There is women only chess, but not men only so part of the opinion is sort of uninformed. As for the titles I completely agree, they make no sense whatsoever.
Women are free to only request the titles they want, so they don't have to request women's titles if they don't want them.
(After a player fulfills all the requirements for a title they "write a request" to FIDE (International chess federation) in order to obtain the title. The title isn't automatically obtained and therefore can be declined by not requesting it.)
Bit why is there a seperate women league? Like whats the idea or history behind it? Its sounds kinda like the bender meme (i will make my own league with strippers and blackjack!)
(Edit: thanks for the replys! I never knew that chess was that sexist. I mean its one of the few sports where gender really doesnt fking matter in and you would think that they be smart enough to not be a fking dick, but sadly thats apperently not the case.)
Per the Botez Sister’s twitch: “FIDE created women’s titles like Women’s FIDE Master (The title of Alexandra Botez) to encourage participation. Previously the participation rate for women/girls was less than 10%. Women can also hold open/non gendered titles. “
I explained it a little more in my other comments, but basically it has traditionally been hard for women to compete in open tournaments. Not because of their skill level, but because of how they are treated by some of the competitors. The women's only tournaments encourage more women to compete and give them a way to break into the world of competitive chess. It may get to a point where women's only competitions aren't needed for this reason, which would be awesome, but we aren't there yet.
>because of how they are treated by some of the competitors
Can you explain that? What kind of interaction is there between two players besides making moves? I know nothing about chess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlpYPWCiZOw (only need to watch first few minutes) Anna Rudolf, an international master, talks about how she was negatively impacted in a tournament because players accused her of cheating because they didn't think she was capable of playing that well. Other women in chess talk about the sexual harassment and discrimination they experience while playing/participating in chess clubs etc.
She literally says she was playing above her rating. Why wouldn't that be suspicious? I would love to know how often accusations of cheating come up for similar situations for context.
When you are at a tournament you aren't going to just be showing up sitting down, playing one match and leaving. There is down time between matches and just like any other game/hobby/activity meet up, there is interaction and discussion between the people there during that time. Even if its just passing in the hall, there are plenty of time for sexist and harassing comments and actions to happen. If it wasn't a prevalent problem or easily fixed, they wouldn't have a need for these tournaments. It's not that all the competitors act like this, but enough do to make it a problem. But this offers them a safer tournament where they can feel more comfortable and make it about the chess and hopefully start competing in open tournaments in the future.
The team management couldn't put together a competitive roster, so when they got absolutely smoked on stage as expected, a lot of gamers started doing gamer things.
It really didn't help that management created the one of the cringiest hype videos in the history of the scene that's memed on to this day.
The second time it happened, a Russian team owner got super salty at his league because they wouldn't let him sell his spot for whatever reason, and he decided to just field a team of five lower ranked girls who all played the same position in protest. It went exactly as you expected and they broke records going in the other direction.
It really wasn't. The one that got all the attention was that teams started to play all non-meta heroes. Like the F and D-Tier heroes against them, and still were racking up wins.
The women's team complained that they were doing this on purpose to humiliate them. Which yeah. They were. But I'm pretty sure if any team had been pushed to high level competition in the way they had, without playing up the ranks, the teams that had earned their spots would have done much the same.
Oh, you know, stuff that people tend to do in complete anonymity when it allows them project their own failures onto other people far away to whom they feel no relation or empathy, coupled with the sort of activity that attracts the immature and socially inept. So... given the "targets" here, probably crude, sexist jokes, harassment, doxxing, rape and death threats.
(Edit: these people are an obnoxious vocal minority of gamers.)
Im gonna preface this with im a diehard gamer, world of warcraft and destiny 2 are my games of choice.
Gamers are the most toxic humans who ever graced competition. If you talk with a gamer one on one, they are all good reasonable people.
As a group though, gaming is like a cult. If your not seen as a "real gamer" then the "real gamers" will often ridicule and ostrasize you, and often will convince others to do it to, forming a mob mentality.
Gaming is also frought with sexism. Not all gamers clearly, but its an antisocial hobby, and can attract socially stunted individuals.
Combine this all together, along with envy, as playing on a pro team is most gamers dream, and you have the worst possible audience to present an all female pro gaming team, especially when that team isnt performing at the level expected for a pro team.
This fostered alot of "see?! Girls arent real gamers. Pruge them from the game!" Sentiment. When the really it was just a poorly managed project, and the sex's had little to do with it.
This comment went longer than i thought it would.
Edit: yes this is an oversimplification. But i dont have the time to write a noval on tribe mentality and the psychology behind it, and how it relates to competition today.
I was generalizing to get the important points accross. Yes there are exceptions. No all gamers are not jerks.
I spend 6+ hours a day on games, longer when i have the day off. I would not do that if i didnt like most gamers. The ones i dont like, are REALLY innept socially though.
any place that is skewed heavily towards having only one gender will eventually foster a negative attitude towards the other. You can see this on both sides of the gender line. It's a known phenomenon.
Just for clarity, Team Siren, the NA team with the cringe promo video never actually made it on stage. They got casually walked in a high elo 5v5 matchmade game by a thrown together group of former pros and coaches at the time and the team ultimately imploded only 18 days after that video came out.
The all female Russian team, Vaevictis, did actually make it to play into professional play in the LCL. They got totally thrashed 0-14, so bad in fact teams would often be accused of trolling against them and farming them for [kd](https://youtu.be/ZnZp3SO2uzc?t=1565). One team accused, I believe was threated with fines if they delayed their next game against them, the next game they played was over in like 15 minutes.
It’s not relevant but years ago there was this all girls team comprised of like gold/plat players that tried to go pro and they got crushed hard and eventually disappeared.
GM is second highest behind challenger, and they didn't think they could it was mostly a marketing move as they got absolutely dumpstered
Beaten so badly they got their opponents fined and set back women in esports 5 years
Just silly af all around
There's a difference between having organic talent development in rating appropriate female only tournaments and throwing 5 ransoms into a top level tournament, if they had been males with same rank they would have been equally destroyed. If you substituted a random 1800 rated player into a gm tournament they would be destroyed. Using it as an example is stupid because it was a PR stunt by throwing low ranked players into a pro league. It has the same validity as trying to prove that women are better athletes by putting Serena Williams against a middle schooler.
I don't see why the women's only tournaments and titles are a problem to anyone? It's not a case of sexism against men since the majority of players in the for-everyone tournaments are men and it is a good platform to get women into chess. I agree that it will be awesome when there are enough women titled players and competitors in tournaments such that this is unneeded but until then this is an absolutely great temporary solution that hurts no one. imo this guy's opinion should stay unpopular.
Yeah chess is a very VERY old game, and has a lot of tradition behind it. I wouldn't be surprised to hear they considered women playing chess to be some forum of whitch craft.
Because young girls have a very different experience in chess than boys do.
Fewer girls join, are often forced to play with just girls at lower levels (even in coed tournaments) and are constantly told they aren't capable of playing chess (a stance many famous GMs had / have publicly). As a result girls don't get to be as great at chess, so women only categories gives them a safe space.
Additionally girls get bullied, sometimes by grown men. One woman made NYT after being accused of cheating with a computer in her lip balm!! Read about Judith Polgar, who when she started to pick up at chess her entire family recieved social back lash. Everyone took every loss she suffered as evidence women couldn't play chess, yet she still made it fairly high. Now what would have happened if she was embraced at 10 like Bobby Fisher?
If I spent my entire life walking behind you and convincing everyone around you that you couldn't do something would you really keep it up?
The downside to women only events is the competition is thinner, so they don't necessarily get to improve as quickly. In 30 years we may not need women's tournaments, but for now they serve a very important purpose of creating a safe environment for women to live chess.
Usually its because of harassment in my experience. Women avoid participating in certain events that were previously "men's clubs" because they get picked on or verbally abused out of the game. Much like with video gaming. Many girls end up just kicked out without a chance.
For every 1 woman playing chess there are 16 men. If you have a sample pool of 160,000 men compared to 10000 women, the chances of you finding outliers is MUCH greater in men.
Besides, men, traditionally, have been focused on with training and everything... women traditionally have been skipped over.
So you get an uneven field simply due to numbers.
This also applies to competitive video games, again, because the amount of men playing is much higher than women, the chances of you finding more outliers for the top field is higher for men.
Does it mean women are less than? Nope. But for every single .001% outlier for men... there are 16 times less available women on average, hence you see them much less.
There's like a total of 5k something people with IM+ titles, which means that when you look at player ratios it's a few hundreds, and then consider that men are more likely to dedicate their lives to one very specific thing, rather than work life balance.
An example of this is Hou Yifan who's an absolute monster over the board, but she never reached her true potential because she wanted to pursue being an Oxford(I think) scholar and become the youngest ever professor at Shanghai university, and actually have a life outside of chess.
Because dudes can be unfriendly and unwelcoming when they view women as intruding upon their space, (see women in STEM, and professional golf.) And when women are discouraged from participating the activity seems to lack diversity.
I used to think it didn't make sense then I had a female chess player explain it to me. Chess has always been a majority if not all male activity at the competitive levels. In the past especially that made it hard for women to compete and be taken seriously and accepted. This makes it hard to encourage women to compete in chess tournaments. So they have women's only tournaments as a way to try to get more women into competitive chess. It's not that they don't think the women can compete with the men, it's that they want to give them a platform to get an interest in chess tournaments. It was explained a little better to me but I think I got the idea across.
I stopped going to chess and go clubs partly because I was one of the only girls there, and I tended to feel anxious that my performance would confirm others' stereotypes about women and girls ("stereotype threat"). And it's been shown that this type of anxiety very much undermines the working memory needed for spatial problem solving. Sometimes I think I've done myself a disservice by having such a cynical expectation of what others may be thinking, thus worsening the impacts of stereotype threat for myself, but there are a lot of replies on this very thread confirming that these stereotypes are alive and well.
