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Time of India
5 days ago
- Sport
- Time of India
India to host third edition of Global Chess League in December; adds to country's busy chess calendar
India will host the third edition of the Global Chess League (GCL) from December 13-24, 2025. The tournament, featuring six franchises with six players each including both male and female competitors, will conclude just before the FIDE World Rapid and Blitz Championship in Qatar. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The Global Chess League was hosted in Dubai for its inaugural edition and London last year. The tournament follows a double round-robin format where each franchise competes against others twice during the event. Previous seasons of the GCL have attracted top chess players globally, including former world champions , , and Hou Yifan. Other notable participants have included rising stars Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi, along with established players Alireza Firouzja, Hikaru Nakamura, and Nodirbek Abdusattorov. The 2025 calendar marks a significant increase in international chess events being hosted in India. The country has already successfully organised several major tournaments this year, including the Delhi International Open Grandmasters Chess Tournament, the Pune Women's Grand Prix event, and currently the Chennai Grandmasters event. India's chess calendar for 2025 will be further enriched by hosting the FIDE World Cup, scheduled from October 30 to November 27. The host city for this prestigious event is yet to be announced. The growing prominence of India in international chess events faced a minor setback when a planned event of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour had to be cancelled. The organisers were unable to secure sufficient funding from Indian corporate entities to proceed with the tournament.
Indian Express
29-07-2025
- Sport
- Indian Express
Divya Deshmukh's FIDE win at FIDE Women's World Cup and a turning point in Indian women's chess
Over the span of 25 days in Batumi, little cracks started to appear in China's dominance of women's chess. A nine-woman contingent made its way from China to the Georgian city to try and win the FIDE Women's World Cup, only to see two Indians — the 19-year-old champion Divya Deshmukh and the 38-year-old finalist Koneru Humpy — fighting it out for the title at the end. The contrast in India and China's fortunes was most visible during the final: While Divya fought against Humpy for the title, the Chinese duo of Tan and Lei were fighting for the third place. 'Indian chess is just unbelievable!' wrote chess legend Judit Polgar in a post on her X account. Having two Indian women fighting in the finale was a moment that could be an indicator of a seismic shift in the world of women's chess. After all, this comes on the back of the Indian women's team claiming the Chess Olympiad gold medal just last year. China has been a dominant force in women's chess for decades now. While they have not had a World Cup winner in three editions, their prowess in women's chess is strongly reflected in women's world championships, the pinnacle of women's chess. Six out of the 17 women's world champions in history have been from China. The first of these was Xie Jun, who became the first-ever women's chess champion from Asia when she claimed the title in 1991. After claiming the title thrice more, she passed the torch to Zhu Chen and Xu Yuhua. Then came the era of Hou Yifan, who won the title four times starting from 2010. The 15 years since that title from Yifan have seen three women from China claim the women's world champion's crown — Tan Zhongyi and Ju Wenjun being the other two. This reign of China on the women's world champion's throne since 2010 was only briefly interjected twice. 'Divya's win is a great thing for India because of the way the country's players dominated the World Cup. Women's chess especially was always dominated by Russia and China, two very strong countries,' points out grandmaster Abhijit Kunte, who was the captain of the Indian women's team at the Olympiad last year where the first blow to China's dominance was struck by Indian women. At the Olympiad, a team event, China had sent a second-string team without stars like women's world champion Ju Wenjun, Tan Zhongyi and Lei Tingjie. At the Women's World Cup, though, it had one of the strongest contingents, missing only two top stars: World No 1 Hou Yifan, who is semi-retired at this point, and women's world champion Ju. China's nine-player contingent was matched in numbers by India's nine players among the 107 contenders from 46 countries. 'The way India dominated the World Cup, it showed that our players are ready to take on everybody. China cannot take India lightly now, because we have gold and silver medals in the World Cup, we won a silver medal at the Asian Games and we were gold medalists in the Chess Olympiad. Having two India versus China semi-finals shows how stiff the competition between the two countries is,' says Kunte. What makes the one-two finish by Indian players even more remarkable is that the FIDE Women's World Cup is the trickiest format in the sport to navigate. It's a minefield where each round involves one-on-one battles in the two-game mini matches in the classical format. If the two classical games do not yield a winner, the battle enters a third day where there are skirmishes in the rapid format and then blitz if necessary until there's a winner. On paper, it should have been an exhausting format for someone like Humpy. And a daunting one for someone as inexperienced as Divya. But eventually, the grizzled veteran and the tenacious teenager were left standing to fight for the title. Away from the two players too, there are plenty of positives: Be it Woman International Master Priyanka K outlasting Women's Grandmaster Zsoka Gaal in tense tiebreaks, or I M Vantika Agrawal taking out former women's world champion Anna Ushenina, or India having more players in the quarter-finals (four) than China (three). 'Our Olympiad team members, Vaishali Rameshbabu and Harika Dronavalli, also made it to the quarter-finals. So if you look at the bench strength of the Indian women's players in this World Cup, we can say that for the very first time in women's chess, we sort of outperformed the Chinese players. That in itself is a show of dominance. Along with the fact that we are better, we also have players that are currently improving. Divya, for example, is far away from reaching her peak,' says Kushager Krishnater, who has been Humpy's second since August 2022. The Olympiad victory, coupled with the one-two at the World Cup, have raised hopes that the final frontier — the women's world championship title — can also be breached by an Indian woman soon. 'Chess in India was ruled by Humpy and Harika for almost 20-25 years. Humpy recently became a World Rapid Champion, her second title in the format. Humpy and Harika have performed very well at the international level. But the Women's World Championship title has always been missed by Indian players. And now the way Gukesh has come and won the World Championship title, we expect that Divya will also follow the same path. This new generation will bring these titles back to India. They are not just ensuring that the legacy of Humpy and Harika continues, they will take that flag even higher,' predicts Kunte.
