg8 23.Nxe7 Kxe7 24.g4 hxg4 25.hxg4 Ng7 26.Nd4 c5 27.Nf5+ Nxf5 28.gxf5 Rh8 29.Kg2 b6 30.Rad1 Rdg8 31.Kg3 Rh4 32.Rh1 Rgh8 33.Rxh4 gxh4+ 34.Kh3 Rh5 35.Rd5 c6 36.Bxf6+ Kxf6 37.Rd8 Rxf5 38.Rxc8 Rf3+ 39.Kxh4 Rxb3 40.Rxc6 Rb4 41.Kg3, ½–½.

Xie Jun - Chiburdanidze (Women’s World Championship, Manila, 1991)

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.0–0 Be7 6.Re1 b5 7.Bb3 d6 8.c3 0–0 9.h3 Na5 10.Bc2 c5 11.d4 Bb7 12.Nbd2 cxd4 13.cxd4 exd4 14.Nxd4 Re8 15.b4 Nc6 16.Nxc6 Bxc6 17.Bb2 Bf8 18.Qf3 Rc8 19.Bb3 Qe7 20.Rad1 Bb7 21.Qf5 d5 22.e5 Nd7 23.Ne4 g6 24.Qxd7 dxe4 25.e6 fxe6 26.Qd4 Kf7 27.Qh8 Qh4 28.g3 Qh5 29.Qf6+ Kg8 30.Rd7, 1–0.

Chiburdanidze - Xie Jun (Women’s World Championship, Manila, 1991)

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.0–0 Be7 6.Re1 b5 7.Bb3 0–0 8.d3 d6 9.c3 Na5 10.Bc2 c5 11.Nbd2 Re8 12.Nf1 Nc6 13.h3 h6 14.Ne3 Bf8 15.Nh2 d5 16.Nhg4 Nxg4 17.hxg4 d4 18.Nf5 c4 19.dxc4 bxc4 20.Ba4 Bd7 21.Bd2 Rb8 22.b3 cxb3 23.axb3 Ne7 24.cxd4 Nxf5 25.gxf5 exd4 26.Ba5 Qe7 27.Qxd4 Bxa4 28.bxa4 Qc5 29.Qd2 Qc4 30.e5 Bc5 31.Rac1 Qd4 32.e6 Rb2 33.Qxd4 Bxd4 34.exf7+ Kxf7 35.Rc7+ Kf8 36.Rxe8+ Kxe8 37.Be1 Bb6 38.Rc4 Rb1 39.Re4+ Kf7 40.Kh2 h5 41.g3 Kf6 42.a5 Bc7 43.Bc3+ Kxf5 44.Rc4 Bd8 45.Rc5+ Kg6 46.Rc6+ Kh7 47.Rxa6 Rc1 48.Bd4 Rd1 49.Bc3 Rc1 50.Ra8 Bc7 51.Bd4 Rc4 52.Be3 h4 53.a6 hxg3+ 54.Kg2 Bf4 55.a7 gxf2 56.Bxf2, 1–0.

Chiburdanidze - Xie Jun (Women’s World Championship, Manila, 1991)

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.0–0 Be7 6.Re1 b5 7.Bb3 0–0 8.d3 d6 9.c3 Na5 10.Bc2 c5 11.Nbd2 Nc6 12.Nf1 Re8 13.h3 Bb7 14.Ng3 Bf8 15.Nf5 Ne7 16.Nxe7+ Bxe7 17.a4 Bf8 18.Bg5 h6 19.Bh4 Be7 20.d4 Qc7 21.dxe5 dxe5 22.Qe2 c4 23.Red1 Qc5 24.Nh2 b4 25.cxb4 Qxb4 26.Nf3 Nh5 27.Bxe7 Qxe7 28.g3 Qe6 29.Kh2 Nf6 30.Ra3 a5 31.Re3 Bc8 32.Qf1 Rb8 33.Rb1 Ba6 34.Qe1 Rb4 35.b3 Reb8 36.bxc4 Nd7 37.Reb3 Qxc4 38.Rxb4 axb4 39.Bb3 Qd3 40.Qd1 Qxd1 41.Rxd1 Nc5 42.Rb1 Bd3 43.Rb2 Bxe4 44.Nxe5 Nxb3 45.Rxb3 Bd5 46.Rb2 b3 47.Nd3 f6 48.g4 Bc4 49.Nc5 Rc8 50.Ne4 Bd5 51.Ng3 Ra8 52.Ne2 Rxa4 53.Nc3 53...Ra2 54.Rb1 Rxf2+ 55.Kg1 Rg2+ 56.Kf1 Rh2, 0–1.

Tony Alston - S Anderson (City Championship, San Antonio, 1992)

1.d4 d6 2.c4 Nf6 3.Nc3 g6 4.e4 Bg7 5.f3 c6 6.Be3 0–0 7.Qd2 Re8 8.0–0–0 Qc7 9.Kb1 a6 10.g4 b5 11.Bd3 Rd8 12.Rc1 b4 13.Nce2 a5 14.Ng3 c5 15.d5 Bxg4 16.fxg4 Nxg4 17.Nf3 Nd7 18.Be2 Nxe3 19.Qxe3 a4 20.Bd1 Rdb8 21.Ne2 Ne5 22.Nxe5 Bxe5 23.h4 h5 24.Nf4 Bg7 25.Bxh5 Bxb2 26.Kxb2 Qa5 27.Rb1 a3+ 28.Kc2 Qa4+ 29.Rb3, 1–0.

Ioseliani - Susan Polgar (Women’s Candidates, Monte Carlo, 1993)

1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 c5 3.c4 cxd4 4.cxd5 Nf6 5.Qa4+ Qd7 6.Qxd4 Qxd5 7.Nc3 Qxd4 8.Nxd4 Bd7 9.Ndb5 Kd8 10.Be3 Nc6 11.h3 a6 12.Bb6+ Kc8 13.Na3 e5 14.Nc4 Be6 15.e4 Bb4 16.0–0–0 Bxc3 17.Nd6+ Kb8 18.bxc3 Nd7 19.Be3 Kc7 20.Bc4 Bxc4 21.Nxc4 f6 22.Rd2 b5 23.Nd6 Nb6 24.Bxb6+ Kxb6 25.Nf5 Rhd8 26.Rhd1 Rxd2 27.Rxd2 Ra7 28.h4 Rf7 29.h5 Kc7 30.h6 g6 31.Ng7 Re7 32.Rd3 Nb8 33.c4 bxc4 34.Rc3 Kd6 35.Rxc4 Nc6 36.Kd2 Rf7 37.Ke3 Rf8 38.g3 Rb8 39.f4 Ne7 40.Ra4 Ra8 41.f5 g5 42.Rb4 Kc6 43.Ne6 Rc8 44.Rc4+ Kd6 45.Ra4 Rc6 46.Nf8 Ng8 47.Nxh7 Kc5 48.Nxg5 Nxh6 49.Ne6+ Kb5 50.Ra3 Rc2 51.Kd3 Rg2 52.Nc7+ Kc6 53.Rc3+ Kb7 54.Nd5 Ng4 55.Rc7+ Kb8 56.Rf7 Rxg3+ 57.Kc4 Ra3 58.Nxf6 Nf2 59.Kd5 Rxa2 60.Kxe5 a5 61.Nd7+, 1–0.

Judit Polgar - Tiviakov (Madrid, 1994)

1.e4 c5 2.c3 d5 3.exd5 Qxd5 4.d4 Nf6 5.Nf3 Nc6 6.Be2 cxd4 7.cxd4 e6 8.0–0 Be7 9.Nc3 Qd6 10.Nb5 Qd8 11.Bf4 Nd5 12.Bg3 a6 13.Nc3 0–0 14.Rc1 Nf6 15.h3 b6 16.a3 Bb7 17.Bd3 Rc8 18.Bb1 b5 19.Qd3 Na5 20.Ne5 Nc4 21.Rc2 Nd6 22.f3 g6 23.Bf2 Re8 24.Ba2 Bf8 25.Re2 Bg7 26.Rfe1 Nd5 27.Nxd5 exd5 28.Qd1 a5 29.h4 Qc7 30.h5 Nc4 31.h6 Bxh6 32.Ng4 Rxe2 33.Nxh6+ Kg7 34.Rxe2 Kxh6 35.Qe1 Kg7 36.Re7 Qb6 37.Bxc4 bxc4 38.Qe5+ Kg8 39.Be3 f6 40.Qf4 Kf8 41.Rxh7 Ke8 42.Qh6, 1–0.

