For a number of years, I have been a great admirer of the games and person of the world's number 1 woman chess player, China's Hou Yifan (侯逸凡). The first fact one needs to have and keep in mind about Hou is that she has always been at most a half-time chess professional. Born in 1994, she was homeschooled during her teens and still qualified to enter Beijing University. In 2016, she earned a bachelor's degree in International Relations. In December, it was announced the Hou would be a recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University in 2018-19, where she will pursue her long-term career dream, an education degree that will enable her to teach and mentor disadvantaged children. However, when she was 9 years old, her intuitive genius for chess was recognised and she came under the training wings of several of China's most prominent masters. It did not take long for the young girl to conquer unheard of territory. One quick year after beginning formal training, at 10, Hou became a FIDE Master. Two years after that, at 12, she became the youngest player ever to participate in the Women's World Championship tournament and on China's Chess Olympiad team, and achieved a Grandmaster norm--the youngest woman Grandmaster ever. At 16 years of age, in 2010, she won the women's world championship match in a shutout. Stripped of her title twice for not participating in FIDE knockout tournaments for the championship (a demand not made of male world champions), she regained her title twice, in 2013 (at 19 years old) and in 2016 (at 21), again by shutout scores in matches. Hou is probably exponentially better than any current competition among women players, and has remained so for some years. Again, this was all achieved during a career in which Hou has, by her own self-report, considered chess a "hobby" and not a career. Needless to say, given her concurrent academic and chess achievements, Hou Yifan is abundantly naturally gifted.
But, from 2015 on, increasingly in the tradition of history's greatest woman player, Hungary's Judit Polgar, whom Hou has beaten in competition, she has insisted in playing in open or invited tournaments with the top men players in the world. She has turned in mixed results, in individual games achieving wins against several top 10 players such as Anish Giri and Fabiano Caruana, and has drawn most of the rest, including world champion Magnus Carlsen, who outranks her by an average of 150 points. Though she won her first major open Grandmaster tournament in Biel last year, she most often finishes near the bottom in fields of the world's best, rated 2750 or higher. It is endlessly tempting to speculate just how far Hou could get in open competition were she to commit herself full-time to chess. Her trainer has consistently not approved of her academic pursuits. Of course, in the interest of Hou's admirable career goals as a person, the expectation that she make of chess a career would be unfair and unreasonable.
In interviews or stories about Hou in various chess and general interest publications, the top GMs in the world have expressed respect and admiration for Hou. But this masks, and not very thickly, the incredibly difficult time women have had in a sport (yes, chess is a sport, as anyone who has played 6+ hour games in tournaments will readily attest) dominated by men. It is not that chess events are segregated by gender, they are not. But women are regularly condescended to and discouraged from playing in club and tournament circles. They have been ridiculed as naturally inferior by world champions past (though Garry Kasparov has recently expressed regret saying such things several decades ago) and GMs present, notoriously Nigel Short. And the double-standards unabashedly voiced by men toward women, and toward Hou specifically, in tournament chat-rooms is downright outrageous. Though she has many genuine admirers too, many comments about Hou betray open sexism. Some allege that top-ten players who don't beat her are beguiled by her looks. Some say that, because she may never reach the rating status of Judit Polgar, who was briefly in the world's top-10, she should not be taken seriously, a sentiment that would almost never be voiced for any male GM ("you're not Magnus Carlsen, so why are you even playing?"). Others claim that she should not be invited to annual tournaments like the current 80th Tata Steel event in Wijk aan Zee in the Nerthelands, that try to draw famous players to increase interest, for, as the critics point out, there are dozens of higher-rated men that are more deserving than she. This sentiment, predictably, is not expressed with regard to the other 2600-level male players in the Masters competition. Perhaps partly because of this, Hou persists in playing the upper tier of super-GMs whenever she can. And, partly because of this, I take special joy in watching her perform well.
Of course, in order to get better at chess, and in order to enjoy chess as a spectator, one has to maintain some objectivity--to learn from mistakes, to correctly evaluate positions, to appreciate who really has the upper hand no matter whom one is cheering for. The present Tata Steel tournament, which includes a big share of top-10 players including the World Champion, has been a very painful one for Hou and her fans. It has been, if anything, an occasion to recall just how much training and preparation is required to compete against the best of the best in the world, in openings, endgames and general technique. Despite draws against world's #15 Sergey Karjakin and #7, former World Champion Vladimir Kramnik, Hou has lost six of her first eight games in a 13-round event. And most of them have been due not to her opponents' superiority, but to her own blunders and inaccuracies.
In round 1, against world #11 Anish Giri, against whom she had a winning record going into this game, Hou was outplayed in the opening and played passively, but managed to struggle her way to a theoretically drawn endgame as Black.
