Tweet
Hou Yifan in The New Yorker
July 27, 2021
There is an article in the August 2, 2021 issue of The New Yorker entitled
Hou Yifan and the Wait for Chess’s First Woman World Champion
By Louisa Thomas.
It is also online at:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...world-champion
There may be a paywall.
A couple of excerpts:
Even by the standards of chess prodigies, Hou Yifan stood out. It wasn’t so much the way she played the game—dynamically but not dazzlingly, with an aggressive but flexible style. It was that she was a girl. Thirteen years after she became a Grandmaster, at the age of fourteen, people still mention the two big barrettes that used to pin back her bobbed hair. “I never felt restrictions or limitations,” she told me recently, from her home in Shenzhen, China, where she is a professor at Shenzhen University’s Faculty of Physical Education. (Last year, at twenty-six, she became the youngest full professor in the university’s history.) “My parents never taught me that as a girl you should do this or that,” she said. “Teachers never shaped my views in that way.” These days, her hair falls to her shoulders, and black cat’s-eye glasses frame her face. She speaks English quickly and precisely; she spent a year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, studying public policy. She is the only woman among the hundred best chess players in the world, at No. 82. The second-ranked woman, Aleksandra Goryachkina, a Russian in her early twenties, is outside the top two hundred.
Hou was born in 1994 in Xinghua, a small city near China’s coast. As a child, she spotted a chess set in a shopwindow, and liked the shapes of the pieces: the sturdy pawns and slender-necked bishops, the castellated rooks and horse-headed knights. When she was five, she started playing the game with other kids at the home of a chess teacher, and showed enough talent that her parents enrolled her a year early in the local school, which had a chess program. She and her classmates would consult a large chess dictionary and write out the first few moves of famous openings—the Scotch, the Ruy Lopez—on a sheet of paper. Then they’d set up their boards, dutifully execute their copied instructions, and launch their wild attacks.
__________-
The article discusses Hou Yifan’s career further, mentions Beth Harmon, the Polgar sisters, Jennifer Shahade, Anna Rudolf, Eva Repkova, Magnus Carlsen, Enkhtuul Altan-Ulzii, Carissa Yip among others.
Worth reading.
July 27, 2021
There is an article in the August 2, 2021 issue of The New Yorker entitled
Hou Yifan and the Wait for Chess’s First Woman World Champion
By Louisa Thomas.
It is also online at:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...world-champion
There may be a paywall.
A couple of excerpts:
Even by the standards of chess prodigies, Hou Yifan stood out. It wasn’t so much the way she played the game—dynamically but not dazzlingly, with an aggressive but flexible style. It was that she was a girl. Thirteen years after she became a Grandmaster, at the age of fourteen, people still mention the two big barrettes that used to pin back her bobbed hair. “I never felt restrictions or limitations,” she told me recently, from her home in Shenzhen, China, where she is a professor at Shenzhen University’s Faculty of Physical Education. (Last year, at twenty-six, she became the youngest full professor in the university’s history.) “My parents never taught me that as a girl you should do this or that,” she said. “Teachers never shaped my views in that way.” These days, her hair falls to her shoulders, and black cat’s-eye glasses frame her face. She speaks English quickly and precisely; she spent a year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, studying public policy. She is the only woman among the hundred best chess players in the world, at No. 82. The second-ranked woman, Aleksandra Goryachkina, a Russian in her early twenties, is outside the top two hundred.
Hou was born in 1994 in Xinghua, a small city near China’s coast. As a child, she spotted a chess set in a shopwindow, and liked the shapes of the pieces: the sturdy pawns and slender-necked bishops, the castellated rooks and horse-headed knights. When she was five, she started playing the game with other kids at the home of a chess teacher, and showed enough talent that her parents enrolled her a year early in the local school, which had a chess program. She and her classmates would consult a large chess dictionary and write out the first few moves of famous openings—the Scotch, the Ruy Lopez—on a sheet of paper. Then they’d set up their boards, dutifully execute their copied instructions, and launch their wild attacks.
__________-
The article discusses Hou Yifan’s career further, mentions Beth Harmon, the Polgar sisters, Jennifer Shahade, Anna Rudolf, Eva Repkova, Magnus Carlsen, Enkhtuul Altan-Ulzii, Carissa Yip among others.
Worth reading.
Comment