Times
05-07-2025
- Politics
- Times
Chess will never be ruled by a queen
The battle of the sexes, or, to be more precise, the battle over sex, has broken out in the oldest of all war games, chess. In Germany, Nora Heidemann, 17, identifying and officially categorised as female but born a boy, won the national girls' under-18 tournament. The German Chess Youth organisation acclaimed Heidemann's result: 'Congratulations on this great performance!' The head of the German commission for women's chess, Nadja Jussupow, was less thrilled. As the Times reported last week, she claimed that more trans women were entering women's chess tournaments since the introduction last year of Germany's Self-Determination Act: 'They merely declared themselves to be women.' Jussupow also claimed to have spoken to many female players who said they would stop competing if it continued. She meant, presumably, in women-only events, since the great majority of tournaments are 'open' ones, in which men and women compete together. They are invariably won by men. Which is, in a way, her point: 'The difference is particularly clear at the top: the men's national team, for example, plays two classes higher than the women's team.' Put more clearly: China's Hou Yifan, far and away the world's strongest female chess player (so much so that she relinquished the women's world championship she first won at the age of 16, as she had nothing left to prove in that context), is ranked 96th in the world, on the Elo rating system, behind 95 men. When the world chess governing body, FIDE, said in December 2023 it would not permit trans women to play in women's events under its auspices — basically, the women's world championship — pending a review of the matter, it declared, in response to critics: 'Of course men and women are equally intellectually capable. However, in chess as a sport other factors like physical endurance may play a role.' This was widely ridiculed, notably by the Labour MP Angela Eagle, a joint winner of the 1976 British girls' under-18 chess championship: 'There is no physical advantage in chess unless you believe that men are inherently more able to play than women. I spent my chess career being told women's brains were smaller than men's and we shouldn't even be playing.' This may well have been the unpleasant ambience when Eagle was competing. But the idea of male physical endurance being of no relevance to this mind sport is itself regarded as ignorant by those women who have competed at the highest level. One of them, Alexandra Kosteniuk, wrote, in exasperation: 'It's almost impossible to explain to non-chess-players how physically demanding the game is, and how hard, physically and psychologically, it is to compete in world championship-level competition.' When, 11 years ago, I played a game against Hou (and was ground down remorselessly in 45 moves) I asked her why women were outperformed so widely by men at the highest level. 'There is a physical side. In chess sometimes you play for seven to eight hours.' She added that 'based on history, I don't see any chance' of a woman becoming the world's strongest player. So, no real-world version of the Netflix drama The Queen's Gambit. In fact, at 14, Hou was the world's highest-ranked player of her age, of either sex. The same had been true of the astonishing Judit Polgar, who became a grandmaster at the age of 15, beating the record of the late Bobby Fischer. Polgar, the only woman ever to have entered the world's top 10 — in 1996 — told me it was only social and cultural factors that stood in the way of women becoming as good as the men at the highest level. Yet a decline in the ranking of females versus males in chess does seem to occur with the onset of puberty and, on the male side of the divide, the effects of testosterone. Those effects are enormous in physical sport, which is why some national sporting bodies' refusal to recognise this, allowing trans women to compete in female weightlifting competitions, swimming or cycling, for example, aroused justifiable public bewilderment — and equally justifiable anger on the part of female competitors who saw their chances blighted by a demented ideology that denied the reality of male biological advantage. But chess — really? If so, it may be analogous, in some way, to a phenomenon in the distribution of IQ: although the male and female averages are the same, males are overrepresented at the very bottom and the very top of the range. To put it crudely, we men provide more idiots and more geniuses. But chess skill is not a pure measure of intelligence: I have met enough chess grandmasters to know that. And I have a small personal example: my stepfather, Sir Alfred Ayer, then Wykeham professor of logic at New College, Oxford, who at the precocious age of 25 produced the seminal book Language, Truth and Logic, was an avid chess-player. But, as a dopey teenager, I would beat him every time we played. The idea that the complete absence of women at the very top of the world chess rankings is a cultural rather than biological phenomenon has frequently been justified by the point that among those registered as players, and at a recreational level, men greatly outnumber women. Therefore, it is said, this is a participation effect — akin to the fact that China will produce many more Olympic gold medallists than Iceland, because their vastly higher number of athletes enhances the probability of having more with extreme talent. So, get more women playing chess, and, over time, they will match men at the very top. That would be wonderful to see, but, alas, the argument was demolished by Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist and the author of T: The Story of Testosterone. She pointed out: 'Like chess, Scrabble uses a version of the Elo rating system. But unlike in the chess world, women dominate the recreational ranks of Scrabble, accounting for about 85 per cent of all recreational players. Even at the competitive level, women generally outnumber men … so if the participation rate hypothesis were correct in this context, then women should be dominating the elite Scrabble ranks. But they're not. Instead, men dominate Scrabble's upper tiers, as they do in chess. And the same goes for bridge.' Hooven's conclusion is that men are more disposed to the intense and passionate obsessiveness, shutting out all external activities and interests, required to become the world's best over the confines of the 64 squares. Or, as the late Dutch grandmaster Jan Hein Donner put it: 'What is going on in their heads is narcissistic self-gratification with a minimum of objective reality, a wordless snuffling and scrabbling in a bottomless pit.' If women are, for biological reasons, less able to lead such a life, the rest follows.