Judit Polgar - Kasparov (Linares, 1994)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.f4 e6 7.Be2 Be7 8.0–0 Qc7 9.Qe1 Nbd7 10.a4 b6 11.Bf3 Bb7 12.Kh1 Rd8 13.Be3 0–0 14.Qg3 Nc5 15.f5 e5 16.Bh6 Ne8 17.Nb3 Nd7 18.Rad1 Kh8 19.Be3 Nef6 20.Qf2 Rfe8 21.Rfe1 Bf8 22.Bg5 h6 23.Bh4 Rc8 24.Qf1 Be7 25.Nd2 Qc5 26.Nb3 Qb4 27.Be2 Bxe4 28.Nxe4 Nxe4 29.Bxe7 Rxe7 30.Bf3 Nef6 31.Qxa6 Ree8 32.Qe2 Kg8 33.Bb7 Rc4 34.Qd2 Qxa4 35.Qxd6 Rxc2 36.Nd2 Nf8 37.Ne4 N8d7 38.Nxf6+ Nxf6 39.Qxb6 Ng4 40.Rf1 e4 41.Bd5 e3 42.Bb3 Qe4 43.Bxc2 Qxc2 44.Rd8 Rxd8 45.Qxd8+ Kh7 46.Qe7 Qc4, 0–1.

Shahade - Fierro (World Junior Championship, Guarapuava, 1995)

1.e4 c5 2.c3 Nf6 3.e5 Nd5 4.d4 cxd4 5.Nf3 d6 6.cxd4 e6 7.a3 Bd7 8.Bd3 Bc6 9.0–0 Nd7 10.Nc3 Nxc3 11.bxc3 dxe5 12.dxe5 Nc5 13.Nd4 Qd5 14.Nxc6 bxc6 15.Be2 Qxe5 16.Bf3 Qc7 17.Bf4 Qc8 18.Rb1 Be7 19.Bd6 Nb7 20.Bxe7 Kxe7 21.Qa4 Nd8 22.Rfd1 Qc7 23.Qb4+ Ke8 24.Rd6 a5 25.Qd4 f6 26.Rd1 e5 27.Qg4 Qf7 28.Rxd8+ Rxd8 29.Bxc6+ Ke7 30.Rd7+, 1–0.

Susan Polgar - Xie Jun (Women’s World Championship, Jaen, 1996)

1.g3 g6 2.Bg2 Bg7 3.e4 e5 4.Ne2 Nc6 5.c3 Nge7 6.d4 exd4 7.cxd4 d5 8.e5 f6 9.f4 0–0 10.0–0 Bg4 11.Nbc3 fxe5 12.fxe5 Rxf1+ 13.Qxf1 Qd7 14.h3 Rf8 15.Nf4 g5 16.hxg4 gxf4 17.gxf4 Qxg4 18.Qe2 Qg3 19.Qf2 Qxf2+ 20.Kxf2 Nxd4 21.Nxd5 Ng6 22.Nc3 c6 23.Be3 Bxe5 24.Rd1 Nxf4 25.Bxf4 Rxf4+ 26.Ke3 Nf5+ 27.Kd3 Rg4 28.Bh3 Rd4+ 29.Ke2 Rxd1 30.Nxd1 Nd6 31.b4 Kg7 32.a4 Kf6 33.Nf2 Bd4 34.Nd3 b6 35.Nf4 c5 36.Nd5+ Ke5 37.bxc5 bxc5 38.Ne7 a6 39.a5 Nc4 40.Nc6+ Kd6 41.Nb8 Kc7 42.Nxa6+ Kb7 43.Nxc5+ Bxc5 44.a6+ Kb6 45.Kd3 Nd6 46.Ke2 Kxa6 47.Kf3 Kb6 48.Be6 Kc7 49.Kg4 Kd8 50.Kh5 Be3 51.Bg8 h6 52.Bb3 Ke7 53.Kg6 Ne4 54.Bd1 Ke6 55.Bg4+ Ke5 56.Bd1 Bg5 57.Be2 Kf4 58.Bd1 Ng3 59.Ba4 h5 60.Bd7 h4, 0–1.

Susan Polgar - Xie Jun (Women’s World Championship, Jaen, 1996)

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 exd4 4.Nxd4 Bc5 5.Nxc6 Qf6 6.Qd2 dxc6 7.Nc3 Be6 8.Na4 Rd8 9.Bd3 Bd4 10.c3 b5 11.cxd4 bxa4 12.Qc2 Qxd4 13.Qxc6+ Kf8 14.Be2 Ne7 15.Qc2 f5 16.0–0 Qxe4 17.Qxc7 Kf7 18.Bh5+ g6 19.Bf3 Qc4 20.Qxa7 Qd4 21.Qa5 Nd5 22.Rd1 Qc4 23.Bg5 Rd7 24.Rac1 Qxa2 25.Bxd5, 1–0.

Xie Jun - Susan Polgar (Women’s World Championship, Jaen, 1996)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 Nc6 6.Bg5 Qb6 7.Nb3 e6 8.Qd2 Be7 9.f3 0–0 10.g4 Rd8 11.Be3 Qc7 12.g5 Nd7 13.0–0–0 a6 14.h4 b5 15.h5 Nb6 16.g6 Bf6 17.h6 fxg6 18.hxg7 Na4 19.Nd4 Nxd4 20.Bxd4 Bxd4 21.Qxd4 Nxc3 22.bxc3 Qxg7 23.Qb6 Qe7 24.e5 d5 25.Bd3 Bd7 26.Rdg1 Be8 27.f4 27...d4 28.cxd4 Rab8 29.Qxa6 Rxd4 30.f5 exf5 31.Bxf5 Qxe5 32.Be6+ Kh8 33.Kb1 Ra4, 0–1.

Judit Polgar - Kasparov (Dos Hermanas, 1996)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.f4 e6 7.Qf3 Qb6 8.a3 Nc6 9.Nxc6 bxc6 10.b3 Bb7 11.Bb2 d5 12.Bd3 c5 13.exd5 exd5 14.0–0–0 0–0–0 15.Na4 Qc7 16.Bf5+ Kb8 17.Be5 Bd6 18.Qc3 d4 19.Bxd6 Qxd6 20.Qxc5 Qxf4+ 21.Kb1 Rd5 22.Rdf1 Qe5 23.Qc4 Rb5 24.Qxf7 Bd5 25.Qxg7 Rg8 26.Qh6 Bxb3 27.cxb3 Rxb3+ 28.Kc1 Qc7+ 29.Bc2 d3 30.Qf4 Rc8 31.Qxc7+ Rxc7 32.Rf2 Ne4 33.Rf8+ Ka7 34.Rf7 Rbb7 35.Rxc7 Rxc7 36.Rd1 Rxc2+ 37.Kb1 Rxg2 38.Rxd3 Rxh2 39.Rd7+ Kb8 40.Re7 Nd2+ 41.Kc1 Nb3+ 42.Kd1 h5 43.Re3 Nd4 44.Nc5 a5 45.Nb3 Nc6 46.Rc3 Kb7 47.Ke1 Kb6 48.Kf1 Rh4 49.Kg2 Nd4 50.Nxa5 Kxa5 51.Rc5+ Kb6 52.Re5 Kc6 53.Kg3 Rh1 54.Kg2 Kd6 55.Ra5 Rh4 56.Kg3 Rg4+ 57.Kh3 Ne2 58.Rxh5 Rg3+ 59.Kh4 Rxa3 60.Kg4 Ke6 61.Rb5 Rg3+ 62.Kh4 Rg1 63.Rg5 Rf1 64.Ra5 Kf6 65.Ra8 Rg1 66.Rf8+ Ke5 67.Re8+ Kf4 68.Rf8+ Ke4 69.Re8+ Kf3 70.Kh5 Ng3+ 71.Kh6 Nf5+ 72.Kh7 Kf4 73.Rb8 Rg7+ 74.Kh8 Rd7 75.Re8 Kg5 76.Re6 Nd4 77.Re1 Kf6 78.Rd1 Rd5 79.Ra1 Ne6 80.Ra6 Kf7 81.Ra7+ Kg6 82.Ra8 Rd7 83.Rb8 Rc7 84.Kg8 Rc5 85.Ra8 Rb5 86.Kh8 Rb7 87.Rc8 Nc7 88.Rg8+ Kh6 89.Rg1 Rb8+ 90.Rg8 Ne8, 0–1.