In the diagrammed position, which admittedly is very tricky, Hou should play 55...Kd6! and after 56. b5 axb5 57. Kb4 c6 58. a6 Kc7 59. Kc5 b4! 60. a7 Kb7 61. Kxb4 Kxa7, White needs to play correctly to hold. Instead, Hou grabbed the opposition with 55...Kc6??, and this allowed Giri to take the distant opposition and win with 56. c4 d4 57. Kc2 Kd6 58. Kd2 c6 59. Ke2 Kd7 60. Kd3 Kc7 61. Kxd4 Kd6 62. Kd3. Now there is no way to prevent either the White King from infiltrating or a queenside pawn from dashing home.
In round 4, shown in the following diagram, against world's #13 Peter Svidler, in what is again admittedly a tricky Queen-less middlegame, Hou can maintain equality with the elegant 38...Nxh3 (always look at checks first, as the old rule goes) 39. Kh2 Rxe5! 40. Kxh3 d3, and now Black's d-pawn and queenside majority force White permanently on the defensive.
Instead, Hou pushed prematurely and dropped the Knight for nothing with 38...d3? and after 39. Rxf7+ Kh6 40. Rxf4 d2 41. Rd4, Black is completely lost.
Against the World Champion Magnus Carlsen in round 7, Hou, in a bad pattern against Carlsen as Black, played passively, and was forced to defend a very difficult position in an endgame, a situation in which Carlsen is famous for grinding opponents to seven-hour losses. Hou played admirably precisely until the diagrammed position was reached.
With two White passers that must be restrained, Black needs to hold off their advance by keeping her Rook active. Correct here was something like 49...Rd1, where a continual shuffling on the queenside should hold White down sufficiently to prevent him from making any progress. Instead, Hou tries to liquidate the Kingside with 49...Rh1?. This allows White to push his d-pawn and block the Black Rook's sightline to his King with 50 d5. Black still might be able to hold if she keeps her Rook on the eighth rank with free shots at checks and piece pins. Instead, Hou continues with her errant planned intent after 12 minutes thought; 50...h5?? 51. d6 Kc8 52. gxh5 Rxh5 53 Kc6, and White's advanced King and pawns, along with the happily free Knight, will run a pawn home very soon.
In round 8, Hou completely outplayed world #5 Fabiano Caruana, also having a terrible tournament, in the opening. Caruana sacrificed a pawn on the queenside in order to get some activity, but in the diagrammed position, Hou has an obvious and easy path to a persistent advantage.
Here, Hou can cash in a second pawn with 28. Bxa4, cleaning up an unclear situation on the queenside, and rely on her central space advantage to apply a long-term stranglehold on Black's position, with a good time advantage to boot. Apparently, thinking the Black a-pawn could not escape, Hou played 28. Ra3 and over the course of the next several moves, simply lost the thread of the position. A series of inaccuracies by White allowed Caruana to overrun Hou with a kingside onslaught.
Obviously, it is possible to chalk these disastrous results up to the descending cycle of one bad tournament. A disappointing loss punches a hole in one's gut, and compromises one's play in the next round, and so on. Even a patzer like me has had such experiences, and the greatest GMs have them too. But, in another sense, the objective reality that this tournament is demonstrating is that it will simply not be possible for Hou Yifan to greatly improve, perhaps not even reach the magic 2700 rating milestone, if she cannot devote herself to chess full-time. To compete at the very top levels of the chess world, one needs not only native genius, which Hou clearly has in spades, but intensive training in all aspects of the game that takes up most of one's waking hours daily. The top GMs are prepared to the teeth with computer-assisted opening and endgame consultation, and sound strategical and tactical technique. But, as mentioned, it simply would not be reasonable to expect Hou, with a Rhodes Scholarship in her hands and a purposeful future serving underprivileged and learning-disabled children to get a hand-up in life, to do this. It is thus very possible that my continued dedication to follow her games and root for her will be met with not-infrequent disappointment. And, to be sure, whatever my disappointments must be as a chess stiff who sits on the sidelines, they must be much more bitter for her.
Still, as far as I'm concerned, it's all worth it. First of all, being a real fan means being loyal. If I can be a Minnesota Vikings fan for 40 years, I can be a fan of Hou Yifan's chess for a dozen or so. Hou is one-of-a-kind, a fantastic prodigy with remarkable chess talents and sometimes sparkling tactical skills. She has bravely pushed her way into the top 100 players in the world and into the upper tiers of a game traditionally hostile even to the presence of women. But even beyond her talents as a player is her character as a person. As is obvious from her interviews and her life-goals, Hou Yifan is a clear-sighted, modest, brilliant young woman who will bring great gifts to the next few generations of children, while, in her "hobby" time, helping to light up the world of chess.
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