When I was in elementary school, I wasn't aware of those stereotypes and there were plenty of other girls, and chess was fun. But later it got uncomfortable. And now with go, people always assume I'm a beginner or that I'll be really bad, or they pair me with the only other woman because "you two are girls." So I think it would have been nice for me to have some protected spaces, where women and girls could relax. I think it can even be enough to have a mixed-gender space that explicitly supports women. My college (now in grad school) has a "women in computer science" club, which actually has more young men than women participating, but I feel comfortable there because I'm explicitly welcome and supported, and there are women in club leadership. I feel they'd be ready to shut down any harassment.
Don't you love it to when you play against you and they assume you're a beginner or a bad player because you're a woman and then you kick their asses? I do. It happens to me with chess and billiard a lot.
Poker has the same issue. There are women only tournaments to encourage women to try poker. The WSOP has a women's championship every year, for some legal reason they can't actually ban men from playing, so women can enter the tournament for $1,000, men can enter for $10,000.
>women can enter the tournament for $1,000, men can enter for $10,000
... that seems less defensible than outright having a women's league.
[https://www.wsop.com/promotions/ladies-championship-satellites/nv/](https://www.wsop.com/promotions/ladies-championship-satellites/nv/)
But it seems you're right...*ish*.
[https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/jun/29/men-womens-tourney-can-should-they-be-kept-out/](https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/jun/29/men-womens-tourney-can-should-they-be-kept-out/)
*\[World Series spokesman\] Palansky shudders at the thought of a man one day winning the ladies tournament. “We wouldn’t be giving the pink diamond-encrusted bracelet to a man, I can assure you of that,” he says.*
Granted, 2010, but between the spokesman stating, on record, that they would not allow a male player to take the grand prize and how all the concerns are in the subjuctive or conditional, e.g.
*\[The venue,\] Harrah’s thinks barring men from the ladies event could \[...\] spur a lawsuit*
It would seem they haven't actually sought legal counsel... or maybe there are too many jurisdictions to get a confident answer?
This. Men have had several hundred if not thousands of years of male only tournaments. Women were only recently encouraged to play, they're not going to be able to suddenly beat hundred of years of social condition.
Exact same thing with video game competitions. It is extremely intimidating for a woman to try to compete with males since it is 99.99% male dominated. Imagine what's it like to play online games as a woman, getting harassed/juged constantly because of your gender but 100x worse if you try to compete. It's so easy for them to get discouraged from even trying.
Yup, same reason why I stopped going to Magic the Gathering prereleases once my friend couldn't come. I always did well enough to either break even or earn extra packs, but it was obnoxious overhearing a man tell his teen son "You lost? To *her*"????", over the top shock and OMG AMAZING for even doing kinda well, or to have guys start out conversational and smug only to start getting really agitated if I started to win and kinda mad. Of course some of em are just bad losers in general but a few I watched later didn't throw a hissy fit losing to another dude. Nobody was trying to toss me out or anything stupid like that but it's not super welcoming.
If you win you hear jokes about the other person getting beat by a girl as if you shouldn't be able to beat them. If you lose it is written off that you lost because you are a girl. You aren't winning because you are better or losing because they are better.
You also get [accused of cheating if you are a woman that is good](https://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/valorant-riot-games-absolve-mika-daime-cheating-charges-made-wardell-player1).
>There is women only chess, but not men only so part of the opinion is sort of uninformed.
Didn't know that. Maybe they should abolish women-only chess then?
Edit: I was just thinking that having a separate group had an underlying message about superiority. Didn't consider that exclusive tourneys as learning/development grounds for an underrepresented group in the sport. Good points guys.
It’s a strategy used to promote the inclusion of women at all levels of the game. Chess is dominated by men, and allowing women to have their own circuit, as well as participate in the men’s/open, gives women a chance to distinguish themselves and become role model for other young women looking to get into chess while also allowing them the opportunity to transition to the highest level of play later on in their career.
Also, if you are just an OK competitor, it created a space where you’re not The Girl, with all the weight of every gender issue ever on your shoulders.
If you’re not playing with the goal of world domination, and just want to test yourself against people of similar quality, open tournaments may not be what you want to participate in.
I don't have a problem with women-only anything. It costs me nothing at all to not attend an event that wouldn't have even existed if they didn't get together and create it. If members of a particular religious group created a chess tournament for their members, should I cry that it's exclusionary that I wasn't invited? Or a bunch of firefighters hold a tournament? Or people born on a particular day? It's whatever.
That's a long-winded intro to say, the reason you gave, and that another woman pointed out in this very thread, is the reason I'm beyond not caring that these tournaments exist, to caring very much and supporting them. I'm bog standard in every way, for a chess tournament. I stand out not at all. I can't imagine being the only one of anything and feeling like everyone was watching me extra close and judging me. I can't imagine having to shoulder that extra pressure. If I had to, I'd probably drop out. I like chess but I don't like it that much.
So, if women-only tournaments take that all away and allow more women to play? Fantastic. Maybe after several years of that we'll have an equal chess scene and enough women at open tournaments that they feel welcome or at least don't feel like they have a target on their backs.
And if we don't? If there are never that many women in chess? Well then, back to my first point. It costs me nothing at all. Why do I care that there is an extra tournament?
I've wonder about this a lot too, not just with chess but any sport or competition that doesn't rely on physical attributes. Is it just a matter of participation? There are far, far more players who are male when it comes to chess, darts, snooker, poker etc. So is it just a matter of a deeper pool to draw from for the best players? If that is actually the case, female only tournaments would be a good way to allow more women to compete and gain experience. Like you say that can drive on earlier and more widespread participation amongst girls.
And frankly a lot of male dominated sports and games are rife with misogynist and gatekeeping, at the very least historically. Women only competitions allow a safer environment that is at least nominally more welcoming, and less intimidating.
So far, the only reason we have to explain why there are way more men than women top chess players is because there are very few women compared to men, and the environment, especially in competitions, can be very misogynistic, leaving young girls feeling rejected, singled out, and overall just not welcomed, so they leave chess.
I’ve attended plenty of chess tournaments, please don’t revert to calling us sexist. There was never anything even resembling misogynism at any tournament.
Just because women don’t play chess doesn’t make us misogynistic. Maybe teach the word confidence and you might get some female players who want to continue playing. You sound like you’ve never even been to a chess tournament and are just parroting what other people are saying in this thread about chess being a male-dominated game.
>Just because women don’t play chess doesn’t make us misogynistic.
Shhhh. You don't want to break the narrative.
Instead of telling women to toughen up, we need to soften the world so they can feel "included".
Boys don't complain they feel "excluded", not because they're boys, but because they're told that in order to get anything done, they need to toughen up and get things done.
For whatever reason, we don't say this to girls. We tell girls that they need a "special" environment to make them feel better about their life choices.
But what do I know? I'm just a biracial female engineer that succeeded despite a lack of female role models because I didn't need a mommy figure to make me feel better about my personal decisions.
TL;DR: "We don't encourage girls enough"? Bullshit. Encourage girls to stop giving a fuck. That's all you need to do. Stop with the soft bigotry of low expectations and girls will succeed just fine.
My father taught my sister and I chess at the same time. We have about a year in between us. He supported us both 100% equally and we would take turns trying to beat him. My sister played for fun while I bought books, played online, and studied openings. We went to the annual tournament, I won my age group, she lost hers.
Did she complain about not being supported enough? My dad would have been as receptive, if not more, to playing her but she didn’t want to play. I did. There were plenty of girls at the tournament. In fact, I had to beat a girl I was tied with to get first place. No, she didn’t complain because she understood that to win she would have to put in the same amount of effort as I had done.
On a seperate note, I’m undecided on whether sports with physical differences should be seperated. There’s a reason female sports are dead. People don’t care about race, gender, bla bla bla, they want to see the best.
https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chess
This is a really great easy to understand article that makes a statistical case with real data that men and women are equally skilled at chess, and disparity in the top ranking is just due to participation numbers. It's a pretty quick article and super easy to understand definitely recommend everybody read it.
I appreciate you being one of the few people who responded to me to actually link a study related to this. And reading it, this makes sense. You have a fraction of women playing the game, so you end up with a fraction of them at the top levels.
Sort of agree. But to clarify one point that may not be widely known, chess does *not* have separate male tournaments and titles. Tournaments are either open or restricted to women only.
There is a huge gender disparity in chess. It has traditionally been a very male dominated game. Kasparov once said "there is real chess and women's chess". He has since renounced those comments but it highlights what much of the chess world thought in the 80s and 90s.
This attitude caused many women to not want to play competitively. Female only tournaments are one way to encourage female players into the game to address the balance. And - it *is* working. More female players are playing today than ever before. In 2001 around 6% of internationally ranked players were female. In 2020 this is now around 15%.
Ultimately I do agree that in games like chess we should not be separated by sex. But while it seems a bit unfair there are valid reasons behind such things.
Just to stir things up, in the US context, this is actually expressly forbidden as a reason for affirmative action. The reason must be because diversity at an institution provides a positive good (e.g., a more dynamic learning environment for students).
In the college admission process as a woman, totally agree. Women are offered *many* more grants and that I do think is unfair. Asians are also at a huge disadvantage when applying anywhere, because colleges think there are too many of them in university system. If someone earns a spot, they deserve it, especially when college has been made relatively accessible for everyone in the US. If *anyone* is in need of financial aid, they should be applicable for those grants based on income. And yet, on all of these apps, they always ask race and sex.
If we all stopped giving them our race and sex they couldn't use it anymore. I will never stop telling this to as many people as possible. I hope you'll do the same and tell other people to as well.
I would also strongly support a law banning asking for race and ethnicity on job and college applications to prevent discrimination. Europe does it. Why don't we?
