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AS LONG AS Vienna keeps dancing, the world cant end, quips Dr. Josef Bartok during a stately ball at the Vienna Opera House in March 1938. When a friend pulls him aside to warn him of the advancing Nazis, the alternately charming and obnoxious Bartok dismisses him with a joke and returns to the dance floor. Hours later, the Austrian prime minister resigns, and the Nazis march into Vienna unopposed as part of the Anschluss, the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria. Before the night is over, Bartok is arrested and imprisoned in the luxurious Hotel Metropole, which was confiscated by the Nazis and turned into the largest Gestapo headquarters outside of Berlin.

This is the scene laid out in Chess Story, Philipp Stlzls 2021 film adaptation of Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweigs last novella. Published posthumously in 1943, Chess Story is a gripping meditation on the psychological torture of isolation; ironically, the films stateside release was delayed by COVID-19. The films long-overdue release ultimately turns an important lens on politics, apathy, and complicity in our own time.

A notary to the wealthiest families in Austria, Bartok refuses to recognize that his charmed life is disintegrating before his eyes. The opulent, cultured life of Bartok in the film mirrors Zweigs own existence in Vienna before the Nazi annexation. Born into an upper-class Jewish Viennese family in 1881, Zweig had achieved considerable success and fame during his lifetime as a writer, dramatist, and critic. Zweig became the center of controversy in 1934 when he completed The Silent Woman, an opera libretto, at the behest of German composer Richard Strauss, who served as the first president of Germanys state music bureau under the Nazis. After the Anschluss in 1938, Zweig fled first to England, then the United States, finally settling in Petrpolis, Brazil, where he and his second wife took their own lives in 1942. As Zweig often pointed out in various letters during his Brazilian exile, Europe itself had died by suicide.

Due to Zweigs collaboration with Strauss and his hesitation to publicly denounce Nazism, he was often criticized for his apolitical orientation. Hannah Arendts 1943 review of Zweigs The World of Yesterday contains a famously withering denunciation of Zweigs silence during the rise of Nazism:

Not one of Stefan Zweigs reactions during all this period was the result of political convictions [] He failed to perceive that the dignified restraint, which society had so long considered a criterion of true culture, was under such circumstances tantamount to plain cowardice in public life.

But Stlzls film adaptation takes Zweigs novella one step further to transform it into an overtly political drama between a prisoner and a Nazi interrogator. The films seeming presenta steamer carrying passengers between the Dutch port of Rotterdam and New Yorkis interspersed with flashbacks to Bartoks traumatic imprisonment in the Hotel Metropole, where the Gestapo urge him to give up the codes to his aristocratic clients bank accounts. Oliver Masucci gives a virtuosic performance of Bartok as both a prewar bon vivant and a post-imprisonment waif, with little more than a mustache to differentiate between these two phases of life.

The film is littered with the cynical witticisms of Bartok, whose first line of defense against the Nazis seems to be humor. Even as he is first escorted by the Gestapo into the hotel, Bartok laughs with a friend who regales him with another joke about the Nazis. But humor is hardly an effective strategy against a bloodthirsty foe. As Theodor Adorno notes, while many Germans at the time ridiculed Nazi slogans like Blood and Soil, their jokes did not diminish the effectiveness of the propaganda. For Bartok, humor functions as a coping mechanism, but it is also a way of disengaging from reality by making it into a game.

It is hard to make chess exciting on the screenthe game is individual and cerebral, and its slow build up does not operate at a cinematic pace. The success of Netflixs chess-themed hit series The Queens Gambit (2020), for instance, hinges more on the star power of Anya Taylor-Joy and the drama surrounding her characters life than on the game itself. Similarly, in Stlzls film, the tension lies in the drama beyond the chessboard.

Locked in solitary confinement, Bartoklike Dr. B. in the novellais desperate for any form of contact with the outside world. While his Nazi captors are distracted during one of his interrogation sessions, Bartok manages to steal a book, which ends up being a chess primer. He becomes possessed by a chess mania that single-handedly allows him to withstand the months of psychological torture and isolation. After memorizing every move in the book, he fashions his own chess pieces, which he moves on a makeshift board on the tiles of his bathroom floor.