Krush - Shahade (U.S. Championship, Denver, 1998)

1.Nf3 Nf6 2.c4 d5 3.cxd5 Nxd5 4.Nc3 g6 5.Qa4+ Bd7 6.Qc2 Nb6 7.d4 Bg7 8.Bg5 Bg4 9.e3 Bxf3 10.gxf3 0–0 11.0–0–0 N8d7 12.h4 Nf6 13.Bxf6 Bxf6 14.h5 Kg7 15.Bd3 Rh8 16.Rdg1 c6 17.Rh3 Nd5 18.hxg6 hxg6 19.Bxg6 Rxh3 20.Bf5+ Kf8 21.Bxh3 e6 22.Bxe6 Nxc3 23.Qh7, 1–0.

Shahade - Kouvatsou (World Junior Championship, Yerevan, 1999)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 d6 6.Be2 a6 7.a4 Nc6 8.Be3 Be7 9.0–0 0–0 10.f4 Qc7 11.Kh1 Re8 12.Bf3 Bf8 13.Qd3 Nb4 14.Qd2 e5 15.Nb3 exf4 16.Bxf4 Nd7 17.a5 Ne5 18.Ra4 Nbc6 19.Nd5 Qd8 20.Bg5 f6 21.Be3 Nd7 22.Qf2 Rb8 23.Bh5 Re5 24.Bg4 Nc5 25.Nxc5 Bxg4 26.Nd3 Re8 27.Qg3 f5 28.exf5 Be2 29.Bb6 Qc8 30.Rff4 Kh8 31.Nc7 Re7 32.Ne6 Ne5 33.Nxe5 dxe5 34.Rh4 Qxc2 35.Qg6 Qc1+ 36.Bg1 h6 37.Ng5, 1–0.

Zhu Chen - Krush (Women’s World Championship, New Delhi, 2000)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 Nc6 6.Bg5 e6 7.Qd2 a6 8.0–0–0 h6 9.Nxc6 bxc6 10.Bf4 d5 11.Qe3 Qa5 12.Be2 Bb4 13.Be5 Be7 14.exd5 cxd5 15.Bxf6 gxf6 16.Rhe1 Qc5 17.Qg3 Bb7 18.Bf3 Kf8 19.Kb1 Rc8 20.Rd2 Qb4 21.Rd3 a5 22.Red1 Ba6 23.Rd4 Qb6 24.Bh5 Bd6 25.f4 Rg8 26.Qh3 Bb4 27.Na4 Qc6 28.c3 Qxa4 29.a3 Bc4 30.cxb4 axb4 31.R1d2 Rb8 32.Bd1 Qa5 33.b3 bxa3 34.Ka2 Bb5 35.f5 Bd7 36.fxe6 Bxe6 37.Qxh6+ Ke7 38.Qe3 Rg5 39.Ra4 Qxa4 40.Qxg5 Qb4 41.Qe3 Kf8 42.g4 Qd6 43.Qh6+ Ke7 44.g5 fxg5 45.Qxg5+ Ke8 46.Bg4 Qb4 47.Bd1 d4 48.Rd3 Rc8 49.Qg8+ Ke7 50.Qg5+ Ke8 51.Qe5 Rc4 52.h4 Kf8 53.Qg3 Bf5 54.h5 Bxd3 55.Qxd3 Rc6 56.Qe2 Re6 57.Qc2 Qc3 58.Qg2 Qb2+ 59.Qxb2 axb2 60.Kxb2 f5 61.Kc2 Re3 62.b4 f4 63.b5 f3 64.Kd2 f2 65.Be2 Rb3 66.h6 Rb1 67.Kd3 Rxb5 68.Kxd4 Rb1, 0–1.

Sagalchik - Shahade (U.S. Championship, Seattle, 2000)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 6.Be3 Bg7 7.f3 Nc6 8.Qd2 0–0 9.0–0–0 Nxd4 10.Bxd4 Be6 11.h4 Qa5 12.Kb1 Rfc8 13.Nd5 Qxd2 14.Nxf6+ Bxf6 15.Rxd2 Bxd4 16.Rxd4 h5 17.b3 Rc3 18.Kb2 Rac8 19.Bc4 Bxc4 20.Kxc3 Bf1+ 21.Kb2 Bxg2 22.Rhd1 Bxf3 23.R1d3 Bg4 24.Rc3 Kg7 25.Ra4 a6 26.Rb4 g5 27.hxg5 Kg6 28.e5 Rxc3 29.Kxc3 dxe5 30.Rxb7 h4 31.Rxe7 h3 32.Rxe5 h2 33.Re1 Bf3 34.Kd4 h1Q 35.Rxh1 Bxh1 36.c4 Kxg5 37.b4 Bc6 38.Kc5 38...f5 39.Kxc6 f4 40.b5 f3 41.b6 f2 42.b7 f1Q 43.b8Q Qxc4+ 44.Kb6 Qxa2 45.Qe5+, ½–½.

Kosteniuk - Zhu Chen (Women’s World Championship, Moscow, 2001)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Bg5 e6 7.f4 Qb6 8.Nb3 Be7 9.Qf3 Nbd7 10.0–0–0 Qc7 11.g4 b5 12.Bxf6 Nxf6 13.g5 Nd7 14.h4 b4 15.Ne2 Bb7 16.Bh3 d5 17.f5 Rc8 18.c3 dxe4 19.Qe3 Bc5 20.Nxc5 Nxc5 21.fxe6 fxe6 22.Rhf1 Rf8 23.Bg4 Rxf1 24.Rxf1 Qa5 25.Qd4 Qxa2 26.Kc2 e3 27.Bh5+ g6 28.Qh8+ Ke7 29.Qxh7+ Kd6 30.Bxg6 b3+ 31.Kc1 Na4 32.Rd1+ Bd5 33.Rxd5+ exd5 34.Kd1 Qxb2 35.Ke1 Qd2+ 36.Kf1 Rf8+, 0–1.

Zhu Chen - Kosteniuk (Women’s World Championship, Moscow, 2001)

1.d4 f5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.g3 e6 4.Bg2 d5 5.0–0 Bd6 6.b3 Qe7 7.c4 c6 8.Bb2 0–0 9.Qc1 a5 10.Ba3 Na6 11.Bxd6 Qxd6 12.c5 Qe7 13.Ne5 Nd7 14.Nxd7 Bxd7 15.f4 b6 16.cxb6 Qb4 17.Qc3 Qxb6 18.Nd2 Rfc8 19.Rfc1 c5 20.Nf3 Rc7 21.e3 Rac8 22.Qd2 a4 23.Ne5 Be8 24.dxc5 Nxc5 25.bxa4 Bxa4 26.Rab1 Qa7 27.Qd4 Be8 28.Rc2 Qa3 29.Qc3 Qa4 30.Qb2 Qa6 31.Bf1 Qa7 32.Qd4 Qa3 33.Qc3 Qa4 34.Qb2 Qe4 35.Re1 g5 36.Bg2 Qa4 37.Rec1 Qa5 38.Qc3 Qa7 39.Qd4 Qa3 40.Qc3 Nb3 41.Qxb3 Qxb3 42.axb3 Rxc2 43.Rxc2 Rxc2 44.fxg5 Re2 45.Nf3 Rxe3 46.Nd4 Kf7 47.Bf1 Bd7 48.Kf2 Rc3 49.b4 e5 50.Nf3 Ke6 51.Nh4 e4 52.g6 hxg6 53.Nxg6 d4 54.h4 Rc2+ 55.Ke1 Rc1+ 56.Kf2 e3+ 57.Kg1 Bb5, 0–1.

