Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport

by Jennifer Shahade

  Linda was sponsored to play in Olympiads and All-African tournaments, but the Zambian chess federation does not have enough money to support her year-round. The top male player, Amon Simutowe, has family ties to the small but powerful Zambian elite, and he has improved the visibility of chess in the country. But Linda still describes dire prospects for professional chessplayers, especially females: “The sports minister is a woman, but she won’t sponsor women’s chess. She thinks that soccer is the only sport.” It is hard to get periodicals and chess books in Zambia. Linda complains, “Once you have a good book it’s best to hide it ’cause once someone borrows it the chances of it being returned to you are one in a thousand.”

  Though Linda hopes to earn a scholarship to study in the United States, she loves Zambia and wants to do her part to improve conditions there. She is a dedicated coach for young girls, including a group of children with AIDS. “I want to go to university, but first I have to do something for these kids.” Linda Nangwale is very much admired by the young girls and boys she teaches. She told me, “I overheard one girl saying that I was her role model, and I felt so proud.”

  Linda’s chess heroes are Judit Polgar and Indian Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand, whom she admires because “he proves that a player from the third world can rise to the world-elite.” Viswanathan Anand, a former world champion, is the second highest-ranked player in the world, just behind Kasparov. He is a national hero in his country, heralded as a “one-man Indian chess revolution” on the webpage of the All-India Chess Federation. Partly because of the successes of Anand, chess in India enjoys an exalted status and is thoroughly covered in the sports sections of Indian dailies. Anand gives up to 100 interviews on busy weeks. When I remark how cooperative he is with the media, he tells me: “Of course! You can’t complain about the popularity of chess and then get mad when they want an interview.” In a report on an international tournament in Delhi, Scottish Grandmaster Jonathan Rowson observed, “Chess had become a symbol of Indian national resurgence, or at least a vehicle for patriotism.”1 The explicit goal of the Indian Chess Federation is to produce 100 grandmasters by the year 2012, which would position India at the top of the chess world. As of 2004, there are eleven GMs, seven of whom are under twenty-five years old.

  The exposure and promotion of women’s chess in India is growing, and the top women players are also national symbols. Much of this is because of the success of Indian prodigy Humpy Koneru. Humpy’s rise was fast and spectacular. She won the Girls’ World Under 20 Championship at just fourteen. At fifteen, Humpy became the ninth woman, and only Indian female, to gain the requirements for the GM title. She also broke Judit Polgar’s record by three months and one day, becoming the youngest female grandmaster in history.

  Humpy’s parents, Ashok and Latha, had designs for their child as soon as she was born in 1989. It was her father Ashok’s idea to name her Hampi, which is derived from the word champion. Later, he was influenced by great Soviet chessplayers and changed his daughter’s name to Humpy to sound more like a Russian name. When Humpy, at age six, showed a talent for chess, Ashok poured his extra resources of time and money into her development. Friends and relatives were surprised when Ashok and Latha used their savings to buy a laptop instead of a color TV, as most middle-class Indians would do. “I still remember how people mocked our decision to buy a computer,” said Latha.

  In one of hundreds of glowing articles about Humpy in the Indian press, Ashok is described as the “proudest father of the Queen of India…waiting for that day when she is queen of the entire world.” So, too, waits all of India, where Humpy is a celebrity, whose chess results are followed by all the major newspapers. To play under constant scrutiny of the national media is tremendous pressure for a teenager, but Humpy handles it calmly.

  Humpy pays little attention to fashion. At tournaments she wears sneakers and sports pants. Reserved and composed, Humpy rarely smiles. In interviews, much like Judit Polgar, she tells little, except that she aims to become world champion (among men).

  Before Humpy came along, Viji Submarayan was the headliner in Indian women’s chess. The first woman grandmaster to come from India, Viji held down board one for the Indian women’s team in the 1998, 2000, and 2002 Olympiads. Humpy did not play. Unlike her reserved compatriot Humpy, Viji is forthcoming, willing to talk about her role in chess, women in India, and the problems faced by her poverty-stricken country. Viji says, “I am quite patriotic. I usually take the responsibility to represent India in team competitions very seriously and play well.”