One of the strengths of the film is how it departs from Zweigs novella to stage another kind of game: a match between its prisoner protagonist and his Nazi interrogator, the head of the secret police. Unlike Zweigs novella, which focuses only on Bartoks attempt to survive solitary confinement, Stlzls film deftly sets up a battle of the wills between Bartok and the Nazi. The real game becomes about Bartoks strategy against his captor as the two constantly try to outmaneuver one another. Just as Scheherazade ingeniously survives the kings murderous wrath by telling stories in One Thousand and One Nights, Bartok quickly realizes he has to play the game to stay alive. This high-stakes match is what makes a film about chess not only eminently watchable but also downright nail-biting, even for those who dont know how to play.

Zweigs interest in psychology and the teachings of his friend and compatriot, the Austrian Jewish neurologist Sigmund Freud, is discernible in much of his work, but especially in Chess Story. Chess is 90 percent psychology, the Nazi interrogator claims in the film. It is about grinding down the opponent. From this angle, Chess Story is a chilling psychological study of an imprisoned, desperate man with few moves left. Eventually, his captors catch on to Bartoks strategy and destroy his chess pieces in a harrowing scene that leaves him begging and howling on the floor. Stripped of any remaining dignity, Bartok begins playing chess against himself, which leads to a schizophrenia, a split personality as Bartok starts to hallucinate and hear voices. In Freudian terms, this divided self reflects how the human psyche deals with trauma. Even as the Nazi interrogator once improbably declares, Youve won, it becomes clear that Bartok, a broken man and shadow of his former self, has lost far more than he has gained.

Being imprisoned in a private room in the Viennese equivalent of the Ritz-Carlton seems like a luxury compared to the fate of millions of other victims of the Holocaust and war. Yet, as the Nazi interrogator boasts, he can completely destroy a person without ever laying hands on him. The same was true for Zweig, who was psychically destroyed even as he was lucky enough to escape Europe in time. In despair over his loss of language, culture, and spiritual homeland, Zweig ended his own life, as much a victim of the Nazi genocide as the millions of other Jews killed in the Holocaust.

While Zweigs reputation may have suffered after his death, his works have gained increasing attention over the past decade. Chess Story might be seen in the context of a larger Zweig revival, including George Prochniks The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World (2014), the recent New York Review of Books editions of many of his works, the English translation of Oliver Matuscheks Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (2011), and Wes Andersons film The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), inspired by Zweigs autobiography. And the return of the far right across the globe has made the plot of Chess Story more urgent than ever. Zweigs hesitation to act and unwillingness to take a stand should be a warning to all who merely go on dancing as the world melts down.

Chess is a convenient metaphoralmost as timeless as the game itself. But it also has its limitations as a conceit. In a recent episode of the podcast Unburied Books, on the topic of Zweigs newly republished Chess Story, Dylan Cuellar and Kassia Oset note how saturated the English language is with chess expressions and metaphors. With its almost deceptive simplicity, the game has been used to explain conflicts, wars, and political crises, a lexicon particularly favored in the realm of international politics. Metaphors always run the risk of making false equivalences, but they seem to be particularly dangerous when applied to a catastrophe of the magnitude of World War II. As both Arendt and Zweig observed, the horrors of the Holocaust were so indescribable and unreal that they defied linguistic expression.

At the same time, in both the film and novella, chess is more than just a game. Although Bartok initially dismisses chess as a diversion for bored Prussian generals, it quickly becomes his means of survival. As the narrator in Zweigs novella argues, [A]re we not already guilty of an insulting limitation in calling chess a game? Isnt it also a science, an art []a unique bond between every pair of opponents, ancient and yet eternally new; mechanical in its framework and yet only functioning through the use of the imagination[?] In the face of these paradoxes, the narrator concludes that chess is art without an end product, architecture without substance, and nevertheless demonstrably more durable in its true nature and existence than any books or creative works? Isnt it the only game that belongs to all peoples and all times? []Where is its beginning and where its end?