Zhu Chen - Kosteniuk (Women’s World Championship, Moscow, 2001)

1.d4 f5 2.g3 Nf6 3.Bg2 e6 4.c4 d5 5.Nh3 c6 6.Qc2 Be7 7.0–0 0–0 8.Nd2 h6 9.Nf4 Qe8 10.Nf3 g5 11.Nd3 Nbd7 12.Bd2 a5 13.b3 Ne4 14.Nfe5 Bf6 15.Bc1 Be7 16.a3 Nxe5 17.Nxe5 b6 18.f3 Nf6 19.Bd2 Ba6 20.e4 c5 21.exd5 exd5 22.Qxf5 Kg7 23.Qd3 Rd8 24.Rfe1 dxc4 25.bxc4 Rxd4 26.Qc2 Bd6 27.Ng4 Qg6 28.Qb2 Nd7 29.Bc3 Kg8 30.Bxd4 cxd4 31.Kh1 Bxc4 32.Qxd4 Bb3 33.Re3 a4 34.Rd3 Nc5 35.Qxd6 Qxd3 36.Qxh6 Qf5 37.Qxb6 Qc2 38.h3 Ne6 39.Re1 Qc4 40.Kh2 Kg7 41.Re4 Qd5 42.Re5 Qd7 43.Qe3 Qe7 44.Nf2 Qf6 45.Ra5 Rd8 46.Ne4 Qb2 47.Rxg5+ Kf7 48.Qa7+ Ke8 49.Rg8+ Nf8 50.Rg7 Rd7 51.Qb8+ Rd8 52.Nd6 mate, 1–0.

Shahade - Sagalchik (U.S. Championship, Seattle, 2002)

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.0–0 Nxe4 6.d4 b5 7.Bb3 d5 8.dxe5 Be6 9.Nbd2 Nc5 10.c3 Bg4 11.Bc2 Qd7 12.Re1 Be7 13.Nf1 Bh5 14.b4 Na4 15.Ng3 Nxc3 16.Qd2 Bg4 17.Qxc3 Bxb4 18.Qe3 Bxf3 19.Bf5 Qe7 20.Bd2 g6 21.Bxb4 Qxb4 22.Qxf3 Nd4 23.Bd7+ Kxd7 24.Qxf7+ Kc8 25.Rac1 Ra7 26.Qxd5 c6 27.Qe4 Rd7 28.e6 Rd6 29.Qg4 Kc7 30.e7 Re8 31.Qg5 Re6 32.Rxe6 Nxe6 33.Qd5 Nd4, 1–0.

Ambarcumjan - Shahade (U.S. Championship, Seattle, 2002)

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 d5 4.Nf3 Bg7 5.e3 0–0 6.Bd2 c5 7.dxc5 Na6 8.cxd5 Nxc5 9.Bc4 Bf5 10.0–0 Rc8 11.Qe2 Nfe4 12.Nxe4 Bxe4 13.Bb4 Na4 14.Ba3 Nxb2 15.Bxb2 Bxb2 16.Qxb2 Rxc4 17.Ne5 Rc5 18.Qd4 Qxd5 19.Nd7 Qxd4 20.exd4 Rg5 21.Rfe1 Rxg2+ 22.Kf1 Rxh2 23.f3 Rd8, 0–1.

Shahade - Stripunsky (U.S. Championship, Seattle, 2002)

1.e4 g6 2.d4 Bg7 3.Nc3 c6 4.Nf3 d5 5.h3 dxe4 6.Nxe4 Nd7 7.Bc4 Ngf6 8.Qe2 0–0 9.0–0 b5 10.Bb3 a5 11.Nxf6+ exf6 12.a3 Re8 13.Be3 Nb6 14.Qd2 a4 15.Ba2 Be6 16.Bxe6 Rxe6 17.Rfe1 Qd5 18.Qc3 Qd7 19.Qd3 Bf8 20.Bd2 Nc4 21.Bc3 Rae8 22.Rxe6 Rxe6 23.Nd2 Nb6 24.Bb4 Bxb4 25.axb4 Qe7 26.c3 Re1+ 27.Rxe1 Qxe1+ 28.Kh2 Qxf2 29.Ne4 Qf5 30.Qe2 Nc4 31.Nc5 Kg7 32.Nxa4 bxa4 33.Qxc4 Qf4+ 34.Kg1 Qc1+ 35.Kh2 Qxb2 36.h4 h5 37.Qxc6 a3 38.d5 a2, 0–1.

Judit Polgar - Kasparov (Russia vs The Rest of the World, Moscow, 2002)

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Nf6 4.0–0 Nxe4 5.d4 Nd6 6.Bxc6 dxc6 7.dxe5 Nf5 8.Qxd8+ Kxd8 9.Nc3 h6 10.Rd1+ Ke8 11.h3 Be7 12.Ne2 Nh4 13.Nxh4 Bxh4 14.Be3 Bf5 15.Nd4 Bh7 16.g4 Be7 17.Kg2 h5 18.Nf5 18...Bf8 19.Kf3 Bg6 20.Rd2 hxg4+ 21.hxg4 Rh3+ 22.Kg2 Rh7 23.Kg3 f6 24.Bf4 Bxf5 25.gxf5 fxe5 26.Re1 Bd6 27.Bxe5 Kd7 28.c4 c5 29.Bxd6 cxd6 30.Re6 Rah8 31.Rexd6+ Kc8 32.R2d5 Rh3+ 33.Kg2 Rh2+ 34.Kf3 R2h3+ 35.Ke4 b6 36.Rc6+ Kb8 37.Rd7 Rh2 38.Ke3 Rf8 39.Rcc7 Rxf5 40.Rb7+ Kc8 41.Rdc7+ Kd8 42.Rxg7 Kc8, 1–0.

Xu Yuhua - Krush (Olympiad, Bled, 2002)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.Bb5+ Bd7 4.Bxd7+ Qxd7 5.c4 Nc6 6.Nc3 Nf6 7.d4 cxd4 8.Nxd4 g6 9.f3 Bg7 10.Nde2 0–0 11.0–0 Rfc8 12.Be3 Qd8 13.b3 Qa5 14.Qd2 a6 15.a4 Rab8 16.Rab1 Nd7 17.Rfd1 Qb4 18.Qc1 Qa5 19.Kh1 Kh8 20.Bd2 Qd8 21.Bg5 Nc5 22.Bh4 Nb4 23.Qd2 Qd7 24.Nd4 Ne6 25.Bf2 Nxd4 26.Bxd4 Qc7 27.Ba7 Ra8 28.Be3 Re8 29.a5 Qxa5 30.Nd5 Nc6 31.Qxa5 Nxa5 32.Nc7 Rac8 33.Nxe8 Rxe8 34.c5 dxc5 35.Bxc5 Bf6 36.Rd7 b5 37.f4 Rc8 38.b4 Nc6 39.e5 Bg7 40.Rbd1 Bf8 41.g3 Kg7 42.Rb7 e6 43.Rdd7 Nd8 44.Bb6 Nxb7 45.Rxb7 Bxb4 46.Ra7 Rc6 47.Bd8 Rc8 48.Bf6+ Kg8 49.Rxa6 Bc5 50.Ra2 b4 51.Rb2 Kf8 52.Kg2 Ke8 53.Kf3 Kd7 54.Ke4 Kc6 55.g4 Kb5 56.f5 gxf5+ 57.gxf5 Rg8, 0–1.

