onegoodmove

When the great Bobby Fischer was asked if women could play chess he said "I could give any woman in the world a piece and a move; to Gaprindashvili even, a knight" When Mikhail Tal heard about Fischer’s claim he is reported to have laughed and said "Fischer is Fischer, but a knight is a knight!"
During the 1930's few women played chess against the men. There was one notable exception, Vera Menchik. She was a very good chess player perhaps the first woman of Grandmaster strength. In fact she defeated so many strong players, world champions among them, that a club of sorts was formed, The Vera Menchik Club. It wasn't a good thing to be a member of the club since the only way you could get there was if you were male and lost a game to Vera. Among her victims were Max Euwe (twice), Sammy Reshevsky, Mir Sultan Khan, Sir George Thomas, C. H. O'D. Alexander, Edgar Colle, Frederick Yates, William Winter, Lajos Steiner, Frederich Saemisch, Milner-Barry, Harry Golombek, and Jacques Mieses (who lost to her four times in a match). After Vera's death there were few women who competed with the male chess players until the late eighties when the Polgar sisters burst upon the scene. Until then men were relatively safe from becoming members of any "woman's club." Well the times they are a changing. This past week the Female World Champion Zhu Chen defeated the Reigning Men's World Champion Ruslan Ponamariov playing at the F.I.D.E. Grand Prix tournament in Dubai. She drew the first game and defeated the men's champ in the second game eliminating him from contention. Chen's remarkable achievement makes her perhaps the only female world champion ever to defeat the male world champion in any sport. The men had to console themselves with the fact that former world champion Anatoly Karpov defeated her in the following round. So the debate goes on, although there are fewer now who don't believe women can compete on an equal basis with men in this mental game. For those of you who would like to see the games here are four games from the event Chen's win and draw against Ponamariov and the losses to Anatoly. Click here for additional information on the F.I.D.E. Grand Prix