  Humpy Koneru. (Photo by Arvind Aaron.)

  Viji is not fully satisfied with the status of women in India. She complains that the Indian culture “worships the man. The woman is supposed to be of service to the man, and parents are disappointed when they have girl children.” Fortunately, Viji’s parents were different: her father always encouraged his three daughters to be strong. “He didn’t care whether we were boys and girls. He wanted us to be good sportspeople.” Chess is an ideal sport for a woman in India, Viji points out, because “women can study chess alone at home.” Traditional Indian values can actually help women in chess, Viji argues, since chess is an activity that can be pursued in private.

  Viji used to be distracted and despondent by the severity of the poverty in her country. Recently, she has learned to relax and focus on her own goals. An avid reader, she has been affected by Ayn Rand’s books (just as Almira Skripchenko has been), which argue that compassion is a spurious virtue. “There is so much poverty and starvation in my country. It is so sad, and it affected me so much in the past, and it still does. But I realize now that feeling pity is not going help anyone and I have to live my life. Even the smallest of insects has to search for his own food.”

  Humpy, Viji, and several other masters are all supported by the government. India has one of the strongest women’s squads in the world—strong enough to compete for the highest honors at Olympiads in the next decade provided that Humpy does not prefer to play for the men’s team.

  In India, you can find some of the best women chessplayers in the world, and also millions of women crippled by poverty. Such juxtaposition raises disturbing questions about the role of chess in a world with so many problems. That feminism confronts different problems in developed and undeveloped nations is real. I was made acutely aware of this outside of Istanbul during the 2003 European Women’s Championship, which I attended as a spectator and writer. At the time, I was looking over the notes on gender difference I had compiled after dozens of interviews. I was frustrated that many of the women I had interviewed had traditional concepts of gender roles. I was looking for more criticism and more anger from them.

  I spotted Austrian teenager Tina Kopinits, who stood out from the crowd with her bleached-blond hair, low-cut jeans, and confident swagger. I had an inkling Tina might have something challenging to say. I introduced myself, chatted about Istanbul, the tournament, and her life in Vienna. I discovered that Tina was an activist and had radical political views. I asked whether she considered herself a feminist and was roused by her answer: “Yes, but I don’t think about feminism in relation to the chess world. The place a feminist most needs to fight is in the third world, where women are victims of crushing poverty and abuse. Anyone who is playing chess has got it pretty good already.” I agreed with Tina that sweatshop labor, overpopulation, and domestic abuse are more urgent issues than sexism in the chess world. Still, I felt her argument was much like responding to “my stomach hurts” with “but some people have kidney stones.” I told her that. Tina laughed at my stomach analogy, but was not convinced, maintaining that chessplayers were automatically among the lucky. I admired Tina’s idealistic passion to combat world poverty. Women who have their civil rights and sufficient food in the first world fight for quality of life, while women of developing nations fight for survival. At the same time I think it is still acceptable to argue in favor of activism on smaller, admittedly less urgent, battlefields.


  Attending an international tournament in India can be an emotionally grueling experience for the more sensitive members of the chess world. In reporting on his first trip to India, grandmaster and writer Jonathan Rowson described his confrontation with poverty, sickness, and existential confusion: “If life begins at the edge of your comfort zone, then life begins in India.”2

  My own trip to India was both thrilling and wrenching. The World Championships in 2000 were held in late November at a luxurious five-star hotel in the capital city of Delhi. I had qualified by placing third in the U.S. Women’s Championship in 1999. Intent on seeing more of India, I had arranged to stay for three weeks, regardless of how many rounds I advanced in the knockout format.

