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Women's World Chess Championship
When talking about World Chess Champions, or chess grandmaster, no one would suspect that the Women's World Chess Champions or women grandmasters (WGM) are not the subject matter. While theoretically, women can compete in the World Chess Championships (though up until now only Judith Polgar have done this), the Women's World Chess Championship, organized by FIDE since 1926, are entirely restricted to women. Do these facts mark the Women's World Chess Championship as slightly inferior to the "real" World Chess Championships?
Women World Chess Championship – the Beginning
The first Women's World Chess Championships consisted of a single tournament held once in two years as part of the Chess Olympiad. The first tournaments were dominated by Vera Menchik, who had defended her titles for seven consecutive Olympiads, losing only in a single game. Menchik era came to its end in 1944 with her tragic death by the Germans' air force attack on London.In 1946, FIDE took charge over the World Chess Championship and enforced a new system on both World Chess Championships; instead of a single tournament in which the defending champion competes against a top ranked opponent, a multi-player event with 16 entrants coming from 12 different countries, using the round robin system (in which the entire participants get to compete against all the others an equal number of times).
Russia vs. Georgia in the Women's World Championship
The first Chess Champion in the renowned women's event in 1949 was Liudmila Rudenko of Leningrad, who had a one point advantage over her runner-up Olga Rubtsova of Moscow. The next decade in Women's chess was under Soviet domination, with the top spots being captured by women chess players of the former USSR.
The crushing victory of Georgian Nona Gaprindashvili over Vrnjacka Banja, put an end to the Soviet dominance and initiated the Georgian reign in women's chess. Gaprindashvili remained unbeatable for the next 14 years, not bothered by FIDE's decision to equalize the Women World Championship cycle to the 3-years cycle that precedes World Chess Championships. In 1976, the Georgian Grandmaster was defeated by her compatriot, 17 years old Maya Chiburdanidze, who ruled the chess competition for the upcoming 15 years.
Women's World Chess Championship 1990-2000
The 1990s and early 2000 will be remembered as the era of Chinese dominance in Women's World Chess Championship. Chinese women chess players took the most important world title in their field from 1991 to date (2008), except for two interruptions:
- Between 1996 and 1999, the Championship title was in the hands of Susan Polgar, an American-Hungarian Grandmaster, one of the three chess playing sisters (Judit Polgar, who is ranked no. 1 in FIDE rating list for women and International Master Zsófia), and the only family member who agreed to settle for the Women's World Championship.
- In 2004, Bulgarian Antoaneta Stefanova championed the women's event for one year.
Women's World Chess Championship – the Future
Women's World Chess Championship 2008 is planned to take place in Nalchik, Russia between August 28 and September 18, with the world's top ranked women chess players including reigning champion Xu Yuhua and excluding Judit Polgar and Xie Jun (who is ranked no. 3 in the world). The favorites for win are Humpy Koneru of India (ranked no. 2) and Chinese Hou Yifan (no. 4 in the world).