There she nails the problem: 'Girls are taught a subtle and less aggressive style of chess playing, primarily to conform chess to preconceived notions of women in society. One of them has created a website to encourage girls to play chess. I have many female students and I can see firsthand how goal-oriented they are! Not only do they win the national and international titles, they also want to make a difference. Rephrasing the famous quote, we can say that God created chess players and computers made them equal.įrom the other side, the new generation of female players is very ambitious and when the ladies really want to achieve their goals, as the rule they succeed!

First of all it is the computer's influence. They were due for a rude awakening! Just like the famous sculpture on Wall Street (a little girl looking defiantly at the charging bull), Sofia had no fear!Īs the result, Sofia Polgar finished the tournament with the historic result 8.5 out of 9 and a rating performance close to 2900!įor a long time no woman could come close to this unbelievable result, until last December GM Valentina Gunina scored 9 out of 10 in London Classic Super Rapid with a rating performance of 2831! I feel that we are going to see more results like this in the near future. In the first rounds the opponents of the 14 year-old Sofia Polgar probably treated her as just a cute little kid. The quartet of very experienced Soviet grandmasters (Dolmatov, Razuvaev, Chernin and Palatnik) was the clear favorite to win the tournament. No one could imagine that a little girl from Hungary was going to completely steal the show. The open tournament in Rome, which was later nicknamed 'The Sack of Rome,' took place in February 1989 and was supposed to be just another proof of the Soviet chess hegemony. Today I want to talk about another defining moment of women's chess. In this article we already discussed how GM Nona Gaprindashvili completely changed this stereotype.

It is probably games like this prompted Bobby Fischer to make his famous claim that he would beat any female player while giving her knight odds.

The awakening porn game