  The hotel had five gourmet restaurants, a discotheque, a fitness center, massage services, and lush bars. It would be easy for a chessplayer to spend time in India sheltered in air-conditioned comfort. Many participants, serious about their chance to compete in the most elite tournament in the world, understandably did not leave the hotel complex. To mix the chess world and the real world is difficult for some players. Former World Championship challenger Victor Korchnoi feels strongly that “chessplayers should not be tourists.”3

  For my first few days in Delhi, I followed Korchnoi’s advice. I studied chess in my hotel room and ate at the rich buffet. At night I sometimes went to the bar adjacent to the hotel, frequented by upper-class Indians and Westerners on business trips. An Australian rock band played U2 cover songs as customers drank eight-dollar martinis underneath flashing lights. This scene did not seem far from Manhattan. When Georgian Ketevan Arakhamia knocked me out of the tournament, I switched from chessplayer to tourist.

  Outside, a world of dirt roads and crushing poverty awaited me. I turned down an invitation to go to the Taj Mahal in Agra in favor of exploring Delhi. So I took an open-air taxi into Delhi’s Old City, the ancient core of the now-sprawling metropolis where sacred cows and fornicating monkeys are always out and about. The streets were nothing more than multiple zigzag lanes, and the permanent rush-hour traffic gave me the leisure to take it all in. The traffic was so slow that the mutilated beggars who approached my cab reached into the car; others knelt on empty spots of pavement, pleading for money and food. I had read in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children about impoverished Indians cutting off their limbs to increase their worth as beggars. I thought this had to be an exaggeration, but the frequency of mutilation and bizarre disfigurings cast aside my doubts. An elderly woman with no teeth approached my cab and knelt beside me. I gave her the ten-rupee note I was using as a bookmark in a contemporary, post-modern novel, Art and Lies by the feminist author Jeanette Winterson. I felt my literary pretensions being dwarfed by my embarrassment.

  The pollution was so severe that my face was covered with soot by the time I reached my relatively unmemorable tourist destination. Later that day, exploring on foot, I crossed an abandoned parking lot, where dozens of homeless were camped out. I was instantly surrounded by bare-footed beggars in rags, who blocked my path back to the street. I was hit on a visceral level by the suffering I was witnessing. I had always known about poverty in India, but to see it up close was unforgettable. I could not think straight, and on the taxi-ride home, I was softly weeping. My driver coolly remarked, “You must have just arrived. You are still so sensitive.”

  I knew my experience was hardly unique. Travelers who’d also been emotionally devastated in their first experiences in impoverished countries had warned me. My reaction that evening surprised me even more than my afternoon sadness, as I felt more humbled than guilty. I went back to the hotel to take a shower and gratefully re-entered the chess world, its never-ending stream of meaningless variations a great relief.

  11

  Playing for America

  Never offer a draw to an American!

  — Grandmaster Eduard Gufeld, coach of the Soviet women’s team

  Every radio comedian and night-club wit has several entries in his card-index file about the possibility of a woman’s becoming President of the United States. The idea that a woman might become our chess champion seems equally ‘comical.’ Yet both of these possibilities are less remote than they were in, say, 1930...

  — Mrs. H.D. Sheldon in Chess Review, 1950.

  In the fall of 2000 I was to be invited for the first time to play for America in the prestigious biennial team competition, the Olympiad, to be held in Istanbul, Turkey. After each Olympiad, the chess world buzzes for months about brilliant chess and lively gossip from the three-week-long event.

  Arriving in Istanbul, I was immediately smitten. My first evening there, I walked around the main strip, my senses reveling in the aroma of beef kabobs, carts of mussels and mangoes and incense. The sounds of calls to prayer mingled with modern Greek music. I observed the intense gestures of Turkish men and noted the style of women, some of whom were veiled while others were dressed like fashion models. I remember thinking over and over I am in Istanbul, and this is so great. Istanbul nightlife was diverse: when teammate Anna Hahn and I went out to a bar in a coastal suburb, we were shocked when we realized that the live Turkish music was being performed by a man in drag.

