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Womens participation in all areas of society and in sports administration is critical for the future, according to the head of the Turkish Chess Federation.

"I am proud to be a role model for young girls," Gulkiz Tulay told Anadolu Agency on Monday, in an interview marking March 8, International Women's Day.

She said she has tried to set a good example for girls by making all-out efforts to ensure that women are present at every step of life.

"When I was appointed the new head of the Chess Federation in 2012, there were 45,000 female athletes, 681 female referees, and 12,000 female trainers," Tulay said.

Since then, she said, they have seen a jump in the number of female referees and trainers, adding that the federation has four female members in the ranks of its administration.

"Since 2012 the number of certified female athletes rose from 45,000 to 342,000," she added.

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Turkish chess group head works to inspire young girls - Anadolu Agency

The queen may be the strongest piece in chess, but it sometimes feels like few women besides the fictional Beth Harmon seem to play the game. In the United States, for example, only about one-seventh of the members of the national chess federation are female. As of February 2021, there are only 37 active female players that have achieved the highest title in chess, that of grandmaster, out of the over 1700 active players who have earned the title.

That said, the very best female players have always been of unambiguously high caliber. Below are the top five in history. All of them played in open events consisting of men and/or women, and some decided at one point to only play in open events. When they did play in women's events, they often lapped the field. All of them have won international tournaments in open fields or defeated a world champion, and in most cases both. Their accomplishments make them legendary icons of the game.

Vera Menchik, the first womens world champion, proved nearly 100 years ago that chess was not just a mans game. In possibly her best tournament, playing on a team with Jose Capablanca among others at Ramsgate in 1929, Menchik went undefeated in seven games. She won her matchups against George Alan Thomas, Reginald Pryce Michell, and Hubert Ernest Price and drew the rest. Those three wins without a loss matched the performance of all-time great GM Akiba Rubinstein in the same tournament, and was a half-point ahead of her former teacher GM Geza Maroczy.

Menchik had an even lifetime score against world champion GM Max Euwe in five games (+2 =1 -2) and U.S. champion GM Samuel Reshevsky in two bouts (+1 -1), but it was Austrias Albert Becker who reportedly created the Vera Menchik Club by losing to her at the 1929 Carlsbad tournament after mocking her participation in the tournament.

In womens events, Menchik was both an unstoppable force and immovable object. She played in seven womens world championship tournaments and won an unbelievable 78 games out of 83, against just a single loss and four draws, for a 98.8% winning percentage. She also won two championship matches against the German (later American) Sonia Graf. In part because of her dominance, Menchik is honored every two years at the Womens Olympiad, where the winning nation is awarded the Vera Menchik Cup.

Menchiks tragic death in a 1944 German rocket strike, six years before the GM title was created, denied her the chance at obtaining it. (FIDE did not award her the title posthumously.) The next player on our list, however, did have that opportunity, and she took it.

GM Nona Gaprindashvili became the first female grandmaster in 1978not to be confused with the Woman Grandmaster (WGM) titleafter a resounding success at the 1977 tournament in Lone Pine, California. There, with a 6.5 score out of nine possible, she tied for first place with grandmasters Yuri Balashov, Dragutin Sahovic, and Oscar Panno.

Gaprindashvilis legacy was already cemented even without her GM title. She was womens world champion for 16 years, taking that title from IM Elisaveta Bykova in 1962, and defending it four times. Gaprindashvili had twice won the Soviet Women's Championship and would win it three more times as a GM. She dominated the women's Olympiad, playing in 12 of them and scoring +94 =26 -8 while winning team gold 11 times and individual gold eight times.

Gaprindashvili has continued to play serious chess well into her 70s, crafting a career spanning more than half a century, nearly six decades. In 1995, she became the women's senior world champion after having been world champion. Twenty-four years later, in 2019 at age 78, Gaprindashvili was the women's 65+ world senior champion for the fifth time.

Few can compete with Gaprindashvili's combination of strength and longevity. Among those who can is one of her fellow countrywomen.

GM Maia Chiburdanidze defeated fellow Georgian Gaprindashvili for the womens world championship in 1978. She was 17 years old at the time, the youngest ever, and went on to hold the title for 13 years, winning four further matches in defense. In the meantime, Chiburdanidze would earn the GM title herself in 1984, at the age of 23. From there, she becamethe first woman to crack the top 50 in rating since FIDE began tracking an official list in July 1971. In January 1988, with a 2560 rating, Chiburdanidze reached #48 in the world. Only one other female player has done so since (as of February 2021).