News18
19-06-2025
- Politics
- News18
'Grit And Determination': PM Modi Lauds Divya Deshmukh After Win Over Hou Yifan
Last Updated: The Indian teenage sensation Deshmukh, who represented Team Hexamind, got the better of her Chinese counterpart Yifan at the event in London. Indian Prime Minister Shri. Narendra Modi lauded the effort of chess star Divya Deshmukh to beat Hou Yifan, the top ranked player in the world, at the World Team Blitz Championship on Thursday. The Indian teenage sensation Deshmukh, who represented Team Hexamind, got the better of her Chinese counterpart Yifan at the event in London. The nation's premier took to the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, to share an update that read, 'Congratulations to Divya Deshmukh on defeating the World No. 1, Hou Yifan in the 2nd leg of Blitz semifinal at the World Team Blitz Championships, London." 'Her success highlights her grit and determination. It also inspires many upcoming chess players. Best wishes for her future endeavours," the post continued. Congratulations to Divya Deshmukh on defeating the World No. 1, Hou Yifan in the 2nd leg of Blitz semifinal at the World Team Blitz Championships, London. Her success highlights her grit and determination. It also inspires many upcoming chess players. Best wishes for her future… — Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 19, 2025 Union Sports Minister Mansukh Mandaviya also congratulated the teenager on her feat with a post that read, 'Checkmate ! Heartiest congratulations to our chess star Divya Deshmukh on her stunning win over World No. 1 Hou Yifan in the 2nd leg of the Blitz semifinal at the World Team Blitz Championships in London. Wishing you the very best for the future games." Checkmate ♟️ !Heartiest congratulations to our chess star Divya Deshmukh on her stunning win over World No. 1 Hou Yifan in the 2nd leg of the Blitz semifinal at the World Team Blitz Championships in London. Wishing you the very best for the future games. — Dr Mansukh Mandaviya (@mansukhmandviya) June 18, 2025 First Published: June 19, 2025, 15:22 IST
India Gazette
19-06-2025
- Politics
- India Gazette
PM Modi lauds Grandmaster Divya Deshmukh for defeating world number one in World Team Blitz Championships
New Delhi [India], June 19 (ANI): Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed Indian chess grandmaster Divya Deshmukh for defeating world number one Hou Yifan in the second leg of the Blitz semifinal at the World Team Blitz Championships, London. Taking to X, PM Modi posted, 'Congratulations to Divya Deshmukh on defeating the World No. 1, Hou Yifan in the 2nd leg of Blitz semifinal at the World Team Blitz Championships, London. Her success highlights her grit and determination. It also inspires many upcoming chess players. Best wishes for her future endeavours.' To this, Divya replied on X, 'Thank you, Respected Sir. It is a great honour and encouragement for me to be recognised by the Prime Minister.' Also, Union Sports Minister Mansukh Mandaviya also posted, 'Checkmate ! Heartiest congratulations to our chess star Divya Deshmukh on her stunning win over World No. 1 Hou Yifan in the 2nd leg of the Blitz semifinal at the World Team Blitz Championships in London. Wishing you the very best for the future games.' Notably, India has been doing really well at the international level in chess as of late. D. Gukesh, the reigning World Champion and recipient of the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award secured a third-place position in the Norway Chess tournament, which concluded early in June. One of his standout moments during the competition was a win over world number one Magnus Carlsen, which was his first classical game win over him. Grandmaster Arjun Erigaisi also finished fifth. Also, Aravindh Chithambaram, clinched first place in the Stepan Avagyan Memorial Chess Tournament, and R Praggnanandhaa, secured second place in the same tournament. The tournament was held from May 28 to June 6. (ANI)