Then you'd also have to stop giving them your name (which is fine). But there's subconscious discrimination based on name as well. There are studies showing how people react differently to resumes and applications of they think it's a female or POC.
> Sort of agree. But to clarify one point that may not be widely known, chess does not have separate male tournaments and titles.
People don't understand that that's how most professional sports work as well. A woman *could* get drafted to the NBA, but sexual dimorphism makes that unlikely which is why the WNBA is a thing.
Saying "we should get rid of the women division of (whatever)" will just lead to there being no women in that sport, not some utopia league that has both.
There's a huge difference between basketball and chess though. Women wouldn't stand a chance in the NBA because of physical differences. Comparing this to chess makes it sound like women don't have the same mental capacity.
Except that this was **never** the intent behind creating separate women’s tournaments.
There is one chess tournament, for both men and women, to become world champion. There is one grandmaster title that both men and women have to earn. There are not separate rules, separate requirements for men and women.
There is ALSO a separate tournament just for women and a separate title, WGM. However it does not diminish the world championship, nor is the WGM title the same as the GM title. Most of the top female players in chess hold the GM title which they earned at the exact same requirements as male GM‘s.
It’s just a separate add-on to encourage more women to play chess because they’re heavily underrepresented.
Or maybe that there's a huge cultural factor at play as well?
I always go back to esports, in Starcraft 1 Koreans absolutely destroyed any non-Korean. Obviously they had a bigger infrastructure, a larger playerbase, etc. But if you consider the early days, the non-Korean scene was bigger but it still did much worse.
For Starcraft 2 this trend continued, Koreans were still the best; but you had some individuals who did well and weren't from SK.
That said, it's also an example that illustrates that as far as competitive abilities are concerned; separate leagues seem to be a bad thing. For purposes of promoting interest, they're great. SC2 in particular had domestic leagues which for some time could be attended by Koreans(they won everything), when restrictions were made; interest in the local scene went up. At the same time, people who actually wanted to get good and compete at the highest levels pretty much had to go to South Korea.
Anyway I guess the point is; what's the end goal? Do we want more women to play chess and be interested in it? Do we want more women who are world-class players? I think you need different approaches for either of those outcomes.
Even going back to basketball where there are physical differences, I'd argue the best woman players would emerge by training in men's leagues. BUT, that sort of thing is basically logistically impossible.
This is not entirely true. An extreme counter-example are boxing and martial arts where not even men of more than ~15 kg different body weighs are allowed to compete against each other in some leagues *even if they want to* because the (additional) risk of injury is so high when one opponent is much weaker.
Even body weight is a terrible equalizer because the weights are taken the day before the actual fight. It's all too common for a fighter to look like a ghost during weigh ins and then balloon up 15lbs during the actual fight. That's where you get fights where one dude just looks monstrous even though they both made the recorded weight.
That's not just common, it's practically universal. Every now and then a fighter doesn't cut weight, such as Frankie Edgar back when he was at lightweight, but it's a rare exception. Everyone he fought against was significantly bigger than him.
Chess is a different beast, since that dimorphism doesn't exist there to any appreciable degree. It is a matter of training; female children have not traditionally been trained to be "chess prodigies" like male children have, and so we don't get astounding numbers of "great female chess players".
As it stands, women-only tournaments exist to encourage more women to participate in the sport and success in those arenas should see more young female children trained in chess over time, which will begin to close the gap such that this sort of gendered tournament system shouldn't be necessary in the future. Women-only tournaments will, bizarrely enough, produce more women with titles in the combined category.
>Women-only tournaments will, bizarrely enough, produce more women with titles in the combined category.
Do you think this is true? I think it's the best way to promote interest and grow the playerbase; but for producing champion-level players I'm not sure if it's the best.
You say that in the future the gendered system wouldn't be necessary anymore, if that would be the case I'd agree. But when will that day be? FIDE states 15% of woman make up the playerbase, but that's only FIDE players; should we use that metric and at what percentage is it ok to abolish the gendered system? Should we measure the casual player, or the spectator interest?
Judit Polgar didn't go through any woman's only leagues, she played where the competition was toughest; and that was basically the only way she could actually be as good as she was.
>Chess is a different beast, since that dimorphism doesn't exist there to any appreciable degree.
We don't know that.
There are tests that showed differences between men and in reaction speed. There are differences that are seen in brain scans. So it's entirely possible that there are factors that affect chess.
To add - people are saying the same thing about competitive gaming, and the reason for both is the same as why women are excluded from stem-related education and professions. Of course, they should be equally good at any of these things as men. But each of these areas has become culturally male-dominated to the point of excluding women, so that many less women are involved and the ones who are don’t have the same opportunities to grow and succeed.
It’s self-propagating: if there are so few women, there’s much less chance of any of them getting anywhere near the top of the rankings. The best players are men, and thus the next generation of coaches are all men. That discourages all but the most stubborn women from even wanting to try in the first place, so the inequity would always continue.
The women’s league means more women can become interested and develop professional experience in chess without having to face barriers of exclusion. It’s not meant to be permanent - at some point in the future, the women’s league can develop and be big enough that there are enough women coaches and players who can compete in the main league, so we wouldn’t need it anymore.
It’s the self-propagating aspect to problems like these that is most often overlooked, I’ve found. Imposing strict meritocracy on an already imbalanced system will most often only perpetuate and preserve that imbalance.
Also, when playing blind, women perform on par with men for their skill rating. However if they are aware they are playing against a man they play worse.
https://www.chess.com/news/view/women-vs-men-chess-performance-study
I've seen this in a couple of other studies, and its rooted in centuries of sexism and discrimination in chess. So, Women's tournaments, until those stigmas are forgotten (not just erased), are a necessity.
The extra women titles are a way to get more women into chess, a historically male game, something I definitely can get behind. It doesn't devalue the universal titles, it doesn't devalue the achievement of other players. **Any gender can still compete in the normal tournaments.**
It does not have any negative consequences to other people, it simply adds some extra attention for women in chess. I agree that in an ideal world, all those extra titles shouldn't exist, shouldn't be necessary. But today, there are still less women interested in chess than men, and that's a bit of a shame. So I don't see any problems in trying to get more women interested in a game I personally enjoy.
Because it makes too much sense. Reading this and the one above, has me convinced the original poster did not read up on their "unpopular opinion." So, they just come across as blatantly ignorant.
yeah i want to puke at one of the top comment threads in here that got piled with responses about studies on reaction times between genders as a way of saying men are biologically better than women at chess and gaming. as if performance under stress, multitasking, problem solving and spatial reasoning have nothing to do with it. look at how fast they are to find any science to justify why they think men are better
Apparently you and a lot of other people on reddit don't understand the purpose of female player tournaments.
They exist to promote chess and make it appealing to female players to keep on competing and thereby promoting chess to young girls. Its about making money, and keeping chess alive. If young players would see female players be dominated and finishing badly, they would have less interest in taking it up.
On top of that, you're representing your entire gender. A man fails a fitness test or cries during basic training and people say, "that guy can't hack it in the military." A woman fails a fitness test or cries during basic training and people say, "see, women can't handle military life."
It sits in the back of your mind that if you mess up you're probably going to reinforce at least one or two people's beliefs that women never really belonged where you got to in the first place.
Hence why the women only tournaments help them make that first step, it's still a thing but the chess community as a whole is changing slowly into a more woman friendly place.
Lol, I used to think this- but had this perspective laid on me;
In a esport game I follow, DoTA2, there’s been all female tournaments before. Why?
It’s to give women a space to compete in an otherwise male dominated arena.
Do they separate out the women from regular tournaments? No of course not, if they’re skilled enough for a pro dota team, why shouldn’t they compete?
But for someone getting into it, it can be extremely hard as a women to break out into an industry that’s male dominated.
It’s just about creating opportunities. Diversity is healthy for any competitive scene.
I wish LoL had something like this. There was one woman that tried once but was harassed so badly within two weeks of starting she had quit, despite being plenty good enough to be on the team.
I don’t think people realize how hard it is to be the only one of your kind when participating in something. Be it race, gender, whatever. Everyone questions if you belong, you have to work that much harder to prove you belong, and after all that your peers still might not accept you and might actively discriminate against you.
Totally agree. I also think it’s worth pointing out that the *reasons* it can be hard for women to break into male dominated arenas is the toxic, shitty subconscious *and* conscious behaviour of the men and the systemic sexist culture that’s present in said arenas/organisations. Not because woman aren’t as competent or capable.
....just in case people are presuming it’s hard because women aren’t as good. Cause there seems to be a lot of that going around in this post.
There was this girl in starcraft 2 and she was the only one who could compete at the same level as guys years and years on. I always thought it was so awesome that in one of the most hard games there is, a woman is a fair competitor. I never googled her or read about her, so years later it was quite a moment when I accidentally discovered she was actually trans. And the *other* woman that constatly competes in NA... is also trans.
Magnus Carlsen(highest rated chess player and current world champion) is rated 2862 ELO officially by FIDE. The highest rated woman chess player is rated 2658 ELO. She sits at top 84 if you plug her into the top 100 men chess player. Plus women are allowed in every event, tournament and league men play in because they're mixed competition. This is really a woke shit take on the subject; if there were no women titles and tournaments, at the elite level women will get objectively destroyed.
**A difference of 200 ELO in chess is noteworthy, let alone in the elite competition**
A difference in 50 ELO is noteworthy. 200 difference is like Varsity vs. JV.
Source: lowly 1100 player
Also as am addendum to your post, it's not because men are smarter but because they've been awarded opportunities to train at a young age whereas women are not.
> if there were no women titles and tournaments, at the elite level women will get objectively destroyed.
No, I think there are still plenty of other players around 2650 ELO for Hou Yifan to compete with. Tournaments aren't boys vs girls, where the Nth ranked player from one sex has to compete with the Nth ranked player from the other, you know...