Chiburdanidze matched up particularly well against GM Nigel Short, going undefeated in her two career games against the Englishman in 1983 and '85. The latter came at Banja Luka, a tournament Chiburdanidze won with a score of four wins and six draws. Less than a decade later, Short would be playing for the world championship.

Chiburdanidze played in 15 Olympiads from 1978-2008, seven for the USSR and then eight for Georgia. She was on the first board all 15 times, even with Gaprindashvili competing for position until 1994. In her last Olympiad, at the age of 47 in 2008, Chiburdanidze led Georgia to victory with a gold-winning +6 =3 in her individual games, including a win over the then-reigning women's world champion, Kosteniuk.

Building off the success of Chiburdanidze and Gaprindashvili, women's chess in Georgia is quite strong. Five female GMs hail from there and despite a current population of about four million. Georgia has over 30 women rated above 2000 by FIDE. That's only four fewer than the nearly 100-times-larger United States, and more than half as many as the 250-times larger China, neither of which are weak chess countries! China has, in fact, one of the two players ranked ahead of Chiburdanidze on this list, with...

As the strongest woman (since our #1 retired) during one of the strongest periods of chess in history, GM Hou Yifan is near the top of this list. In 2010 Hou, 16, broke Chiburdanidzes record for youngest womens world champion. Two years before that, she had surpassed even Judit Polgar by becoming a GM at 14 years old, making her the youngest female GM ever (a record she still holds as of February 2021). Hou would win the championship twice more, in 2013 and 2016, before shifting her focus to open events.

It was a reasonable course of action, as Hou soon achieved great success at Biel in 2017. She won outright with 6.5 out of 9 with a performance rating of 2810. It was a field that included a FIDE world champion (GM Ruslan Ponomariov), a classical world championship finalist (GM Peter Leko), and four other super GMs (players whose rating peaked above 2700). That same year at the GRENKE Chess Classic she defeated GM Fabiano Caruana, who would be playing for the world championship a year later.

At various points in Hou's career, she has taken a break from professional chess to focus on her education and career outside of chess. She was a Rhodes Scholar in 2018 and in July 2020 she became a full-time professor at Shenzhen University at the age of 26. Hou has not entirely left chess, playing two international team competitions in 2020 including the Chess.com Online Nations Cup, and the game of chess plays a key role in her professorship at Shenzhen University.

Hou peaked at 55th in the world on the May 2015 FIDE rating list, just shy of Chiburdanidze's top ranking, but Hou has faced somewhat stronger competition; Chiburdanidze rarely if ever played in fields quite as strong as Biel or GRENKE 2017. Still, the #2 spot on our list was perhaps the toughest call to make. Who to have #1, meanwhile, was the easiest.

GM Judit Polgar is the only player on this list who never became womens world champion, but with good reason: she never tried to obtain that title. She was simply too strong of a player and was better-suited in open events. She has won games against GMs Garry Kasparov andMagnus Carlsen, both while they were #1 in the world. Polgar has even toppled GM Bobby Fischer: When Polgar earned the grandmaster title in 1991, she was the youngest ever, beating Fischers record. (Fischer would stay at the Polgar household for a time in 1993.)

By the time Polgar was 21 years old, New York Times chess columnist GM Robert Byrne declared, there is no argument about the greatest female player ever." Her position was certainly inarguable by the objective rating: in January 1989, when Polgar was 12, she already ranked 55th in the world at 2555, just shy of Chiburdanidze's peak. By July 1993, Polgar reached a 2635 rating and joined the world top 20, easily surpassing Chiburdanidzes top marks. On FIDEs January 1996 rating list, Polgar ranked 10th, a previously unimaginable accomplishment.

Byrne wrote his profile of Polgar in 1997, and she only added to her resume after that. In January 2003, she joined the 2700 rating club, still the only woman to have done so. The following January, Polgar reached eighth on the FIDE rating list, and she stayed in the top ten until 2006. In 2005, Polgar came the closest a woman ever has to becoming world chess champion, playing in an eight-player field for the FIDE crown (won by GM Veselin Topalov).

When Polgar retired in 2014, she was still the top-rated woman in chess at 2675. Hou would pass her the next year when she reached 2686. By that point, Polgar had been the top-rated female player for a quarter of a century, 26 years running all the way back to 1989. Given all of her accomplishments, it is nearly impossible to argue that anyone but Judit Polgar is the greatest female chess player of all time.

See original here:
The Top 5 Best Female Chess Players of All Time - Chess.com

The pandemic put sports on hold for students across the state.

As things start to get back on track, one team is celebrating a big win and something no one has been able to do since March 2020.