But where the game begins and ends in the film is much less clear. Unlike the sleek novella, in which every line is as strategic as a chess move, this captivating film adaptation generates some aesthetic confusion in its third act. Once the narrator is revealed to be unreliable, it becomes increasingly hard to follow the plot, as the setting switches back and forth between the ship and Bartoks imprisonment. In the end, we are completely disoriented, harboring a sneaking suspicion that the ship journey might itself be a figment of Bartoks tormented mind. Just as the torture has erased all traces of time and space, we are unmoored, unable to discern past from present and reality from torture-induced hallucination.

Written shortly before Zweigs suicide, Chess Story offers a possible self-portrait of his mental dissolution in exile. Zweig mailed the final typescript of the novella to the publishers the day before he chose to end his life in February 1942. Through the lens of his last work, Zweigs suicide note reads as a refusal to keep playing the game that has been stacked against him. Describing the difficulties of rebuilding his life after the world of my own language sank and was lost to me and my spiritual homeland, Europe, destroyed itself, he concludes:

[T]o start everything anew after a mans 60th year requires special powers, and my own power has been expended after years of wandering homeless. I thus prefer to end my life at the right time, upright, as a man for whom cultural work has always been his purest happiness and personal freedomthe most precious of possessions on this earth.

The rest is here:
The Pawn's Gambit: On Adapting Stefan Zweig's Chess Story - lareviewofbooks

April may have been the cruelest month as far as T.S. Eliot was concerned, but in the chess world it's shaping up to be pretty great. Find out what happened in March and get some sneak previews and insights into April's highlights! Hint: we're going to have a new world champion very soon.

Here's what this monthly update covers:

The team has made some awesome new improvements to your Chess.com experience. On a side note, the plumbing at Chess.com HQ has never operated more smoothly.

If you are an engineer and want to help grow the game of chess, come work with us! Visit Chess.com/jobs to find out more.

The main season of the PCL has finished, but it's time to start getting excited about the finals. The Champions Chess Tour continues, and Titled Tuesday has never been more competitive. There's also a little thing called the 2023 FIDE World Championship happening right now, the most important over-the-board chess event of the year in which two of the world's top players battle it out to determine the next chess world champion.

Here are some of the Community Teams highlights, including lots of ways you can be part of the Chess.com community no matter where you are in the world.

Enjoy a rundown of some of the top chess content from the last month, including GM Anish Giri's spectacular (and entirely fictional) rise and fall as CEO of Chess.

The Champions Chess Tour and Pro Chess League events went swimmingly from a Fair Play perspective, and the team is confident that these two tournaments are an absolute gold standard for fair chess events.

Fair Play stats for March:

The Chess.com Support Team is still experiencing a huge amount of requests and questions, but these superstars are actively working to resolve your issues as quickly and effectively as possible.

Here are the stats for March:

As always, thank you for making Chess.com such an amazing place, and thank you for the comments you leave on these updates. Stay tunedyour thoughts might be featured in one of these updates soon...

The rest is here:
New Features And A New World Champion - Chess.com

Were used to breakthroughs. We live in an age where technology advances so quickly that seeing once-unimaginable feats performed by computers and artificial intelligence barely causes anyone to raise an eyebrow. We carry supercomputers in our pockets and complain when they do anything less then perfectly.

But once upon a time, technological feats drew gasping crowds and every breakthrough seemed tantamount to magic.

One such breakthrough came in 1770, when a Hungarian inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled the Mechanical Turk, an automaton capable of beating people at chess, to impress the Empress of Austria. It was a striking-looking machine, a large wooden cabinet accompanied by the top half of a model man in a turban. Inside the doors of the cabinet was an impressively complicated array of shiny brass pipes, cogs, turbines and wheels. On the top was a chessboard, over which one of the Turks hands hovered.

When someone was invited to play against the automaton, the Turks arm would move to a piece, pick it up and make a move. It would nod three times if it had placed its opponents piece in check, and would shake its head if its opponent performed an illegal move. Kempelen, who stood by the machine at all times, would frequently glance into a small, vaguely coffin-like box at the edge of the table. The overall impression was eerie enough no doubt helped by the unshifting expression of the mysterious turbaned figure that some audience members were convinced that supernatural elements were at play.

It was presented, however, as cutting-edge technology. When the cabinet was open, spectators could see right through it, marveling at the intricacy of it all. As well as beating almost all challengers, the Turk could perform the technically challenging knights tour, in which a knight visits every square on the board.