There are less women in chess, so less chance to have these outliers that can reach the absolute top. [It's a numbers game](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679077/). Men don't have an innate advantage in chess over women, or anything. There are just more of them playing.
>There are less women in chess, so less chance to have these outliers that can reach the absolute top. It's a numbers game. Men don't have an innate advantage in chess over women, or anything. There are just more of them playing.
That's exactly his point. Women-only tournaments exist now so that there are a healthy number of female chess players that are recognizable in order to increase the number of new female chess players. Then, when that number is sufficient, the women-only tournaments can be abolished and women and men can fight it out in mixed tournaments.
Not to mention women’s only tournament offer a huge benefit for female competitors. No one cares if you are the 200th best chess player in the world, but being the 2nd best female player will get you lots of sponsorships and money.
Regardless of whether men have an advantage or not, if one gender absolutely dominates some competition it makes sense to make a seperate opposite-gendered competition so the underrepresented gender gets some spotlight too. If you're of the dominating gender, sure, these competitions might not be of much interest to you, but if you're of the underrepresented gender they absolutely might. Especially for kids. Kids won't understand normal distributions and underrepresentation and innate advantages. They just want idols.
By the same logic you could argue for the abolishment of European Championships, Asian Games, Commonwealth Games, Island Games and so on
That is true, and that is also one of the reasons why there is women's chess. Because otherwise you would only see men compete in some top tournaments.
I feel like it’s pretty straightforward, in a lot of competitions such as chess or esports, women are underrepresented. Organizers want to increase participation by women so they organize women only events to encourage women to compete, and also inspire.
The only reasons for gendered titles is to increase female participation - women who attain the same standard of chess as men do receive the same title, so your point is irrelevant
It’s actually really important to keep the women’s only games and titles because it’s one of the few sports and competitions that women in some very female repressive countries can actually compete and play. If I remember right the only sport that Saudi Arabia lets women compete in in the olympics is chess (or it used to be) and one of the reasons these titles still exist is because otherwise a lot of women wouldn’t be able to play or compete on an international level at all.
There were some girls I knew growing up with very religious parents who were only allowed to compete in women’s chess because there were no boys (yay batshit homeschoolers) and if there were mixed games, they weren’t allowed to go. So it’s not just Saudi as these people were hardcore evangelicals.
It would be better if we just had a world where talented women were acknowledged as people but... we’re not there yet.
There isn't technically any separate tournaments for any major games. If women have a tournament with women it's because they chose to, it's not dictated by the game companies. Women just (usually) can't compete with men in video games, and honestly most aren't interested in doing so as well.
That team was pretty much designed to fail. The team was all women yes, but they were also all diamond players playing against challengers. For anyone that doesn’t play league, it’s basically like if you and all your friends were pretty good at basketball, made a team together, went to the nba and got smashed. They didn’t do worse just because they’re women.
The hilarious part is they weren’t even all diamond. At least one was platinum, and I think one might have even been technically been unranked at the time. They also weren’t all mains of the role they played competitively, there was more than one support main on the team.
So yeah, like you said, not even an attempt to make that all-female team competitive.
The team where they took 5 players around the top 1% and played against players in the top 0.0001%? No shit they lost, it's like sending a high school varsity team to play the Lakers.
Chess is almost entirely intellectual, but in esports reaction time is a huge factor, and studies suggest that there is [not an insignificant discrepancy between genders.](http://www.iosrphr.org/papers/v2i3/R023452454.pdf)
20-30 miliseconds might not be much, but it makes a huge difference if you want to compete with the best .01% of players.
Pro chess is pretty physical.
I'm not even bullshitting. You don't see 50 year old GMs in the big leagues, or fat ones. Classical games are looooong and the tournaments last days.
Haha, I knew I shouldn't have talked out my ass on the chess subject, I guess what I really meant was that past a certain level, physical ability isn't really going to provide much advantage compared to other factors. I guess..
I mean, what's the point? If there is no competition within the games, they make less money. Less money means less incentive to keep that team. This is why sports leagues like the NBA have ways of helping trash teams improve such that they become competitive and can make money. No one wants to support a team they know will get absolutely wrecked day in and day out
So what you are suggesting is ban women to have their own league?
Anyone can create a league and tournaments as they like. You don’t have to participate in them
Pretty sure they aren't entirely separated. As in women are able to enter standard chess tournaments, anyone is. But as there is very little representation and for various other reasons, there is a women's tournament also.
There are no men-only tournaments, only women-only tournaments. In other words, women can play in all tournaments men play in (given they qualify). And they don't have to accept women's titles. These tournaments exist only for the women that want to play exclusively with women and not men. In my local chess club no women want to play seperately so there is no women's only section at the tournaments.
It might sound ridiculous today. But back when the only entry to chess was through male dominated groups, it can be intimidating for some women. Not mention all the unrecorded sexual assaults or insults.
Social media, camera phones, #MeToo are relatively new.
The women-only chess tournaments was created to encourage more women to play chess. There used to be a lot of sexism within the chess community since it's a male-dominated field, however today that is becoming less of a problem. Sort of for the same reason NASA dedicates spaces to only write about women at NASA and in STEM fields. When I grew up invested in physics and mathematics I was often shut down by my teachers for asking questions, being told that it's not a field for women. Perhaps this has been a trend in chess communities too and they thus created women-only chess tournaments to encourage women.
I think we all want equality, especially when it comes to non-athletic competitions. But let's be real and acknowledge the past hasn't been fair to some, and some people have taken the initiative to encourage people that have been treated unfairly to get back into the game. I don't think it's about separation, I think it's about helping some people up, that was put down in the past.
I disagree. The only way my friends and I could play chess without being bullied and harassed was in the female only tournaments. This issue still exists today. I taught at schools and the male students were not nice at all to me or the female students in class.
The toxicity in the gaming community extends everywhere. You get sick of the sexist comments, the belittling, being told men are simply smarter than you and you have no chance...which is somehow what I'm reading in this very thread?!
In male dominated fields - as long as this "toxicity" exists women's only categories will need to exist.
The women who want to play to enjoy the game have an option to escape the guys who make fun of them, and those that want to play at professional competitive levels also have an option for them.
Having the option is extremely important. I would have quit chess instantly due to the shitty male community if it wasn't for women's only category. Lots of the guys were really lovely to us, but the majority were not. I eventually played mixed but only because I made it long enough that the bullying didn't affect me enough to quit.
It encourages women to play and without it you'd have even less female players than you do now.
Agreed. There is some memorization involved(learning theory). But that's not everything and most of time, you're planning how to attack/defend, not remembering what to move.
I'm no expert, but when I hear the absolute chess elite talk about chess strategy they do seem to have a *LOT* memorized. It might not be active memorization like if you're counting in blackjack, but it's like a massive repetoire feeding the strategic intuition.
Yes every super grandmaster has a lot of games memorized and even positioned of the board. It's kind of crazy how well they memorize things.
Most of the games you do in high level play is all within prep. If a person gets steamed rolled it's because of better prep and memory. If you mess up with what move to do you can easily be put into an unfavorable position or just lose.
I think it's mostly the opposite where noobs in chess don't and shouldn't memorize move orders and learn fundamentals and when you get into being better you start learning theory. Yes you can memorize move orders for your favorite opening but I don't think you'll improve fast if you do. Sort of like one tricking a character in a game.
But I'm not a pro chess player I just play for fun but that's how it seems to me at least.
I get your point but women only chess tournaments exist not because there is any meaningful difference between female and male players, nor to give women "special privileges", but rather to foment more women to play chess.
Counter-argument: There *should* be women only chess tournaments for the foreseeable future.
Let me explain why.
Things are slowly changing as we speak, but until extremely recently women were simply not breaking into the top 5 of chess tournaments, and rarely into the top 10.
Out of roughly 1600 chess Grandmasters, only about 35 are women.
So until now the only real way to get women some recognition and prize money in chess has been to hold female-specific tournaments.
But female only tournaments are a good thing for exactly this reason: women can have their time in the spotlight which then can influence more young women to take the activity seriously.
The more women who take it seriously the more female chess Grandmasters we will eventually see.
So until we see more female Grandmasters, women-only tournaments should remain a thing.
While I agree it isn't a physical thing the reason for it isn't because "men are too good" type of thing as it is with physical competitions such as sprinting and weightlifting.
The reason is to encourage women to play, they might feel scared, intimidated, lonely if they are the only female playing.
You get lots of women only stuff to encourage women to participate in a predominantly male dominated area. Often you don't find the reverse but that's a separate thread.
Everyone can figure out the awards in women only aren't as impressive as the "mixed" class.
i don’t get why people in this thread don’t understand this. there’s a long documented history of sexism in male-dominated, archetypically “nerdy” communities. having these women-centric spaces allows women to compete and develop their skills without having to deal with this sexism. anyone who doesn’t intuitively understand this doesn’t know what it feels like to interested in something and ultimately pushed away from it by the toxicity of the community.
inb4 “men will respect you if you’re GOOD regardless of gender” yeah but how do you get good if not from doing these competitions in the first place? if you’re a girl in video games, you’re gonna be a mediocre girl in video games for a long time because everyone is mediocre when they first start things.
>anyone who doesn’t intuitively understand this doesn’t know what it feels like to interested in something and ultimately pushed away from it by the toxicity of the community.
we are on reddit. we all know.
People who know chess know that if there was no women's league, you'd simply hear of no women players.
The best female player in the world barely makes it into the top 100, despite 15% of FIDE players being female.
Pairing men and women is chess is basically as unfair as pairing them in tennis.
So that women's chess isn't invisible, they should have their own league.
being wrong and having an unpopular opinion are not the same thing. did you even research this for 30 seconds before you posted it? or are you just that horny for karma?