  The Chess Olympiad is a social occasion as well as a fierce competition. Most delegations include four women and six men, so the male-to-female ratio is much more balanced than at most chess tournaments. Several married couples came out of Olympiads. Lithuanian Camila Baginskaite and the Russian-American Alex Yermolinsky met at the 1996 Yerevan Olympiad and now live in Northern California, with two children. Almira Skripchenko and Joel Lautier began dating at the 1994 Moscow event. Such relationships are instigated by social events at the Olympiad, like the historic Bermuda bash. The Bermuda team has one of the lower-rated lineups in the event, but they make their mark each year with their party, held at every Olympiad since 1980. They rent out a huge space, hire DJs, and print out invitations for thousands of participants, along with arbiters, journalists, and chess tourists. Always held before a free day, even the most professional players abandon rigorous routines to stay out late and sleep in. “I can’t wait to see all these players, so serious over the board, shake it over the dance floor,” said Zambian representative Linda Nangwale. Temporary social constellations form between players from all corners of the world, from Santiago to Oslo and Namibia. I met an Iraqi medical doctor, who asked me to dance: “I don’t like to talk about politics.” Some of the best Russian players in the world perform comically athletic dance moves, arms flailing, jumping up and down for some treasure on the ceiling.

  Some nonplayers would be surprised at chessplayers’ penchant for partying, but for me there are natural similarities between chess games and parties. Before either, I feel giddy over the numerous possibilities—perhaps this party will be one where I will have a transcendent conversation or perhaps this game will be filled with sacrifice and beauty, making the hours of small talk or technical study worthwhile. As the night or game goes on, anticipation dwindles into the reality of the present. You win or you lose, the lights are turning off.

  Not all of my memories from Olympiads are positive. In the 2002 event (held in Bled, Slovenia), in addition to playing, I was writing an article about the Olympiad for Chess Life (the national chess magazine). I wanted to interview two of the top young Russian male players in the world, both of whom have been heralded as possible future world champions. I was nervous, especially because one seemed particularly cool—he had big blue eyes, dreadlocks and wore black leather. I was already familiar with his games, one of which had impressed me so much that I showed it to the junior high team I coached back in Brooklyn. (“That game was hot,” said one of my students, “can I have a copy?”) I approached him at the hotel’s dining room and was pleased that he consented immediately to an interview. He wanted to do it right then and there, over dinner where his teammate, the other young grandmaster, was also eating.

  It was the most disturbing interview I have ever conducted. One declared that he hated
journalists, hated New York, and became annoyed when I asked him about his training routine. His teammate had even worse things to say. America was a horrible place, he said, because the rape laws were stricter than in Russia, where he was used to raping women who are ‘too ashamed to go to the police.’ He proceeded to use words like lesbian, fat, and stupid to describe American women. As we left the dining hall, one of them asked me to join him and some friends for drinks later that night, as if their outrageous comments were part of a charming routine. I declined. Later, I found out that the two were bragging to their teammates about how much they upset me with their sexist, anti-American insults.

  At my first Olympiad in Istanbul, I was feeling more American than I ever had. I’m not particularly patriotic, but there is something about competing for my country internationally that uncovers my deep-seated identification as an American. Because of this, chess at the Olympiad is even more intense for me as winning feels noble and losing shameful. At the 2000 Istanbul event, the U.S. team began with a sensational upset in the third round, beating the higher-ranked German team 3-0. We were euphoric for a short time—the following day, we lost to the lower-ranked Vietnamese team.

  Midway through the Istanbul tournament, I tuned into the BBC to watch the votes of the 2000 Bush-Gore election being recounted. I was nineteen at the time, so it was my first chance to vote in a presidential election. I knew I was going to be playing in the Olympiad on Election Day, but I applied too late for an absentee ballot, and did not receive it before departing for Turkey. Feeling guilty, I lay down on the bed and watched the TV for hours until it became more and more clear who our new president would be. I yearned to be back in the States, commiserating with friends and family.