[blind-chess] Chess Article #43 Women's World Chess Championship

From: Roderick Macdonald <rmacd@xxxxxxxx>
To: Blind Chess Mailing List <blind-chess@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 19:42:34 -1000 (HST)

Chess Article #43
Women's World Chess Championship
From: http://www.playe4.com/index.html

When talking about World Chess Champions, or chess grandmaster, no
one would suspect that the Women's World Chess Champions or women
grandmasters (WGM) are not the subject matter. While theoretically,
women can compete in the World Chess Championships (though up until
now only Judith Polgar have done this), the Women's World Chess
Championship, organized by FIDE since 1926, are entirely restricted
to women. Do these facts mark the Women's World Chess Championship
as slightly inferior to the "real" World Chess Championships?

Women World Chess Championship - the Beginning

The first Women's World Chess Championships consisted of a single
tournament held once in two years as part of the Chess Olympiad.
The first tournaments were dominated by Vera Menchik, who had
defended her titles for seven consecutive Olympiads, losing only in
a single game. Menchik era came to its end in 1944 with her tragic
death by the Germans' air force attack on London.

In 1946, FIDE took charge over the World Chess Championship and
enforced a new system on both World Chess Championships; instead of
a single tournament in which the defending champion competes
against a top ranked opponent, a multi-player event with 16
entrants coming from 12 different countries, using the round robin
system (in which the entire participants get to compete against all
the others an equal number of times).

Russia vs. Georgia in the Women's World Championship

The first Chess Champion in the renowned women's event in 1949 was
Liudmila Rudenko of Leningrad, who had a one point advantage over
her runner-up Olga Rubtsova of Moscow. The next decade in Women's
chess was under Soviet domination, with the top spots being
captured by women chess players of the former USSR.

The crushing victory of Georgian Nona Gaprindashvili over Vrnjacka
Banja, put an end to the Soviet dominance and initiated the
Georgian reign in women's chess. Gaprindashvili remained unbeatable
for the next 14 years, not bothered by FIDE's decision to equalize
the Women World Championship cycle to the 3-years cycle that
precedes World Chess Championships. In 1976, the Georgian
Grandmaster was defeated by her compatriot, 17 years old Maya
Chiburdanidze, who ruled the chess competition for the upcoming 15
years.

Women's World Chess Championship 1990-2000

The 1990s and early 2000 will be remembered as the era of Chinese
dominance in Women's World Chess Championship. Chinese women chess
players took the most important world title in their field from
1991 to date (2008), except for two interruptions:
*    Between 1996 and 1999, the Championship title was in the hands
     of Susan Polgar, an American-Hungarian Grandmaster, one of the
     three chess playing sisters (Judit Polgar, who is ranked no.
     1 in FIDE rating list for women and International Master
     Zssfia), and the only family member who agreed to settle for
     the Women's World Championship.
*    In 2004, Bulgarian Antoaneta Stefanova championed the women's
     event for one year.

Women's World Chess Championship - the Future

Women's World Chess Championship 2008 is planned to take place in
Nalchik, Russia between August 28 and September 18, with the
world's top ranked women chess players including reigning champion
Xu Yuhua and excluding Judit Polgar and Xie Jun (who is ranked no.
3 in the world). The favorites for win are Humpy Koneru of India
(ranked no. 2) and Chinese Hou Yifan (no. 4 in the world).
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[blind-chess] Chess Article #43 Women's World Chess Championship

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