The Whitney Young Magnet High School Chess Team was awarded a state championship on Feb. 13. It's the first state title since March 7, 2020, when Fremd High School won the Class 4A girls basketball championship over Lincoln-Way West.

"Theres no other feeling like it," said Daniel Zhang, junior at Whitney Young.

The win over Barrington marks the school's sixth championship in 11 years, making Whitney Young the most successful chess program in Illinois High School Association history.

"Im just extremely proud of the team," said chess team coach Daniel Hart. "Its not easy to win a state championship. Its not easy to win one under these incredibly different circumstances."

The team would typically practice and play tournaments throughout the school year in person. Because of the pandemic, this year, all matches were played virtually, including the state title tournament.

"We were just in the computer lab at our school. Normally wed be in a huge ballroom with 1,000 some people," said Alexander Ursu, senior at Whitney Young.

To limit online cheating, the students were required to login at their school with a coach present.

The win came down to the final round between Aria Hoesley, a junior, and another female student, each with seconds left on their game clocks. Games are limited to 45 minutes.

"Her board is worth 12 points. Everyone, including her, knew she had to win," said chess team coach Paul Kash. "When Aria was playing her last game, both players were under a minute, like 10 seconds, on their clocks."

Although undefeated throughout the season, Whitney Young was playing as the underdogs in the state championship, since a teammate was disqualified for technical difficulties.

"I played it as best I could, confidently and aggressively. When I was able to pull it out, it was probably one of the most amazing feelings ever," Hoesley said.

Hoesley has been playing chess for 10 years. She said her dad taught her the game. Hoesley said she's optimistic about the future of chess for girls following the release of the Netflix show "Queen's Gambit."

"Weve never seen so many girls interested in chess," Hoesley said. "Having that show, where it was centered around a female, its awesome. Theres not a lot of girls that play chess, and theres not a lot of girls that stick with chess."

The school's principal is planning a virtual pep rally to celebrate the team's win. Nationals, which are typically held in the spring, have already been canceled due to the pandemic.

Here is the original post:
Whitney Young Chess Team Claims First State Title of Pandemic - NBC Chicago

Alexandra Botez brings in over $100,000 a year as a professional chess streamer in Austin, Texas.

Along with her sister, Andrea, the 25-year-old creates and streams chess content on Twitch. "By the end of 2021, we'll definitely be at least in the mid-six figures," Botez tells CNBC Make It.

Botez is also paving the way for more women to make a living through chess, especially as it gains newfound popularity. The pandemic brought a significant number of new users to the world of online chess, and combined with the success of 'The Queen's Gambit' on Netflix, chess has become part of mainstream culture.

Membership on Chess.com increased by 1.1 million in October 2020 and by 3.9 million in December 2020.

The show's success was a dream for chess enthusiasts because it influenced popular culture, Botez says. "That's the only way to do it," she adds, likening it to the spike in interest the game saw during the Cold War when chess prodigy Bobby Fischer became a grandmaster at age 15.

'The Queen's Gambit' is "a story of a full success all of the way," says Emil Sutovsky, director-general of The World Chess Federation. "That is a bit of a fairy tale, which almost doesn't happen, or surely it doesn't happen on such a scale."

But Botez is making waves. Here's how she got her start and built a successful career.

Botez's dad taught her how to play chess when she was just 6, and she won her first national tournament at 8.

"My family comes from Romania, which has a really rich chess culture as opposed to in the U.S., where people typically see chess as a game for nerds," says Botez.

Alexandra Botez started playing chess at six years old

Source: Alexandra Botez

Today, Botez is a master with The World Chess Federation, also known as FIDE. She ranks 27,631 amongst FIDE's 100,000-plus active players.

As a woman, she's a minority in the chess world. The ratio of men to women grandmasters in chess is 50 to 1.

"Women in chess is not something very common," Botez says. "It has taken very long to get to the point where we're starting to change the stereotype that women are not genetically inferior to men at playing chess."

There's a long way to go, Sutovsky, for one, is hopeful. "We believe that this situation will change," he says. "I do not expect it to change to the proportion of being an equilibrium, or something like that, but it's definitely going to change."

Still, it won't be an easy transition. "It is not a short journey," Sutovsky adds. "It's a long journey that will take some time."

During college at Stanford, Botez played on Chess.com, but missed the social interaction of in-person games. So in 2016, while she was still in school, she decided to start streaming on Twitch for fun. Her channel quickly took off.

She began making money on Twitch through subscribers to her channel, who pay a monthly fee starting at $4.99. Her viewers also gave her donations and direct support. When she first started streaming, about 90% of her income came directly from her viewers, Botez says.