Shahade - Wang Pin (Olympiad, Bled, 2002)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Bg5 e6 7.f4 Qb6 8.Qd2 Qxb2 9.Rb1 Qa3 10.Bxf6 gxf6 11.Be2 h5 12.0–0 Nd7 13.Kh1 Nc5 14.f5 Be7 15.Rf3 Qa5 16.Rg3 h4 17.Rg7 Bf8 18.Rg4 h3 19.fxe6 fxe6 20.e5 dxe5 21.Nb3 Nxb3 22.Rxb3 Bh6 23.Qd3 f5 24.Rg6 hxg2+ 25.Rxg2 Qd8 26.Bh5+ Ke7 27.Qe2 b5 28.Bf3 e4 29.Nxe4 fxe4 30.Qxe4 Bd7 31.Qb4+ Kf6 32.Qh4+ Kf7 33.Bh5+ Kf8 34.Rf3+, 1–0.

Socko - Zhao Xue (Olympiad, Bled, 2002)

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.Qc2 c5 5.dxc5 Bxc5 6.Nf3 Qb6 7.e3 Qc7 8.Bd3 b6 9.0–0 a6 10.a3 Be7 11.b3 Bb7 12.Bb2 d6 13.Rad1 Nbd7 14.Ne4 Rc8 15.Rd2 Qb8 16.Nxf6+ Bxf6 17.Bxf6 Nxf6 18.Rfd1 Bxf3 19.gxf3 Ke7 20.Qb2 g5 21.Bf1 Rhd8 22.Qd4 a5 23.Bg2 Qc7 24.b4 axb4 25.axb4 e5 26.Qa1 Qxc4 27.Bh3 Rc7 28.Qb1 h6 29.Kh1 g4 30.Bg2 gxf3 31.Bxf3 Qh4 32.Qf5 Rc4 33.b5 e4 34.Bg2 Rc5 35.Qf4 Qxf4 36.exf4 d5 37.f3 e3 38.Rd4 Kd6 39.Bf1 Rc2 40.Bd3 Rc3 41.Kg2 Kc5 42.Be2 Ra8 43.R4d3 Rxd3 44.Bxd3 Nh5 45.Bb1 Nxf4+ 46.Kg3 Ne2+ 47.Kg4 Rg8+ 48.Kf5 Rg1, 0–1.

Shahade - Stefanova (Andorra, 2000)

1.e4 d5 2.exd5 Qxd5 3.Nc3 Qa5 4.g3 c6 5.Bg2 Nf6 6.Nf3 Bg4 7.h3 Bh5 8.b4 Qc7 9.0–0 e6 10.Rb1 a6 11.a4 Nbd7 12.Re1 Bd6 13.b5 0–0 14.g4 Bg6 15.Nh4 axb5 16.Nxg6 hxg6 17.axb5 Nb6 18.Qf3 Nbd5 19.Bb2 Rac8 20.Nxd5 cxd5 21.Bxf6 gxf6 22.Qxf6 Be7 23.Qb2 Qf4 24.c3 Bc5 25.d4 Bd6 26.Re3 Rc4 27.Ra1 Bb8 28.Qb3 Qh2+ 29.Kf1 Rfc8 30.Ra4 Qd6 31.Rxc4 Rxc4 32.Qa2 Rc8 33.Qa4 Kg7 34.Qb4 Qxb4 35.cxb4 Rc4 36.Rb3 b6 37.Ke2 Rxd4 38.Ke3 Rc4 39.Kd3 Bd6 40.Bf1 Bxb4 41.Rb2 Bc5 42.f3 Rc1 43.Bg2 g5, 0–1.

Milov - Stefanova (Andorra, 2001)

1.c4 c6 2.Nf3 d5 3.e3 Nf6 4.Nc3 g6 5.d4 Bg7 6.Be2 0–0 7.0–0 a6 8.b4 dxc4 9.Bxc4 b5 10.Bb3 Nd5 11.Nxd5 cxd5 12.a4 bxa4 13.Bxa4 Bd7 14.Qb3 e6 15.Bd2 Ra7 16.Rfc1 Qb6 17.Rc5 Rd8 18.Bc3 Bf8 19.Ne5 Bxa4 20.Qxa4 Rb7 21.Qd1 Qd6 22.h4 Nd7 23.Rc6 Qe7 24.Nf3 Qe8 25.Rc5 Nxc5 26.dxc5 Bg7 27.Bxg7 Kxg7 28.Qd4+ f6 29.Rxa6 e5 30.Qc3 Qb5 31.Rxf6 d4 32.exd4 Kxf6 33.Ng5 Rxd4 34.Qf3+ Rf4 35.Qb3 Qc4 36.Qa4 Qc1+, 0–1.

Skripchenko - Atalik (Saint Vincent, 2001)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.Bb5+ Bd7 4.Bxd7+ Qxd7 5.0–0 Nf6 6.Qe2 Nc6 7.c3 e6 8.d4 cxd4 9.cxd4 d5 10.e5 Ng8 11.Nc3 Bb4 12.a3 Bxc3 13.bxc3 Nge7 14.Rd1 Na5 15.Rb1 h6 16.Ne1 Rc8 17.Rd3 b6 18.Qh5 Rc7 19.g4 Qc8 20.Bd2 Nc4 21.Bc1 Ng6 22.f4 Ncxe5 23.fxe5 Rxc3 24.Rd1 Qc4 25.Ng2 Qa2 26.Be3 Qxa3 27.Ra1 Qe7 28.Rf1 Qc7 29.Ra2 0–0 30.Raf2 a5 31.g5 hxg5 32.Bxg5 Qc4 33.Be3 Qd3 34.Rf3 Qe2 35.Qg5 Rc2 36.R3f2 Qc4 37.h4 Rxf2 38.Rxf2 Kh7 39.h5 Nh8 40.Nh4 Qd3 41.Rg2 Rg8 42.Ng6 Qd1+, 1–0.

Kosteniuk - Paehtz (Duel of the Graces, Mainz, 2002)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 a6 5.Nc3 Qc7 6.Be2 Nc6 7.0–0 Nf6 8.Be3 Bb4 9.Na4 Be7 10.f4 Nxe4 11.c4 0–0 12.Bd3 Nf6 13.g4 Nb4 14.g5 Ne8 15.Bxh7+ Kxh7 16.Qh5+ Kg8 17.Rf3 f5 18.Rh3 Nf6 19.gxf6 Bxf6 20.Nf3 Nd3 21.Ng5 Bxg5 22.fxg5 Nf4 23.Qh7+ Kf7 24.Rh6 Ne2+ 25.Kf2 Nf4 26.Rf6+ Ke8 27.Qxg7 Nh3+ 28.Ke1 Qa5+ 29.Ke2 Qb4 30.Qg6+ Ke7 31.Bc5+ Qxc5 32.Qg7+ Ke8, 1–0.

Paehtz - Kosteniuk (Duel of the Graces, Mainz, 2002)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 g6 6.Be2 Bg7 7.0–0 0–0 8.Re1 Nc6 9.Nb3 a5 10.a4 Be6 11.Bf1 Bxb3 12.cxb3 e6 13.Bg5 h6 14.Bh4 Qb6 15.Bg3 Rfd8 16.Nb5 Ne8 17.Bf4 d5 18.e5 Nc7 19.Qd2 g5 20.Bg3 Nxb5 21.axb5 Nd4 22.Qe3 Bf8 23.Ra4 Bc5 24.Rc1 Rac8 25.Rxc5 Nf5 26.Rxc8 Nxe3 27.Rxd8+ Qxd8 28.fxe3 Qc7 29.e4 Qc2 30.exd5 Qxb3 31.Rxa5 exd5 32.Ra8+ Kg7 33.Bf2 Qxb2 34.Rb8 Qxe5 35.Rxb7 h5 36.Rd7 h4 37.b6 g4 38.g3 Qe6 39.b7, 1–0.