Chess has always held a certain status in the public imagination, symbolic of extreme, but very human, genius someone excelling at it is seen as operating at a deeper level of intelligence than those around them. Its used as a metaphor for life and for war. Ingmar Bergmans The Seventh Seal shows a knight playing chess with Death itself, an iconic piece of cinema history that wouldnt be the same if they were playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.

The machine was a sensation upon its public debut, beating member after member of the Queens court. However, after a few demonstrations, von Kempelen stopped showing it off, claiming whenever anyone wanted to play against it that it was being repaired. He instead focused on his other passions: speaking machines. It was a full decade after its debut that he was persuaded (read: ordered) to bring it out again, and subsequently take it on tour through Europe. Crowds gathered and paid handsomely from London to Leipzig. Benjamin Franklin played against it in Paris. After its creator died, its new owner, Johann Nepomuk Mlzel, toured it further: Napoleon lost to it after attempting to cheat; Founding Father Charles Carroll beat it in Baltimore. Decades after its first game, the Mechanical Turk remained a marvel.

Except, it wasnt.

It was, in fact, all bullshit. The high-tech trappings were nonsense, and the way the machine worked was ultimately very low-fi: There was a dude in there. A dude who was great at chess, but a dude nonetheless. He could see where all the chess pieces were from underneath, and controlled the Turk with a series of levers. When the knights tour was performed, the operator was following a set of instructions in there with him.

When someone played against the Mechanical Turk, they were playing against a very patient, cramped, skilled chess player curled up in a cabinet. The machinery inside had been designed to allow every section to be revealed in turn, the secret player moving from part to part as needed. The coffin-like box on the top was meaningless, a red herring designed to distract. The whole thing was ingenious, but not in the way it was presented as being ingenious.

That was why von Kempelen was so unenthusiastic about it following its initial unveiling for all the excitement it brought everyone else, he knew it was just a cheap trick. While there had always been speculation that the cabinet housed a series of small but talented chess players, nobody had ever entirely hit upon how it worked. Edgar Allan Poe concluded that there had to be a human element in there when he saw the Turk lose a game, his logic being that a genuine version would perform flawlessly.

It was obvious to some people what was going on copycat automatons were built by rivals in which the secret was exactly the same, and articles floating it as an idea had frequently appeared, but nobody got it quite right or could explain it in a way that satisfied people, perhaps because the truth was so unsatisfying. The machine represented progress, genius, innovation; hiding a person in a box was none of these things.

Touring Cuba, however, disaster struck: William Schlumberger, the player inside the Turk, became ill with scarlet fever and died. Mlzel himself died on the ship home, and the Turk ended up in a museum, where it was destroyed in a fire.

In 1912, 142 years after the Mechanical Turk was built, Spanish engineers debuted El Ajedrecista. This was a machine that genuinely did what the Turk claimed to do, with some fairly hefty caveats rather than an entire game of chess, El Ajedrista could only do the very end, using a white king and rook to checkmate a black king moved by the human player. It was an extraordinary feat even with those caveats, worked out with analogue algorithms and laying a claim to arguably being the first-ever computer game.

It wasnt until 1997, when IBMs famous supercomputer Deep Blue beat international chess number one Garry Kasparov, that technology had genuinely reached the point von Kempelens automaton alleged in 1770: capable of beating anyone at chess. (The name Mechanical Turk is now used by Amazon for a controversial service providing cheap human input on jobs where people outperform computers certain types of image recognition, for instance but in a totally removed way for the client, where it feels much like deploying software to perform a task. The thinking behind the name is that its humans hidden within a machine, rather than a giant decades-long scam.)

Why then, over 200 years before it was possible, were so many people taken in by it?

While computers have shown that chess can be won algorithmically through sheer mathematics, its a complex enough game in the hands of mere humans that personality shines through. Aggression, patience, recklessness, desperation, tenacity, elegance these are all deeply human traits that can be played out upon a chessboard. Calculation is one thing, but chess feels like it requires thinking. A machine outperforming a human at arithmetic? Impressive. But a machine outperforming a human at an exercise in deviousness, grace and courage? That feels substantially different, less like an assistant and more like a replacement.