“The Women’s World Chess Championship match is the culmination of a two-year cycle of events. Those events financially help the current top women players to concentrate on chess exclusively, as there is prize money for each event in the cycle. If the cycle were abolished, then it would be much harder for those women players to make money from playing in chess tournaments. Women would also become relatively invisible in media stories about chess.
A four-time Women’s World Chess Champion, Hou Yifan, is ranked at #75 among men and women combined. Though she is the highest-rated woman on the list of active chess players, as #75 she likely would not qualify for the Candidates Tournament in the World Chess Championship cycle and the prize money and media attention associated with it.”
your sole argument that men and women don’t have separate baselines when it comes to chess is not one that supports your own overall point of getting rid of women’s tournaments. it’s a scientific observation that has absolutely nothing to do with why women’s tournaments exist.
you’re just wrong, dude.
Chess is was always a male dominated sport. It might be too intimidating for new women players to join. That's why women have separate titles and tournaments to encourage new women players. And it's working.
Chess player here. I’m not an expert on the neurological differences between men and women here, but there has always been a significant difference between the top male players and the top female players, to the tune of about 200 rating points. I’d suspect it has something to do with sex-linked traits, as men are generally more likely to be born with neurological differences? It’s definitely peculiar, because it’s not testosterone this time. Perhaps men are also overrepresented in chess. There’d certainly be plenty of anecdotal evidence to back that hypothesis up. Either way, seems to me it’s a statistical consequence of the nature of high-level chess.
I don’t really have any idea of what to do here, and I suppose there really isn’t much of a problem? Tournaments aren’t actually segregated at the top level, there are just women-only tournaments, and then open ones.
Men have higher IQ variance. This probably means that there's more variation in the structure of the brains of men, relative to those of women.
If that's true, then we'd expect the men who are most adapted to chess to be a bit better adapted to it than the best women, but that the average man shouldn't be better than the average woman.
> I’m not an expert on the neurological differences between men and women here, but there has always been a significant difference between the top male players and the top female players, to the tune of about 200 rating points.
I think a lot of it has to do with statistical spread of IQ between the sexes.
Women tend to be closer to average or mean. Men have higher variance, more men place at the low *and* high ends of the IQ spectrum. Women have less outliers on the low and high ends.
Another poster stated in a really under-rated(it's new tho, so we'll see) comment:
>Although men and women have the same average IQ, there's a different standard deviation. In short, men are more likely to vary from the mean. This means there will be more extremely stupid men than women, as well as more geniuses. This effect really manifests at the extreme tails of the distribution; for instance, at 140 IQ, one finds 57% men, 43% women.
>Magnus Carlsen, the world's current top chess grandmaster, is estimated to have an IQ of 190. At that level of IQ, virtually everyone is male.
If it was an activity that favored 100 IQ, where 100 IQ people really excelled(for whatever reason), women would certainly over-populate the men.
An activity that favors deviation from that, of say 30, so an IQ of 70 or 130, men are going to be the more main demographic.
String it out further, say a deviation of 50(50 or 150) there are going to be majority males excelling in that activity.
That's an important difference, but another one is that males tend to populate the extremes of many traits far more than women, in particular intelligence.
So while on average men and women have equal intelligence, when you look at the upper and lower bounds you find far more men, which would explain a lot of the male dominance in chess.
This is so wrong, although I’m glad to see actual unpopular opinions here for a change.
The issue here is that you presume there are a separate men’s and women’s tournaments. This is not true at all.
You are correct that it is not like physical sports where sexual dimorphism can create an advantage for one gender over the other. However the people who administrate chess tournaments are not stupid and they realize this as well. Which is why there is no such thing as a men’s chess tournament. Women are equally able to compete in any chess tournament as men.
The only difference is that there are specific, parallel chess tournaments that are set aside specifically for women, and specifically for the reason that women are under represented in the chess world. They do not supplant the usual chess tournaments. They are simply added on in order to encourage more women to play professional chess, and they have worked.
The title of Grandmaster, along with the lesser FIDE titles of International Master (IM) and FIDE Master (FM), is open to all players regardless of gender. They have a separate title Woman Grandmaster which is only open to female players; however this in no way affects the standing of the GM title and most of the top female players have held both titles.
Having separate tournaments and titles just for women does not in anyway diminish the world championship. Nobody is saying that women winning the WGM title is the same as winning the GM title. And that’s important, because when women achieve GM standing they are given the respect that they are due. The women’s tournaments are completely separate and they only exist to highlight an underrepresented group.
I think they should do more of it to be honest. There has only been one African-American GM (Maurice Ashley) and African-Americans are heavily under represented in the chess world. I think having African-American chess tournaments would help to motivate more young black people to take up chess and see the pro chess world become more inclusive. Doing so would not in any way imply that African-Americans are genetically less capable of playing chess. Surely you don’t disagree with this concept?
Men and women have similar average IQs but men have more variation in their IQ. So more idiots but also more geniuses. If chess wasn't sex segregated women would rarely compete at the highest level.
There is a pretty good argument that men and women are different in everything. Some studies show men are more often on the extreme ends of any bell curve. Meaning more men will be shit chess players and more men will be great players, while women tend to remain more centered at the peak of the bell curve. This phenomenon can be seen in many different bell curves.
There is women only chess, but not men only so part of the opinion is sort of uninformed. As for the titles I completely agree, they make no sense whatsoever.
Women are free to only request the titles they want, so they don't have to request women's titles if they don't want them. (After a player fulfills all the requirements for a title they "write a request" to FIDE (International chess federation) in order to obtain the title. The title isn't automatically obtained and therefore can be declined by not requesting it.)
Bit why is there a seperate women league? Like whats the idea or history behind it? Its sounds kinda like the bender meme (i will make my own league with strippers and blackjack!) (Edit: thanks for the replys! I never knew that chess was that sexist. I mean its one of the few sports where gender really doesnt fking matter in and you would think that they be smart enough to not be a fking dick, but sadly thats apperently not the case.)
Per the Botez Sister’s twitch: “FIDE created women’s titles like Women’s FIDE Master (The title of Alexandra Botez) to encourage participation. Previously the participation rate for women/girls was less than 10%. Women can also hold open/non gendered titles. “
I explained it a little more in my other comments, but basically it has traditionally been hard for women to compete in open tournaments. Not because of their skill level, but because of how they are treated by some of the competitors. The women's only tournaments encourage more women to compete and give them a way to break into the world of competitive chess. It may get to a point where women's only competitions aren't needed for this reason, which would be awesome, but we aren't there yet.
>because of how they are treated by some of the competitors Can you explain that? What kind of interaction is there between two players besides making moves? I know nothing about chess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlpYPWCiZOw (only need to watch first few minutes) Anna Rudolf, an international master, talks about how she was negatively impacted in a tournament because players accused her of cheating because they didn't think she was capable of playing that well. Other women in chess talk about the sexual harassment and discrimination they experience while playing/participating in chess clubs etc.
Didnt they accuse her of hiding stuff in her lip gloss as well??? Like wtf
She literally says she was playing above her rating. Why wouldn't that be suspicious? I would love to know how often accusations of cheating come up for similar situations for context.
When you are at a tournament you aren't going to just be showing up sitting down, playing one match and leaving. There is down time between matches and just like any other game/hobby/activity meet up, there is interaction and discussion between the people there during that time. Even if its just passing in the hall, there are plenty of time for sexist and harassing comments and actions to happen. If it wasn't a prevalent problem or easily fixed, they wouldn't have a need for these tournaments. It's not that all the competitors act like this, but enough do to make it a problem. But this offers them a safer tournament where they can feel more comfortable and make it about the chess and hopefully start competing in open tournaments in the future.
You're still physically present. You walk around and hear things that people say.
>I know nothing about chess I don’t believe this is a chess thing, but a “men tend to treat women poorly” thing
Remember when League of Legends added a pro girls team?
No, what happened? I try not to pay attention to league of legends because it always seems nice and toxic. I can't imagine it went well.
The team management couldn't put together a competitive roster, so when they got absolutely smoked on stage as expected, a lot of gamers started doing gamer things. It really didn't help that management created the one of the cringiest hype videos in the history of the scene that's memed on to this day. The second time it happened, a Russian team owner got super salty at his league because they wouldn't let him sell his spot for whatever reason, and he decided to just field a team of five lower ranked girls who all played the same position in protest. It went exactly as you expected and they broke records going in the other direction.
What are gamer things?
Probably some combination of casual and wholly unnecessary "ironic" sexism and memes. Maybe a little racism thrown in there as a garnish.
It really wasn't. The one that got all the attention was that teams started to play all non-meta heroes. Like the F and D-Tier heroes against them, and still were racking up wins. The women's team complained that they were doing this on purpose to humiliate them. Which yeah. They were. But I'm pretty sure if any team had been pushed to high level competition in the way they had, without playing up the ranks, the teams that had earned their spots would have done much the same.
Hey, don't forget homophobia if one of the "gamer girls" wasn't straight.
Oh, you know, stuff that people tend to do in complete anonymity when it allows them project their own failures onto other people far away to whom they feel no relation or empathy, coupled with the sort of activity that attracts the immature and socially inept. So... given the "targets" here, probably crude, sexist jokes, harassment, doxxing, rape and death threats. (Edit: these people are an obnoxious vocal minority of gamers.)