Luong Minh Hue - Paridar (Asian Junior Championship, Tehran, 2002)

1.c4 e6 2.Nc3 d5 3.cxd5 exd5 4.d4 c6 5.Qc2 Nf6 6.Bg5 Be7 7.Nf3 0–0 8.e3 Nbd7 9.Bd3 Re8 10.0–0 Nf8 11.Bxf6 Bxf6 12.b4 Be7 13.Rab1 Bd6 14.Bf5 a6 15.Na4 Bxf5 16.Qxf5 Re6 17.Nc5 Rg6 18.Qd3 Qe7 19.Rfe1 Rh6 20.a4 Bxh2+ 21.Nxh2 Qh4 22.Nxb7 Qxh2+ 23.Kf1 Rg6 24.Ke2 Rxg2 25.Rf1 Qh5+ 26.Ke1 Re8 27.Rb3 Qh6 28.Kd1 Qf6 29.Nc5 h5 30.Nxa6 h4 31.b5 h3 32.Nc7 Rb8 33.Ke2 h2 34.Qd1 Qf5 35.Kd2 Rxf2+ 36.Rxf2 Qxf2+ 37.Kd3 Ne6 38.b6 c5 39.Nxd5 cxd4 40.Rb1 dxe3 41.Ne7+ Kf8 42.Ke4 Qf4+ 43.Kd5 Rd8+ 44.Kc6 Rxd1 45.Rxd1 Qxa4+ 46.Kb7 Qxd1 47.Nc8 h1Q+, 0–1.

Shahade - Dzagnidze (Women’s World Championship, Elista, 2004)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 Nc6 6.Bg5 e6 7.Qd2 Be7 8.0–0–0 Nxd4 9.Qxd4 0–0 10.f3 a6 11.Kb1 Nxe4 12.Nxe4 Bxg5 13.Nxg5 Qxg5 14.f4 Qa5 15.Qxd6 b5 16.Bd3 Bb7 17.Qe5 Rac8 18.h4 Bd5 19.b3 Qc3 20.Qe2 b4 21.f5 a5 22.Rh3 Qf6 23.g4 exf5 24.Bxf5 Rcd8 25.Rhd3 Bb7 26.g5 Qb6 27.h5 Ba6 28.g6 Bxd3 29.gxh7+ Kh8 30.Bxd3 Rde8 31.Qg2 Re5 32.Rf1 Rfe8 33.a4 bxa3 34.Ka2 Qd4 35.Kxa3 Rxh5 36.Rxf7 Qa1 mate, 0–1.

Chiburdanidze - Stefanova (Women’s World Championship, Elista, 2004)

1.c4 Nf6 2.d4 c6 3.Bf4 Qb6 4.Qd2 Ne4 5.Qc2 d5 6.f3 Qa5+ 7.Nd2 Nxd2 8.Bxd2 Qd8 9.e3 g6 10.Bd3 Bg7 11.Ne2 dxc4 12.Bxc4 Nd7 13.Bb3 a5 14.a3 e5 15.0–0 0–0 16.Rad1 exd4 17.Nxd4 Qe7 18.Rfe1 Ne5 19.e4 c5 20.Nb5 c4 21.Ba4 Nd3 22.Re2 Nxb2 23.Rb1 Nxa4 24.Qxa4 c3 25.Be3 Bd7 26.Qc2 Rfc8 27.a4 Rc4 28.Bc1 h5 29.Ba3 Qe6 30.f4 Qg4 31.Bd6 Bxb5 32.axb5 Rd8 33.e5 Qxf4 34.Rf1 Qg4 35.h3 Qe6 36.b6 a4 37.Kh1 Rd7 38.Ra1 Kh7 39.Rf1 Rc6 40.Ref2 Qb3 41.Qe2 Rxb6 42.Qe4 Rc6 43.Rb1 Qc4 44.Qc2 b5 45.Rff1 Rcxd6 46.exd6 Rxd6 47.Rf2 Bh6 48.Rbf1 Rd7 49.Rf3 Bd2 50.Rf6 a3 51.Ra1 Ra7 52.Rd6 a2 53.Rd8 Bg5 54.Re8 b4 55.Qf2 Rc7, 0–1.

Kovalevskaya - Stefanova (Women’s World Championship, Elista, 2004)

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.0–0 b5 6.Bb3 Bc5 7.a4 Bb7 8.d3 d6 9.Nc3 b4 10.Ne2 0–0 11.Ng3 h6 12.Nf5 Bc8 13.N3h4 Nd4 14.Nxd4 Bxd4 15.Qf3 Bg4 16.Qg3 Kh7 17.Be3 Bxb2 18.Rab1 Bc3 19.f3 Bd7 20.Qf2 a5 21.g4 Qe8 22.Nf5 Bxa4 23.g5 Nh5 24.Qh4 g6 25.Nxh6 Bxb3 26.Ng4 Qe6 27.Nf6+ Kg7 28.Nxh5+ gxh5 29.cxb3 a4 30.bxa4 Rxa4 31.Kh1 Ra2 32.Rg1 Re2 33.Bf2 Ra8 34.f4 exf4 35.Qxf4 Raa2 36.Rg2 Kg6 37.Qf3 Rac2 38.Rf1 b3 39.e5 Bxe5 40.d4 Bg7 41.Bg1 Rxg2 42.Qd3+ Kxg5 43.Be3+ Kh4 44.Rf4+ Rg4 45.d5 Rc1+ 46.Bxc1 Qe1+ 47.Rf1 Qe4+ 48.Qxe4 Rxe4 49.Kg2 b2 50.Bf4 Rb4 51.Bg3+ Kg5 52.h4+ Kg6 53.Rb1 Ra4, 0–1.

Shahade - Goletiani (U.S. Championship, 2004)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 Nc6 6.Be2 e6 7.0–0 Be7 8.Be3 a6 9.f4 0–0 10.Qe1 Qc7 11.Qg3 Nxd4 12.Bxd4 b5 13.a3 Rb8 14.Kh1 b4 15.e5 Ne8 16.exd6 Bxd6 17.Ne4 f6 18.Bd3 bxa3 19.bxa3 Be7 20.Rab1 Bxa3 21.Rxb8 Qxb8 22.Bc4 Be7 23.Qh3 f5 24.Ng5 Bxg5 25.fxg5 Qb4 26.Qb3 Qxb3 27.cxb3 Nd6 28.Bc5 Rd8 29.Bxd6 Rxd6 30.Rxf5 Rd1+ 31.Rf1 Rxf1+ 32.Bxf1 a5 33.Kg1 Kf7 34.Kf2 e5 35.Bd3 Bb7 36.g3 e4 37.Bc4+ Kg6 38.h4 Kf5 39.Bg8 Ke5 40.Ke3 Bd5 41.Bxh7 Bxb3 42.Bxe4 a4 43.h5 a3 44.Bb1 a2 45.Bxa2 Bxa2 46.h6 gxh6 47.gxh6, ½–½.

Batseeseg - Shahade (U.S. Championship, 2004)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 e5 6.Nb3 a6 7.Be3 Be6 8.f3 Be7 9.Qd2 Nbd7 10.0–0–0 Nb6 11.g4 0–0 12.g5 Nh5 13.Rg1 Qc7 14.Nd5 Bxd5 15.exd5 a5 16.Nc5 Rac8 17.c3 Nxd5 18.Qxd5 dxc5 19.Bc4 Rcd8 20.Qe4 g6 21.h4 Rd4 22.cxd4 cxd4 23.Bd2 Qxc4+ 24.Kb1 Qb5 25.a4 Qc5 26.Rc1 Qd6 27.Rge1 f6 28.f4 Qa6 29.Rc7 Bd6 30.Rd7 Kh8 31.fxe5 fxe5 32.Bc1 Ng3 33.Qd5 Nf5 34.Rxe5 Bxe5 35.Qxe5+ Kg8 36.Ka2 Qc6 37.Rc7 Qxa4+ 38.Kb1 Qb3 39.h5 gxh5 40.Qe4 d3 41.Rc3 Qb5 42.Qe6+ Kh8 43.Bd2 Qe8 44.Qd5 Qf7 45.Qxd3 Ng7 46.Qd4 Qf5+ 47.Ka2 Qe6+ 48.Rb3 b5 49.Bc3 Rg8 50.Bxa5 Ra8 51.Qb4 Qd5 52.Kb1 Qd1+ 53.Ka2 Qd8 54.Ra3, 0–1

Shahade - Abrahayman (U.S. Championship, 2004)

1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nd2 Nf6 4.e5 Nfd7 5.c3 c5 6.Bd3 Nc6 7.Ngf3 Qb6 8.0–0 cxd4 9.cxd4 Nxd4 10.Nxd4 Qxd4 11.Nf3 Qb6 12.Qa4 Be7 13.Qg4 Kf8 14.Bg5 Qd8 15.Qf4 Nc5 16.Bc2 Bd7 17.b4 Na6 18.a3 Kg8 19.Bd3 h6 20.Bxe7 Qxe7 21.Rfc1 Be8 22.Rc3 Rd8 23.Qd4 Nb8 24.b5 b6 25.h4 g6 26.Qb4 Qb7 27.Nd4 h5 28.Rac1 Rd7 29.Nc6 Kg7 30.Qf4 Rc7 31.Nd8, 1–0.