Thats why people gasped in 1770, and why they gasped again in 1997. Now, of course, every one of us is carrying around a device that can outperform us in countless fields many times over, that can run programs that may put large swathes of us out of work, that we are in thrall to.

Yet somehow, were not gasping any more. We probably should be.

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The Pioneering 18th Century Chess Robot That Was Just a Dude Hiding in a Box - Cracked.com

Chess is the original 4X RPGgiving you command of territory and an army, together with a mission to explore and expand across the board, exploit your enemy's weakness, and then exterminate your opponent.

While it's simple to play online chess in a browser, you can also stage a two-player chess game in your terminal, either with an opponent in the same room or via SSH, meaning your opponent could be anywhere in the worldor beyond. Here's how.

Chess is one of the greatest games of all time, with a history going back to the 6th Century Gupta Empire in India. Although the rules have been refined over time, chess has remained popular due to its accessibility, and the cerebral challenge of pitting one person's skills against another.

If you've never played chess before, don't fret; you can easily learn to play Chess on your phone.

Traditionally, chess is a two-player game, played using a physical board with 64 squares, and two armies of 16 pieces.

Before the advent of the internet, if you wanted to play chess with someone who wasn't in the same room as you, each player would have to have their own chess board and communicate their moves via a letter telegram, phone, or a message in the newspaper.

Today, you can use mobile apps to instantly join chess games, or open a web browser and join one of the many online chess sessions on dedicated sites.

But mobile apps can be costly, and not everyone has a computer with a web browseror even a graphical desktop.

With Gambit, you can create a chess game in your terminal, and play with the person sitting next to you. Alternatively, you can serve or join a game over SSH, meaning you can play instantly against anyone in the world.

Gambit is written in Google's Go language, so before you start, make sure that you have Go installed on your Linux system.

If your distro supports Snap, the easiest way to install Go is with:

With Go installed, you can install Gambit with:

This command will install the Gambit binary to ~/go/bin/gambit.

You can make the binary accessible from any terminal location by creating a symbolic link with the ln command:

You can then start Gambit with:

Alternatively, you can install Gambit by cloning its GitHub repository:

Then, use the cd command to navigate to the new directory:

Finally, start Gambit with:

If you're a fan of Snap packages, you can install Gambit with the snap command as follows:

If you've read this far, it's probably safe to say that you know at least the basics of how to play chess.

The game starts as soon as you open Gambit, and you'll see a chess board, complete with representations of the chess pieces in either white or black with a white outline.

When it's your turn to move, click on a piece. You'll see a colored dot representing the spaces your piece can move to. Click on one to move your piece.

Alternatively, if your machine doesn't have a mouse, you can use the keyboard to type out the square the piece you want to move is on, then type out the square onto which you want to move the piece.

The only minor gripe we have with playing chess this way is that the chessboard squares are all black, rather than black and white. This can make it a little difficult to easily visualize paths for your pieces.

If you're playing against an opponent on the same computer, you can press the Ctrl + F key combo to flip the board around to give them a better view of the action.

But if you're sitting next to someone, it's probably just as easy, and slightly more satisfying, to break out a real chess board and set up the pieces. It's in playing remote players that Gambit comes into its own.

Secure Shell (SSH) is a protocol used to connect to remote devices securely, and with it, you can host a chess game with Gambit and have other players connect to it.

Before you start, you'll need to create an SSH key. It's not in the documentation, but Gambit will reject keys created with the RSA algorithm. You'll need to use the newer ECDSA algorithm with a minimum key size of 256 bits to host a chess game over SSH with Gambit.

On the host machine, enter:

Choose whether you want to use a password, and then hit Enter. You can find your new key pair in the "~/.ssh/" directory.

If you're playing against an opponent on a different network, the host will need to open port 53531 on their router and forward connections to the host machine's IP address. This requires you to have some basic knowledge about port forwarding on a router.

To start the Gambit server, enter:

Gambit will start the server on port 53531, and players can connect to the game with:

...where room_name is a name picked by the first player to join.

Back on the host machine, you won't find a chessboard in your existing terminal window. Open a second window or tab, then enter:

You can now play a game against your opponent.