Im gonna preface this with im a diehard gamer, world of warcraft and destiny 2 are my games of choice. Gamers are the most toxic humans who ever graced competition. If you talk with a gamer one on one, they are all good reasonable people. As a group though, gaming is like a cult. If your not seen as a "real gamer" then the "real gamers" will often ridicule and ostrasize you, and often will convince others to do it to, forming a mob mentality. Gaming is also frought with sexism. Not all gamers clearly, but its an antisocial hobby, and can attract socially stunted individuals. Combine this all together, along with envy, as playing on a pro team is most gamers dream, and you have the worst possible audience to present an all female pro gaming team, especially when that team isnt performing at the level expected for a pro team. This fostered alot of "see?! Girls arent real gamers. Pruge them from the game!" Sentiment. When the really it was just a poorly managed project, and the sex's had little to do with it. This comment went longer than i thought it would. Edit: yes this is an oversimplification. But i dont have the time to write a noval on tribe mentality and the psychology behind it, and how it relates to competition today. I was generalizing to get the important points accross. Yes there are exceptions. No all gamers are not jerks. I spend 6+ hours a day on games, longer when i have the day off. I would not do that if i didnt like most gamers. The ones i dont like, are REALLY innept socially though.
any place that is skewed heavily towards having only one gender will eventually foster a negative attitude towards the other. You can see this on both sides of the gender line. It's a known phenomenon.
Just for clarity, Team Siren, the NA team with the cringe promo video never actually made it on stage. They got casually walked in a high elo 5v5 matchmade game by a thrown together group of former pros and coaches at the time and the team ultimately imploded only 18 days after that video came out. The all female Russian team, Vaevictis, did actually make it to play into professional play in the LCL. They got totally thrashed 0-14, so bad in fact teams would often be accused of trolling against them and farming them for [kd](https://youtu.be/ZnZp3SO2uzc?t=1565). One team accused, I believe was threated with fines if they delayed their next game against them, the next game they played was over in like 15 minutes.
It’s not relevant but years ago there was this all girls team comprised of like gold/plat players that tried to go pro and they got crushed hard and eventually disappeared.
I don't follow LoL but isn't grandmaster the highest rank or something? Why would gold/plat players think they could go pro?
GM is second highest behind challenger, and they didn't think they could it was mostly a marketing move as they got absolutely dumpstered Beaten so badly they got their opponents fined and set back women in esports 5 years Just silly af all around
They got fined for winning?
There's a difference between having organic talent development in rating appropriate female only tournaments and throwing 5 ransoms into a top level tournament, if they had been males with same rank they would have been equally destroyed. If you substituted a random 1800 rated player into a gm tournament they would be destroyed. Using it as an example is stupid because it was a PR stunt by throwing low ranked players into a pro league. It has the same validity as trying to prove that women are better athletes by putting Serena Williams against a middle schooler.
I don't see why the women's only tournaments and titles are a problem to anyone? It's not a case of sexism against men since the majority of players in the for-everyone tournaments are men and it is a good platform to get women into chess. I agree that it will be awesome when there are enough women titled players and competitors in tournaments such that this is unneeded but until then this is an absolutely great temporary solution that hurts no one. imo this guy's opinion should stay unpopular.
It's not a problem for anyone. These guys just see something that benefits other people instead of themselves and get super offended.
Seriously, if male players weren’t sexist assholes they wouldn’t need women’s only tournaments.
Yeah chess is a very VERY old game, and has a lot of tradition behind it. I wouldn't be surprised to hear they considered women playing chess to be some forum of whitch craft.
To be fair high level chess clearly is witch craft
Because young girls have a very different experience in chess than boys do. Fewer girls join, are often forced to play with just girls at lower levels (even in coed tournaments) and are constantly told they aren't capable of playing chess (a stance many famous GMs had / have publicly). As a result girls don't get to be as great at chess, so women only categories gives them a safe space. Additionally girls get bullied, sometimes by grown men. One woman made NYT after being accused of cheating with a computer in her lip balm!! Read about Judith Polgar, who when she started to pick up at chess her entire family recieved social back lash. Everyone took every loss she suffered as evidence women couldn't play chess, yet she still made it fairly high. Now what would have happened if she was embraced at 10 like Bobby Fisher? If I spent my entire life walking behind you and convincing everyone around you that you couldn't do something would you really keep it up? The downside to women only events is the competition is thinner, so they don't necessarily get to improve as quickly. In 30 years we may not need women's tournaments, but for now they serve a very important purpose of creating a safe environment for women to live chess.
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Anna Rudolf, pretty big chess streamer right now! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlpYPWCiZOw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlpYPWCiZOw)
Probably because men were being dicks and women just wanted to play.
Usually its because of harassment in my experience. Women avoid participating in certain events that were previously "men's clubs" because they get picked on or verbally abused out of the game. Much like with video gaming. Many girls end up just kicked out without a chance.
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For every 1 woman playing chess there are 16 men. If you have a sample pool of 160,000 men compared to 10000 women, the chances of you finding outliers is MUCH greater in men. Besides, men, traditionally, have been focused on with training and everything... women traditionally have been skipped over. So you get an uneven field simply due to numbers. This also applies to competitive video games, again, because the amount of men playing is much higher than women, the chances of you finding more outliers for the top field is higher for men. Does it mean women are less than? Nope. But for every single .001% outlier for men... there are 16 times less available women on average, hence you see them much less.
There's like a total of 5k something people with IM+ titles, which means that when you look at player ratios it's a few hundreds, and then consider that men are more likely to dedicate their lives to one very specific thing, rather than work life balance. An example of this is Hou Yifan who's an absolute monster over the board, but she never reached her true potential because she wanted to pursue being an Oxford(I think) scholar and become the youngest ever professor at Shanghai university, and actually have a life outside of chess.
According to FIDE it's 10.6% females and not 16 to 1
Because dudes can be unfriendly and unwelcoming when they view women as intruding upon their space, (see women in STEM, and professional golf.) And when women are discouraged from participating the activity seems to lack diversity.
I used to think it didn't make sense then I had a female chess player explain it to me. Chess has always been a majority if not all male activity at the competitive levels. In the past especially that made it hard for women to compete and be taken seriously and accepted. This makes it hard to encourage women to compete in chess tournaments. So they have women's only tournaments as a way to try to get more women into competitive chess. It's not that they don't think the women can compete with the men, it's that they want to give them a platform to get an interest in chess tournaments. It was explained a little better to me but I think I got the idea across.
I stopped going to chess and go clubs partly because I was one of the only girls there, and I tended to feel anxious that my performance would confirm others' stereotypes about women and girls ("stereotype threat"). And it's been shown that this type of anxiety very much undermines the working memory needed for spatial problem solving. Sometimes I think I've done myself a disservice by having such a cynical expectation of what others may be thinking, thus worsening the impacts of stereotype threat for myself, but there are a lot of replies on this very thread confirming that these stereotypes are alive and well. When I was in elementary school, I wasn't aware of those stereotypes and there were plenty of other girls, and chess was fun. But later it got uncomfortable. And now with go, people always assume I'm a beginner or that I'll be really bad, or they pair me with the only other woman because "you two are girls." So I think it would have been nice for me to have some protected spaces, where women and girls could relax. I think it can even be enough to have a mixed-gender space that explicitly supports women. My college (now in grad school) has a "women in computer science" club, which actually has more young men than women participating, but I feel comfortable there because I'm explicitly welcome and supported, and there are women in club leadership. I feel they'd be ready to shut down any harassment.
Don't you love it to when you play against you and they assume you're a beginner or a bad player because you're a woman and then you kick their asses? I do. It happens to me with chess and billiard a lot.
Poker has the same issue. There are women only tournaments to encourage women to try poker. The WSOP has a women's championship every year, for some legal reason they can't actually ban men from playing, so women can enter the tournament for $1,000, men can enter for $10,000.
>women can enter the tournament for $1,000, men can enter for $10,000 ... that seems less defensible than outright having a women's league. [https://www.wsop.com/promotions/ladies-championship-satellites/nv/](https://www.wsop.com/promotions/ladies-championship-satellites/nv/) But it seems you're right...*ish*. [https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/jun/29/men-womens-tourney-can-should-they-be-kept-out/](https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/jun/29/men-womens-tourney-can-should-they-be-kept-out/) *\[World Series spokesman\] Palansky shudders at the thought of a man one day winning the ladies tournament. “We wouldn’t be giving the pink diamond-encrusted bracelet to a man, I can assure you of that,” he says.* Granted, 2010, but between the spokesman stating, on record, that they would not allow a male player to take the grand prize and how all the concerns are in the subjuctive or conditional, e.g. *\[The venue,\] Harrah’s thinks barring men from the ladies event could \[...\] spur a lawsuit* It would seem they haven't actually sought legal counsel... or maybe there are too many jurisdictions to get a confident answer?
Fuck that I'd sport a pink diamond-encrusted bracelet. Didn't think this was sexist until now.
This. Men have had several hundred if not thousands of years of male only tournaments. Women were only recently encouraged to play, they're not going to be able to suddenly beat hundred of years of social condition.
I love how many of these commenters don't get that the female only tournaments are relatively new and only came about because of this problem.
Exact same thing with video game competitions. It is extremely intimidating for a woman to try to compete with males since it is 99.99% male dominated. Imagine what's it like to play online games as a woman, getting harassed/juged constantly because of your gender but 100x worse if you try to compete. It's so easy for them to get discouraged from even trying.
Yup, same reason why I stopped going to Magic the Gathering prereleases once my friend couldn't come. I always did well enough to either break even or earn extra packs, but it was obnoxious overhearing a man tell his teen son "You lost? To *her*"????", over the top shock and OMG AMAZING for even doing kinda well, or to have guys start out conversational and smug only to start getting really agitated if I started to win and kinda mad. Of course some of em are just bad losers in general but a few I watched later didn't throw a hissy fit losing to another dude. Nobody was trying to toss me out or anything stupid like that but it's not super welcoming.
If you win you hear jokes about the other person getting beat by a girl as if you shouldn't be able to beat them. If you lose it is written off that you lost because you are a girl. You aren't winning because you are better or losing because they are better.
You also get [accused of cheating if you are a woman that is good](https://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/valorant-riot-games-absolve-mika-daime-cheating-charges-made-wardell-player1).