Having the support of the chess community helped make streaming a viable career option for Botez. "I was always one of the top three streamers at any point in my streaming career. And I had a lot of early subscribers who really helped me out to even host cash tournaments and things like that," she says.

After she graduated in 2017, Botez worked for a startup that ended up failing. But since her streaming career was already going well, she decided to take a risk and pursue chess full-time.

Alexandra and Andrea Botez

Source: Team Envy

Her 18-year-old sister, Andrea, became her streaming partner in 2020. The sisters currently have over 650,000 followers on Twitch.

Botez and her sister earn income from a number of sources, including viewers, sponsors, ad revenue from social platforms like Instagram and a salary from Team Envy, a global esports company the pair recently signed with. They plan to sell merch in the future too.

As their viewership has grown, between 20% and 30% of the pair's current income comes from audience subscriptions and direct donations, Botez says.

"She probably makes a similar type of income that the top professionals are from streaming chess on Twitch. And she's not even ranked in the top 20,000 players in the world," says Nick Barton, director of business development at Chess.com. "The definition of what a chess professional is has changed."

Although Botez has found success on Twitch, it hasn't always been easy.

"With my first Twitch stream, like 60% of it was just people trying to flirt with me and chat, or people just commenting on my appearance the entire time," says Botez. "They didn't care about the game play at all. I actually stopped streaming at first until I had moderators come and help clean it up."

Alexandra Botez and her sister Andrea Botez streaming on Twitch

CNBC Make It

It's hard to be a woman gamer on Twitch, Botez says. "You can sometimes gain followers faster, but it doesn't translate to viewers, which is what you usually monetize," she says.

One advantage, however, is that women tend to earn higher advertising rates on the site than men do, Botez says. "A lot of brands want to have diversity now," she adds.

Botez first realized she might be able to scrape together a living through chess in high school, when she sold lessons online for around $50 an hour. But she never imagined she could earn six figures from the game.

"I'm happy that we have somebody like Alexandra because it shows you that chess provides you a lot of opportunities," says Sutovsky. "You don't have to be even a grandmaster, but you have to be an educated player because all the way through, she's good enough to explain the subtleties. I think Alexandra will be a huge success for years to come."

Because of platforms like Twitch, it's now exponentially more feasible to make a living playing chess. "It's just growing by the day," says Barton. "Whether it be YouTube or Twitch or other methods, there are certainly thousands of people making a living in chess at this point, at least to some extent."

In 2021, Botez wants to expand her content to reach even more people. She aims to make videos that are "really relatable, even for people who just like to play casually," she says.

Reaching that goal might mean putting other chess content ahead of playing competitively, but Botez is OK with that. "If I want to become a 10 times bigger content creator, then I have to learn a specific skill set that might not necessarily be studying more chess," she says.

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This 25-year-old earns 6 figures playing chess on Twitchhere's how - CNBC

In 1924, the main landmark of Leningrad turned in the huge chess board and gathered thousands of locals to observe the legendary performance.

In Russia, chess has always been a very popular game dating back to the times of Catherine the Great (heres why), and in the Soviet Union, every schoolkid played it. One of the most unusual versions of the game took place on July 20, 1924, on the Palace Square (then - Uritsky Square) in St. Petersburg (then - Leningrad). It was the day the FIDE World Chess Federation was officially established (and from 1966, International Chess Day also began to be celebrated on this day).

At the giant chess board were famous players Ilya Rabinovich (black pieces) and Pyotr Romanovsky (white pieces) and each piece was represented by actual people: the Red Army soldiers were the white pieces and the Red Fleet were the black pieces.

Gunners became Rooks, commanders with sabers became Kings and two ladies became Queens (one of them was Rabinovichs wife). The horses were real, however, there were no bishops (who are called elephants in Russian).

Commands from the grandmasters were transmitted by phone to assistants, who, in turn, announced them to the pieces via a megaphone.

The epic performance gathered about 8,000 spectators, who surrounded the square.

The match lasted for 5 hours and ended in a draw on the 67th move at the proposal of white pieces (in actual fact, the people and horses were a bit tired). This exhibition game was not just for entertainment, as it helped promote chess among the Soviets, as well as abroad.

90 years later, St. Petersburg decided to repeat the legendary match on the Palace Square. On July 20, 2014, masters Nikita Vitiugov and Valery Popov played out another match - with volunteers playing the chess pieces. The game also ended in a draw.

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How the Soviets made a GIANT chess board on the Palace Square (PHOTOS) - Russia Beyond the Headlines