If you know your opponent and schedule regular matches against them, Gambit makes it super easy to create or connect to a match.

If your friends don't play chess, don't use Linux, or if you just don't have any friends, you can play solitaire in your terminal instead!

Read more here:
How to Play Chess in Your Linux Terminal (With Multiplayer Support ... - MUO - MakeUseOf

The subject of the female minority in chess has long intrigued the chess world. There are many theories and hypotheses as to why there are so few women in chess. However, one of the most obvious, and often overlooked, reasons is that the current state of chess is not supportive enough and, at times, is downright disruptive for women.

In this eye-opening and honest discussion, led by IM Anna Rudolf, seven prominent women in chess gather together to discuss some of the important issues they have faced in the chess world. This is a discussion that must be watched by all coaches, parents, officials, event organizers and participants. The women touch on subjects that include inspiration, equality, breaking barriers and common stereotypes, and harassment. They raise awareness of our own everyday actions that can sometimes hinder the success of girls and women in chess.

Watch the full video below and check out the summary thereafter.

The women further include invaluable suggestions of what each one of us can do to make the chess community more inclusive, supportive, and a happier place for everyone to be in. We can all take action, sometimes in surprisingly small steps, to bring more fairness and equality to chess.

The participants of the discussion include:

Its been over two years since Netflix released its powerful and much-beloved series, The Queens Gambit. It has changed the perception of chess forever. The series has inspired many girls and women all over the world to take up the game. "For so many years," says Jennifer Shahade, "Ive been trying to tell my friends that chess is glamorous and fun and that it was about the beauty of the game and not just winning. And, of course, when you saw The Queens Gambit, I didnt have to convince anyone because they suddenly knew it."

Seeing the "representation of chess" embodied by feminine grace, beauty, and intelligence inspired Lula Roberts to take up the game and become a sensational content creator. The message throughout the discussion is cleargirls and women want to see more female role models in chess. The positivity and increased interest in the game that The Queens Gambit has brought are inspiring and unparalleled.

Despite doing many things right, the series, however, came with some startling flaws. Everything about the show, other than the main heroine, Beth Harmon, was male-driven. The writer, the producers, the consultants, and the creative team were all male. Not a single game that was taken from history and portrayed in the show was played by a female player. The result? The show totally "glossed over a lot of the female experience," says Alisa Melekhina. This is "strange because it is supposed to be a coming-of-age story of a young, female player coming into her own. And they didnt really portray a lot of the adversity."

In the real world of chess, Judit Polgar had to "fight a lot so that people acknowledge [her] achievements." The 'fight' many women still face today: the 'fight' against being demeaned, belittled, abused, harassed, and not being supported and acknowledged enough. "To tell you the truth, I was kind of unhappy that I didnt have a single game [featured in the series]," laughs Judit.

Furthermore, the defamation caseof GM Nona Gaprindashvili vs. Netflix could have been avoided altogether, had more consideration been given to womens chess. A character in the series stated that Nona never faced men. In reality, Nona was the first female player ever to earn the general grandmaster title among men. Her inspiring accomplishments in chess cannot go unnoticed and unacknowledged.

The lessons learned from the series are apparent: include more women in decision-making, front and back. Encourage and support female role models.

Unlike in The Queens Gambit, "playing chess in real life makes you feel your gender. When you go to a chess tournament and maybe have a negative experience, you start to feel out of place," says Lula. Playing and being harassed online is one thing, but "feeling disrespected [in real life] is a whole different thing altogether." As a newcomer to chess, Lula did not anticipate facing so many issues.

Jennifers own experience and recent allegations of an assault have opened up a lot of discussions and an urgent need for change. Girls drop out of chess because "they dont have the support structure of friends, family, and school that would support them not only as players but as human beings," she says. She noted that boys experience abuse too and there is a great need for proper code of conduct implementation.

Furthermore, once a woman experiences abuse or inappropriate actions against herself, she is often left to her own devices, not knowing what to do. Every woman in this discussion can share such a story. However, and many people may not realize this, "speaking up is really difficult," says Anna Rudolf. "I had experiences where Im not brave enough to talk about them. I was ashamed. I havent told my family. I havent told my friends. I havent told anyone." And for the first time, in this discussion, Anna has opened up about such an emotional experience.