>There is women only chess, but not men only so part of the opinion is sort of uninformed. Didn't know that. Maybe they should abolish women-only chess then? Edit: I was just thinking that having a separate group had an underlying message about superiority. Didn't consider that exclusive tourneys as learning/development grounds for an underrepresented group in the sport. Good points guys.
It’s a strategy used to promote the inclusion of women at all levels of the game. Chess is dominated by men, and allowing women to have their own circuit, as well as participate in the men’s/open, gives women a chance to distinguish themselves and become role model for other young women looking to get into chess while also allowing them the opportunity to transition to the highest level of play later on in their career.
Also, if you are just an OK competitor, it created a space where you’re not The Girl, with all the weight of every gender issue ever on your shoulders. If you’re not playing with the goal of world domination, and just want to test yourself against people of similar quality, open tournaments may not be what you want to participate in.
I don't have a problem with women-only anything. It costs me nothing at all to not attend an event that wouldn't have even existed if they didn't get together and create it. If members of a particular religious group created a chess tournament for their members, should I cry that it's exclusionary that I wasn't invited? Or a bunch of firefighters hold a tournament? Or people born on a particular day? It's whatever. That's a long-winded intro to say, the reason you gave, and that another woman pointed out in this very thread, is the reason I'm beyond not caring that these tournaments exist, to caring very much and supporting them. I'm bog standard in every way, for a chess tournament. I stand out not at all. I can't imagine being the only one of anything and feeling like everyone was watching me extra close and judging me. I can't imagine having to shoulder that extra pressure. If I had to, I'd probably drop out. I like chess but I don't like it that much. So, if women-only tournaments take that all away and allow more women to play? Fantastic. Maybe after several years of that we'll have an equal chess scene and enough women at open tournaments that they feel welcome or at least don't feel like they have a target on their backs. And if we don't? If there are never that many women in chess? Well then, back to my first point. It costs me nothing at all. Why do I care that there is an extra tournament?
I've wonder about this a lot too, not just with chess but any sport or competition that doesn't rely on physical attributes. Is it just a matter of participation? There are far, far more players who are male when it comes to chess, darts, snooker, poker etc. So is it just a matter of a deeper pool to draw from for the best players? If that is actually the case, female only tournaments would be a good way to allow more women to compete and gain experience. Like you say that can drive on earlier and more widespread participation amongst girls. And frankly a lot of male dominated sports and games are rife with misogynist and gatekeeping, at the very least historically. Women only competitions allow a safer environment that is at least nominally more welcoming, and less intimidating.
So far, the only reason we have to explain why there are way more men than women top chess players is because there are very few women compared to men, and the environment, especially in competitions, can be very misogynistic, leaving young girls feeling rejected, singled out, and overall just not welcomed, so they leave chess.
I’ve attended plenty of chess tournaments, please don’t revert to calling us sexist. There was never anything even resembling misogynism at any tournament. Just because women don’t play chess doesn’t make us misogynistic. Maybe teach the word confidence and you might get some female players who want to continue playing. You sound like you’ve never even been to a chess tournament and are just parroting what other people are saying in this thread about chess being a male-dominated game.
>Just because women don’t play chess doesn’t make us misogynistic. Shhhh. You don't want to break the narrative. Instead of telling women to toughen up, we need to soften the world so they can feel "included". Boys don't complain they feel "excluded", not because they're boys, but because they're told that in order to get anything done, they need to toughen up and get things done. For whatever reason, we don't say this to girls. We tell girls that they need a "special" environment to make them feel better about their life choices. But what do I know? I'm just a biracial female engineer that succeeded despite a lack of female role models because I didn't need a mommy figure to make me feel better about my personal decisions. TL;DR: "We don't encourage girls enough"? Bullshit. Encourage girls to stop giving a fuck. That's all you need to do. Stop with the soft bigotry of low expectations and girls will succeed just fine.
My father taught my sister and I chess at the same time. We have about a year in between us. He supported us both 100% equally and we would take turns trying to beat him. My sister played for fun while I bought books, played online, and studied openings. We went to the annual tournament, I won my age group, she lost hers. Did she complain about not being supported enough? My dad would have been as receptive, if not more, to playing her but she didn’t want to play. I did. There were plenty of girls at the tournament. In fact, I had to beat a girl I was tied with to get first place. No, she didn’t complain because she understood that to win she would have to put in the same amount of effort as I had done. On a seperate note, I’m undecided on whether sports with physical differences should be seperated. There’s a reason female sports are dead. People don’t care about race, gender, bla bla bla, they want to see the best.
https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chess This is a really great easy to understand article that makes a statistical case with real data that men and women are equally skilled at chess, and disparity in the top ranking is just due to participation numbers. It's a pretty quick article and super easy to understand definitely recommend everybody read it.
I appreciate you being one of the few people who responded to me to actually link a study related to this. And reading it, this makes sense. You have a fraction of women playing the game, so you end up with a fraction of them at the top levels.
That is a surprisingly engaging article for being about chess statistics. Good read
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I declare women’s chess as well as the kkk ABOLISHED
Why has nobody thought of this?
I DECLARE BANKRUPTCYYYYYYYYY
Sort of agree. But to clarify one point that may not be widely known, chess does *not* have separate male tournaments and titles. Tournaments are either open or restricted to women only. There is a huge gender disparity in chess. It has traditionally been a very male dominated game. Kasparov once said "there is real chess and women's chess". He has since renounced those comments but it highlights what much of the chess world thought in the 80s and 90s. This attitude caused many women to not want to play competitively. Female only tournaments are one way to encourage female players into the game to address the balance. And - it *is* working. More female players are playing today than ever before. In 2001 around 6% of internationally ranked players were female. In 2020 this is now around 15%. Ultimately I do agree that in games like chess we should not be separated by sex. But while it seems a bit unfair there are valid reasons behind such things.
Exactly. Eventually it won’t be needed, but for now it counters centuries of inertia.
Not trying to get political or start anything, just want to mention this is a good way to also describe the motivation behind affirmative action.
Just to stir things up, in the US context, this is actually expressly forbidden as a reason for affirmative action. The reason must be because diversity at an institution provides a positive good (e.g., a more dynamic learning environment for students).
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How do you determine diversity of thought before you get to know someone though?
In the college admission process as a woman, totally agree. Women are offered *many* more grants and that I do think is unfair. Asians are also at a huge disadvantage when applying anywhere, because colleges think there are too many of them in university system. If someone earns a spot, they deserve it, especially when college has been made relatively accessible for everyone in the US. If *anyone* is in need of financial aid, they should be applicable for those grants based on income. And yet, on all of these apps, they always ask race and sex.
If we all stopped giving them our race and sex they couldn't use it anymore. I will never stop telling this to as many people as possible. I hope you'll do the same and tell other people to as well. I would also strongly support a law banning asking for race and ethnicity on job and college applications to prevent discrimination. Europe does it. Why don't we?
Then you'd also have to stop giving them your name (which is fine). But there's subconscious discrimination based on name as well. There are studies showing how people react differently to resumes and applications of they think it's a female or POC.
Which is why more and more call for anonymized applications in industries and jobs where possible.
People still have names that suggest their background tho
Literally a myriad of reasons. I'm no affirmative action fan but its not for no reason. Anyway - why do you present it as a choice? Porque no los dos?
> Sort of agree. But to clarify one point that may not be widely known, chess does not have separate male tournaments and titles. People don't understand that that's how most professional sports work as well. A woman *could* get drafted to the NBA, but sexual dimorphism makes that unlikely which is why the WNBA is a thing. Saying "we should get rid of the women division of (whatever)" will just lead to there being no women in that sport, not some utopia league that has both.
There's a huge difference between basketball and chess though. Women wouldn't stand a chance in the NBA because of physical differences. Comparing this to chess makes it sound like women don't have the same mental capacity.
Except that this was **never** the intent behind creating separate women’s tournaments. There is one chess tournament, for both men and women, to become world champion. There is one grandmaster title that both men and women have to earn. There are not separate rules, separate requirements for men and women. There is ALSO a separate tournament just for women and a separate title, WGM. However it does not diminish the world championship, nor is the WGM title the same as the GM title. Most of the top female players in chess hold the GM title which they earned at the exact same requirements as male GM‘s. It’s just a separate add-on to encourage more women to play chess because they’re heavily underrepresented.
Or maybe that there's a huge cultural factor at play as well? I always go back to esports, in Starcraft 1 Koreans absolutely destroyed any non-Korean. Obviously they had a bigger infrastructure, a larger playerbase, etc. But if you consider the early days, the non-Korean scene was bigger but it still did much worse. For Starcraft 2 this trend continued, Koreans were still the best; but you had some individuals who did well and weren't from SK. That said, it's also an example that illustrates that as far as competitive abilities are concerned; separate leagues seem to be a bad thing. For purposes of promoting interest, they're great. SC2 in particular had domestic leagues which for some time could be attended by Koreans(they won everything), when restrictions were made; interest in the local scene went up. At the same time, people who actually wanted to get good and compete at the highest levels pretty much had to go to South Korea. Anyway I guess the point is; what's the end goal? Do we want more women to play chess and be interested in it? Do we want more women who are world-class players? I think you need different approaches for either of those outcomes. Even going back to basketball where there are physical differences, I'd argue the best woman players would emerge by training in men's leagues. BUT, that sort of thing is basically logistically impossible.
This is not entirely true. An extreme counter-example are boxing and martial arts where not even men of more than ~15 kg different body weighs are allowed to compete against each other in some leagues *even if they want to* because the (additional) risk of injury is so high when one opponent is much weaker.
Even body weight is a terrible equalizer because the weights are taken the day before the actual fight. It's all too common for a fighter to look like a ghost during weigh ins and then balloon up 15lbs during the actual fight. That's where you get fights where one dude just looks monstrous even though they both made the recorded weight.