Zatonskih - Shahade (U.S. Championship, 2004)

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.Bb5+ Bd7 4.Bxd7+ Nxd7 5.0–0 Ngf6 6.Nc3 g6 7.d3 Bg7 8.Ng5 h6 9.Nh3 0–0 10.f4 c4 11.Kh1 cxd3 12.cxd3 Qa5 13.Qe2 Qh5 14.Qe1 Nc5 15.d4 Nd3 16.Qd2 Nxc1 17.Raxc1 e5 18.fxe5 dxe5 19.d5 Rac8 20.Nf2 Rfd8 21.Ne2 Rxc1 22.Rxc1 Ne8 23.Rc3 Nd6 24.Rh3 Qg5 25.Qxg5 hxg5 26.g4 f6 27.Rc3 Rc8 28.Rxc8+ Nxc8 29.Nd3 Bf8 30.Kg2 Kf7 31.Kf3 Bd6 32.Ke3 Ke7 33.Nc3 Kd7 34.Nb1 Nb6 35.b3 Nc8 36.Nd2 b6 37.Nf3 Ne7 38.h4 gxh4 39.Nxh4 g5 40.Nf3 Ng6 41.Nh2 Ne7 42.Nf1 Ng8 43.Kd2 Nh6 44.Ne3 Kc7 45.Kc3 b5 46.a4 Kb6 47.Kd2 a6 48.Nf5 Nxf5 49.exf5 bxa4 50.bxa4 e4 51.Nf2 e3+ 52.Kxe3 Bc5+ 53.Kf3 Bxf2 54.Kxf2 Kc5 55.Ke3 Kxd5 56.a5 Ke5 57.Kd3 Kf4 58.Kc4 Kxg4 59.Kc5 Kxf5 60.Kb6 g4 61.Kxa6 g3 62.Kb7 g2 63.a6 g1Q 64.a7 Qa1 65.a8Q, 0–1.

Shahade - Belakovskaya (U.S. Championship, 2004)

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.0–0 Be7 6.Re1 b5 7.Bb3 0–0 8.h3 Bb7 9.d3 d6 10.a3 Na5 11.Ba2 c5 12.Nbd2 Qc7 13.Nf1 Rae8 14.Ne3 Bd8 15.Nh2 Nc6 16.Nhg4 Nxg4 17.hxg4 Bg5 18.c3 Ne7 19.Qf3 Qd7 20.Nf5 Bxc1 21.Raxc1 Ng6 22.Rcd1 Rd8 23.d4 Qc7 24.dxc5 dxc5 25.Bd5 Bc8 26.g3 Be6 27.c4 Ne7 28.Ne3 Rd6 29.g5 Nc6 30.Bxc6 Qxc6 31.Nd5 Qd7 32.Qc3 f6 33.gxf6 gxf6 34.cxb5 Bxd5 35.exd5 Qxb5 36.Rd2 Rb8 37.Rc1 Rc8 38.Qc4 Qxc4 39.Rxc4 Kf7 40.b4 Rcd8 41.Rxc5 Kg6 42.Kg2 Kf5 43.Kf3 e4+ 44.Ke3 Ke5 45.a4 f5 46.Rc6 h5 47.Rxd6 Rxd6 48.f3 h4 49.f4+ Kf6 50.gxh4 Ke7 51.Kd4 Rh6 52.Ke5 Rxh4 53.Kxf5 e3 54.Re2 Kd6 55.Rxe3 Kxd5 56.Re5+ Kc4 57.b5 axb5 58.axb5 Rh6 59.Ke4 Rb6 60.f5 Rh6 61.Re6 Rh4+ 62.Ke5 Kxb5 63.Kd6 Ra4 64.Re5+ Kb6 65.f6 Ra7 66.Re7 Ra1 67.Re8 Rd1+ 68.Ke7 Kc7 69.f7 Re1+ 70.Kf6 Rf1+ 71.Kg6 Rg1+ 72.Kh5 Rh1+ 73.Kg4 Rg1+ 74.Kh3 Rh1+ 75.Kg2. 1–0.

Notes

1. Playing Like a Girl

1. H.J.R. Murray, History of Chess. New York: Oxford University Press, 1913, p. 530.

2. War-Torn Pioneers: Vera Menchik and Sonja Graf

1. British Chess Magazine, 1937.

2. Margaret Hilton Brown, “Tribute to Vera Menchik,” British Chess Magazine, 1944.

3. There were no copies of I Am Susann avaliable in U.S. bookstores or libraries. Henk Chevret of The Hague Collection sent me a copy for Christmas.

4. R. H. Wood, “Rolling Down to Rio,” Chess, September 20, 1939, pp. 18-19 (article was written before, but published after, the start of the War.)

5. British Chess Magazine, August 1944.

6. Thanks to Michael Negele, who encountered these stories in Max Euwe’s writing in researching Sonja Graf’s life for the German magazine KARL.

7. Kathryn Slater, “Women’s Chess,” Chess Life, October 1966.

8. John Graham, Women in Chess: Players of the Modern Age. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1987.

3. Building a Dynasty: The Women of Georgia

1. New In Chess, No. 8, 2003, p. 106.

2. Chess Life & Review, January 1979.

3. Graham, op. cit., p. 43.

4. In Olympiads played between 1957-1978, there were three-player women’s teams with two boards and one alternate.

5. Inside Chess, Vol. 1, Issue 25, pp. 4-5.

4. Be Like Judit!

1. Ratings change incrementally but constantly, so these are approximate figures.

2. ChessCafe.com interview between Misha Savinov and Olga Alexandrova.

3. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952, pp. 604-605.

4. Melbourne Herald, April 1, 1998.

5. Bring Up Grandmasters: The Polgar Sisters

1. Susan Polgar on chess, ChessCafe.com March 2003.

2. Ibid.

3. Zsuzsa Polgar and Jacob Shutzman, Queen of the Kings Game. New York: CompChess Cosulting, 1997, p. 17.

4. Ibid.

5. New In Chess, No. 8, 1989, p. 34.

6. Tibor Károlyi, Judit Polgar: The Princess of Chess. London: B. T. Batford, 2004, p. 38.

7. New In Chess, No. 2, 1989.

8. Cathy Forbes, The Polgar Sisters: Training or Genius? New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1992, p. 49.

9. Dirk Jan Ten Geuzendam, New In Chess, No. 4, 1994.

10. Forbes, op. cit., p. 177.

11. Polgar and Shutzman, op. cit., p. 83.

12. Susan had occasionally chose to develop her King’s Knight on the first move (1.Nf3), the third or fourth most popular starting move, which often involves playing d4 later, thus leading to positions that would have come about after 1.d4 anyway.

6. Women Only!

1. Graham, loc. cit.

7. Chinese Style

1. The quotes are from Xie Jun’s book Chess Champion from China: The Life and Games of Xie Jun. London: Gambit Publications Ltd., 1998.

2. Sarah Hurst, Curse of Kirsan. Milford, CT: Russell Enterprises, 2002.

3. “Making All the Right Moves” Asia Time magazine, April 8, 2002.

4. Ibid.

5. “God of Big Trends,” Bitch magazine, No. 16, Spring 2002.

6. Asia Time magazine, op. cit.

7. Yu Nan’s translations, found on his Internet site. At the time of writing, the book is only available in Chinese languages.

8. New In Chess, No. 1, 2003.

8. Juno and Genius

1. Edward Lasker, “Letter from a Woman,” Chess for Fun and Chess for Blood. New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1942.