A much older man, a teammate, was trying to touch and kiss her when she was just eighteen years old. It was totally uncalled for and inappropriate. "Just because you are kind to people," says Anna with now almost teary eyes, "doesnt mean you have any romantic affection towards them, which a lot of time is being misinterpreted."

But speaking up is not just difficult. Speaking up means reliving the trauma a second time. Not everyone wants to go through that. For many victims, its just easier to bury their negative experiences and move on. Its possible to forgive, if only for ones own sake and sanity. But impossible to forget. So many women still carry the weight of misconduct against them on their shoulders.

And the next worst part of it all, is that some people dare to ask these women: "Well, how are you conducting yourself? Are you inviting this type of [behavior]?" Alisa had issues with stalkers following her to chess tournaments and sending her gifts and love letters. She clearly did not invite that type of conduct. Neither did Anna.

It is important to be aware that harassment can take on many forms. It can also be psychological. Like that one time when Anna was winning game after game in a tournament, beating the top seed. This instantly raised suspicion, because she is female. The tournament arbiters went searching through her belongings in front of everyone. A traumatizing experience to witness, says Fiona Steil-Antoni, who is also Annas close friend.

Fiona herself has experienced sexist, demeaning remarks about women from a partnering commentator right during a live broadcast. And, to her dismay, nothing was said or done about it for days. "Is anyone even watching this?" she wondered. Of course, people were watching.

The message that women get from such experiences is that they cant possibly be so good. If they dont "play like a girl," if they play aggressively or positionally instead, well, then something is suspicious. They dont fit into the stereotype.

With FIDE being the official governing body of chess, a lot of talks have been done regarding the issues that women face in chess. But talking is not enough. "The support is great," says Ayeln Martnez, "but I want to see action. Tell us exactly what youre going to do about [all these issues], in concrete steps." Every governing body, organization, chess club, and event organizer has the responsibility to create a safe environment for the players and shall be held accountable for it.

As a society, we can all play a role in making the chess community safer and more supportive for all players. We can:

Parents and coaches need to raise their children in a gender-bias-free environment, where both talented boys and girls are being told equal things about their abilities. An environment where playing a girl shouldnt be viewed as easier and losing to a girl shouldnt be shameful.

We see and hear it everywhere. In books, in movies, in chess courses, and in our everyday conversations. A chess genius is always a "he." An unknown, online opponent is always a "he." Even women make these references and assumptions. We need to incorporate more "she" and "they" into our chess language. And "we have to watch how we phrase a sentence when we want to uplift someones knowledge," remarks Judit, to avoid references such as "you play like a boy." Her way of inspiring girls is to tell them, "Be the best you can!"

It can be extremely difficult for a person who has experienced any sort of harassment to speak up about it. Nonetheless, speaking up is important. And what is more important is that men also need to step in. If they see something is not right, they need to escalate it and help the victim deal with the situation.

The chess community needs to decide how to address and escalate issues and misconduct and establish a centralized dispute mechanism. The right questions to ask, says Alisa, are: Is there a sexual harassment policy in place? Can people make complaints in a confidential way? Will conflicts be escalated to the right people? Is there a dispute resolution in place? How can conflicts get resolved in a way that is fair? All chess players need to be aware of the policies and procedures that are going to be put in place.

Many chess federations and organizations, including FIDE, are run predominantly by men. As such, it is difficult for a woman to raise her concerns to a man. These federations should be protecting us when were speaking out, says Ayeln. But we are fighting alone. Womens involvement also means hiring more female coaches and engaging female role models. This is not just for girls. Boys would benefit from this too. While this might be logistically difficult, we still have to try, says Jennifer.

Now is the time to think about all of the above issues and to take appropriate action. Each one of us can change the chess environment for the better and prevent the next headline.

And with this important discussion in place, we can now all begin to feel a little more optimistic about the future of chess. We can all try to be the best we can be. Chess is a game that builds invaluable skills and fosters amazing friendships. And, as Alisa stated, "The chess community is worth fighting for!"

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Women's Roundtable: The Experiences Of Women In Chess - Chess.com