2. John Berger, Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin Books, 1972.

9. European Divas

1. In Russian, Sasha is a nickname for Alexandra.

2. Nigel Farndale, “Blitzed by Russia’s pawn star,” Telegraph, August 14, 2002.

10. Checkmate Around the World

1. New In Chess, No. 8, 2003, pp. 65.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid. No. 5, 1995.

11. Playing for America

1. New York Sun, April 16, 1937.

2. New York Herald Tribune, February 28, 1937.

3. The Cleveland Public Library houses the largest collection of chess books and memorabilia in the world, and the Midwestern former steel capital is an unlikely Mecca for a small but zealous group of chess historians. Upon visiting the library myself, I was stunned by its wealth of materials, such as personal letters, original photographs, and rare books. The material in this chapter as well as in Chapter 2 is largely based on my findings there.

4. Rank and File, January/February 1993, pp. 16-17.

5. “Queen Among the Knights,” New York Post, September 10, 1945.

6. A preset number of World Championship invitations are awarded to Zones consisting of several countries.

7. The winner was the young Nona Gaprindihasvilli, who later that winter defeated Bykova for the title.

8. Although many teams fielded two players and an alternate, the United States Federation only sponsored a two-player women’s team.

9. Newsweek, May 22, 1961.

12. Gender Play: Angela from Texas

1. H.J.R. Murray, History of Chess. New York: Oxford University Press, 1913, pp. 426-427.

13. Worst to First

1. Seth Mydans, “Where Chess Is King and the People Are Pawns,” The New York Times June 20, 2004.

2. In the final round, I lost against Irina Krush, who played a nice game. She ended up tying with Anna Zatonskih for second/third place.

Bibliography

Books

Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953.

Berger, John, Ways of Seeing. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972.

Bykova, Elizaveta, Vera Menchik. Moscow: Physiculture and Sport, 1957.

Cabanne, Pierre, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1987

Cockburn, Alexander, Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974.

Fine, Reuben, Psychoanalytic Observations on Chess and Chess Masters. New York: National Psychological Association, 1956.

Forbes, Cathy, The Polgar Sisters: Training or Genius? New York: Henry Holt, 1992.

Goldberg, Steven, Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance. Chicago: Open Court, 1993.

Graham, John, Women in Chess: Players of the Modern Age. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1987.

Geuzendam, Dirk Jan Ten, Linares! Linares! A Journey into the Heart of Chess. Alkmaar, The Netherlands: New In Chess, 2001.

Graf, Sonja and Asi Juega Una Mujer (Here Plays a Woman), Yo Soy Susann (I Am Susann),1946.

Hurst, Sarah, The Curse of Kirsan: Adventures in the Chess Underworld. Milford, CT: Russell Enterprises, 2002.

Károlyi, Tibor, Judit Polgar: The Princess of Chess. London: B.T. Batsford, 2004.

Kasparov, Garry with Donald Trelford, Child of Change: The Autobiography of Garry Kasparov. London: Hutchinson, 1987.

Kosteniuk, Alexandra, How I Became a Grandmaster at Age 14. Moscow: AkyAS Publishing, 2001.

Liu Wenzhe, Chinese School of Chess. London: B.T. Batsford, 2002.

Messner A. Michael, Taking the Field: Women, Men, and Sports. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002.

Murray, H.J.R., History of Chess. New York: Oxford University Press, 1913.

Nochlin, Linda, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Women, Art and Power and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.

Polgar, Zsuzsa (Susan) and Jacob Shutzman, Queen of the Kings Game. New York: CompChess Consulting, 1997.

Tannebaum, Leora, Catfight: Women and Competition. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002.

Xie Jun, Chess Champion from China: The Life and Games of Xie Jun, London: Gambit Publications Ltd., 1998. Yalom, Marilyn, The Birth of the Chess Queen. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Newspapers, Periodicals, Internet, Other

Associated Press, “Lisa Lane, Chess Player, Quits Tourney Because She’s in Love,” New York Times, January 3, 1962.

Beech, Hannah, “Making All the Right Moves,” Time Asia, April 1, 2002.

Benko, Pal, “Match of the Century,” Chess Life and Review, Vol. 34, No. 1, January 1979.

Braggiotii, Mary, “Queen Among the Knights,” New York Post, September 10, 1945.

Cantwell, Robert, “Queen of Knights and Pawns,” Sports Illustrated, Vol. 15, No. 6.

Clarke, P.H, “Vera Menchik: First Queen of Chess,” British Chess Magazine, 1958.

Duffy, Pat, “Diana Lanni: Chess Champion with a Checkered Past,” Ms, Vol.12, No. 7 (January 1984).

Eggers, Paul, “Akmilovskaya, Donaldson in Olympiad Shocker,” Inside Chess Vol. 1, No. 25, December 26, 1988.

Geuzendam, Dirk Jan Ten, “Interview with Judit Polgar,” New In Chess, No. 8, 1989.

Geuzendam, Dirk Jan Ten, “Lion Queen Reaches New Heights,” New In Chess, No.1, 2004.

Gilbert, Linda Carol, “Chessplayers: Gender Expectations and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.” Ph.D dissertation, California School of Professional Psychology, Los Angeles,1989.

Gresser, Gisela, “Chess Queens in Moscow.” Unpublished article.

Grimsley, Will, “Scorned Woman Gets Something Off Her Chess,” The New York Sun, May 16, 1963.

Hilton-Brown, Margaret, “Vera Menchik,” British Chess Magazine, 1944.

Kingston, Taylor, “From Russia, With Hype,” ChessCafe.com, April 14, 2002.

Lipsyte, Robert, “Queen of Pawns, Etc.” The New York Times Magazine, June 4, 1961.

New Yorker, The Talk of the Town, “Chess Candidate,” September 19, 1964.

Polgar, Susan, “Susan Polgar on Chess,” Monthly column on ChessCafe.com, from 2002-2004.

Savinov, Misha: Interview with Olga Alexandrova, ChessCafe.com August 2003.

Slater, Kathyryn, “Women’s Chess,” Chess Life, October, 1966.

Sloan, Sam, “Assembly Copes with Controversy,” Gulf News, December 1, 1986

Stevens, Tim, “An American Champion Makes History Inside Cold-War Soviet Russia.” Chess Life, January 2004.

Stix, Harriet, “A Family Sees Its Road to Riches,” Los Angeles Times, December 18,1980.

Teasley, Dorothy, “Mona Karff,” Marshall Chess Club News, January 25, 2003.

Thrupkaew, Noy, “The God of Big Trends,” Bitch, No. 16 (Spring 2002).

Walsh, Nick Paton, “I Play to Win,” The Guardian, April 15, 2002.

Weart, Edith: Collection of press clippings compiled at the Cleveland Library.

Woo, Elaine, “Gisela Gresser: Chess Pioneer Won National Title Nine Times,” The New York Times, December 16, 2000.

About the Author

Jennifer Shahade, age 24, is an international chess icon. A chess master and two-time American Women’s Chess Champion (2002, 2004), She has represented the U.S in international competitions in countries all over the world, including Spain, Russia, China, India, and Brazil. In 2002, Shahade received a degree in comparative literature from NYU, where she was an editor for the literary magazine Brio. Her writing has appeared in Chess Life, New In Chess, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Through the non-profit Chess-In-The Schools, she coaches inner-city youths, including a girls’ class, and the three-time National Junior High Championship team, I.S. 318. Shahade is a member of the artist collective Mano/Damno, a group that aims to blur the boundaries between life and art, and has participated in performance art projects at New York’s psychogeography festival, the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and The Viewing Room Art Gallery. Her Webpage is www.jennifershahade.com. She lives in Brooklyn.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface to eBook Edition

Playing Like A Girl

War-Torn Pioneers: Vera Menchik and Sonja Graf

Building a Dynasty: The Women of Georgia

Be Like Judit!

Bringing Up Grandmasters: The Polgar Sisters

Women Only!

Chinese Style

Juno and Genius

European Divas

Checkmate Around the World

Playing for America

Gender Play: Angela from Texas

Worst to First

Glossary

Appendix — Games

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author