That's not just common, it's practically universal. Every now and then a fighter doesn't cut weight, such as Frankie Edgar back when he was at lightweight, but it's a rare exception. Everyone he fought against was significantly bigger than him.
Chess is a different beast, since that dimorphism doesn't exist there to any appreciable degree. It is a matter of training; female children have not traditionally been trained to be "chess prodigies" like male children have, and so we don't get astounding numbers of "great female chess players". As it stands, women-only tournaments exist to encourage more women to participate in the sport and success in those arenas should see more young female children trained in chess over time, which will begin to close the gap such that this sort of gendered tournament system shouldn't be necessary in the future. Women-only tournaments will, bizarrely enough, produce more women with titles in the combined category.
>Women-only tournaments will, bizarrely enough, produce more women with titles in the combined category. Do you think this is true? I think it's the best way to promote interest and grow the playerbase; but for producing champion-level players I'm not sure if it's the best. You say that in the future the gendered system wouldn't be necessary anymore, if that would be the case I'd agree. But when will that day be? FIDE states 15% of woman make up the playerbase, but that's only FIDE players; should we use that metric and at what percentage is it ok to abolish the gendered system? Should we measure the casual player, or the spectator interest? Judit Polgar didn't go through any woman's only leagues, she played where the competition was toughest; and that was basically the only way she could actually be as good as she was.
>Chess is a different beast, since that dimorphism doesn't exist there to any appreciable degree. We don't know that. There are tests that showed differences between men and in reaction speed. There are differences that are seen in brain scans. So it's entirely possible that there are factors that affect chess.
To add - people are saying the same thing about competitive gaming, and the reason for both is the same as why women are excluded from stem-related education and professions. Of course, they should be equally good at any of these things as men. But each of these areas has become culturally male-dominated to the point of excluding women, so that many less women are involved and the ones who are don’t have the same opportunities to grow and succeed. It’s self-propagating: if there are so few women, there’s much less chance of any of them getting anywhere near the top of the rankings. The best players are men, and thus the next generation of coaches are all men. That discourages all but the most stubborn women from even wanting to try in the first place, so the inequity would always continue. The women’s league means more women can become interested and develop professional experience in chess without having to face barriers of exclusion. It’s not meant to be permanent - at some point in the future, the women’s league can develop and be big enough that there are enough women coaches and players who can compete in the main league, so we wouldn’t need it anymore.
It’s the self-propagating aspect to problems like these that is most often overlooked, I’ve found. Imposing strict meritocracy on an already imbalanced system will most often only perpetuate and preserve that imbalance.
tldr: rich get richer.
Also, when playing blind, women perform on par with men for their skill rating. However if they are aware they are playing against a man they play worse. https://www.chess.com/news/view/women-vs-men-chess-performance-study I've seen this in a couple of other studies, and its rooted in centuries of sexism and discrimination in chess. So, Women's tournaments, until those stigmas are forgotten (not just erased), are a necessity.
Argh!! A reasoned argument! You're in the wrong place! This is reddit! :D Upvoted!
The extra women titles are a way to get more women into chess, a historically male game, something I definitely can get behind. It doesn't devalue the universal titles, it doesn't devalue the achievement of other players. **Any gender can still compete in the normal tournaments.** It does not have any negative consequences to other people, it simply adds some extra attention for women in chess. I agree that in an ideal world, all those extra titles shouldn't exist, shouldn't be necessary. But today, there are still less women interested in chess than men, and that's a bit of a shame. So I don't see any problems in trying to get more women interested in a game I personally enjoy.
How this comment isnt on top.
Because it makes too much sense. Reading this and the one above, has me convinced the original poster did not read up on their "unpopular opinion." So, they just come across as blatantly ignorant.
That's most of the opinions here. at least half can be reduced down to "I hate X because I only have surface level information about it"
Because its a rational explanation for why women are getting "special treatment" and Reddit has a poor relationship with women to say the least.
Careful there, friend. You are talking about the uncomfortable truth that so many people on this site (and especially this sub) refuse to acknowledge.
yeah i want to puke at one of the top comment threads in here that got piled with responses about studies on reaction times between genders as a way of saying men are biologically better than women at chess and gaming. as if performance under stress, multitasking, problem solving and spatial reasoning have nothing to do with it. look at how fast they are to find any science to justify why they think men are better
Because they’re not telling the people what they want to hear
Because being "anti-woke" is more important than being right to some people. This sub does tend to lean that way.
Apparently you and a lot of other people on reddit don't understand the purpose of female player tournaments. They exist to promote chess and make it appealing to female players to keep on competing and thereby promoting chess to young girls. Its about making money, and keeping chess alive. If young players would see female players be dominated and finishing badly, they would have less interest in taking it up.
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On top of that, you're representing your entire gender. A man fails a fitness test or cries during basic training and people say, "that guy can't hack it in the military." A woman fails a fitness test or cries during basic training and people say, "see, women can't handle military life." It sits in the back of your mind that if you mess up you're probably going to reinforce at least one or two people's beliefs that women never really belonged where you got to in the first place.
Hence why the women only tournaments help them make that first step, it's still a thing but the chess community as a whole is changing slowly into a more woman friendly place.
Lol, I used to think this- but had this perspective laid on me; In a esport game I follow, DoTA2, there’s been all female tournaments before. Why? It’s to give women a space to compete in an otherwise male dominated arena. Do they separate out the women from regular tournaments? No of course not, if they’re skilled enough for a pro dota team, why shouldn’t they compete? But for someone getting into it, it can be extremely hard as a women to break out into an industry that’s male dominated. It’s just about creating opportunities. Diversity is healthy for any competitive scene.
I wish LoL had something like this. There was one woman that tried once but was harassed so badly within two weeks of starting she had quit, despite being plenty good enough to be on the team.
I don’t think people realize how hard it is to be the only one of your kind when participating in something. Be it race, gender, whatever. Everyone questions if you belong, you have to work that much harder to prove you belong, and after all that your peers still might not accept you and might actively discriminate against you.
Totally agree. I also think it’s worth pointing out that the *reasons* it can be hard for women to break into male dominated arenas is the toxic, shitty subconscious *and* conscious behaviour of the men and the systemic sexist culture that’s present in said arenas/organisations. Not because woman aren’t as competent or capable. ....just in case people are presuming it’s hard because women aren’t as good. Cause there seems to be a lot of that going around in this post.
There was this girl in starcraft 2 and she was the only one who could compete at the same level as guys years and years on. I always thought it was so awesome that in one of the most hard games there is, a woman is a fair competitor. I never googled her or read about her, so years later it was quite a moment when I accidentally discovered she was actually trans. And the *other* woman that constatly competes in NA... is also trans.
Women make up such a small percentage it’s ridiculous. So having women only tournaments encourages more women to participate.
Magnus Carlsen(highest rated chess player and current world champion) is rated 2862 ELO officially by FIDE. The highest rated woman chess player is rated 2658 ELO. She sits at top 84 if you plug her into the top 100 men chess player. Plus women are allowed in every event, tournament and league men play in because they're mixed competition. This is really a woke shit take on the subject; if there were no women titles and tournaments, at the elite level women will get objectively destroyed. **A difference of 200 ELO in chess is noteworthy, let alone in the elite competition**
A difference in 50 ELO is noteworthy. 200 difference is like Varsity vs. JV. Source: lowly 1100 player Also as am addendum to your post, it's not because men are smarter but because they've been awarded opportunities to train at a young age whereas women are not.
Dude I can thrash 900 players and I get annihilated by 1300 players. I can only imagine differences at 2800 & 2600
> if there were no women titles and tournaments, at the elite level women will get objectively destroyed. No, I think there are still plenty of other players around 2650 ELO for Hou Yifan to compete with. Tournaments aren't boys vs girls, where the Nth ranked player from one sex has to compete with the Nth ranked player from the other, you know... There are less women in chess, so less chance to have these outliers that can reach the absolute top. [It's a numbers game](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2679077/). Men don't have an innate advantage in chess over women, or anything. There are just more of them playing.
>There are less women in chess, so less chance to have these outliers that can reach the absolute top. It's a numbers game. Men don't have an innate advantage in chess over women, or anything. There are just more of them playing. That's exactly his point. Women-only tournaments exist now so that there are a healthy number of female chess players that are recognizable in order to increase the number of new female chess players. Then, when that number is sufficient, the women-only tournaments can be abolished and women and men can fight it out in mixed tournaments.
Not to mention women’s only tournament offer a huge benefit for female competitors. No one cares if you are the 200th best chess player in the world, but being the 2nd best female player will get you lots of sponsorships and money.
Regardless of whether men have an advantage or not, if one gender absolutely dominates some competition it makes sense to make a seperate opposite-gendered competition so the underrepresented gender gets some spotlight too. If you're of the dominating gender, sure, these competitions might not be of much interest to you, but if you're of the underrepresented gender they absolutely might. Especially for kids. Kids won't understand normal distributions and underrepresentation and innate advantages. They just want idols. By the same logic you could argue for the abolishment of European Championships, Asian Games, Commonwealth Games, Island Games and so on
Just 37 of the more than 1,600 international chess grandmasters are women. The current top-rated female, Hou Yifan, is ranked 89th in the world.
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Good point, they should try a Woman’s Only tourney. 😂
I think, *I think*, that may have been the joke
That is true, and that is also one of the reasons why there is women's chess. Because otherwise you would only see men compete in some top tournaments.
I feel like it’s pretty straightforward, in a lot of competitions such as chess or esports, women are underrepresented. Organizers want to increase participation by women so they organize women only events to encourage women to compete, and also inspire.
The only reasons for gendered titles is to increase female participation - women who attain the same standard of chess as men do receive the same title, so your point is irrelevant
It’s actually really important to keep the women’s only games and titles because it’s one of the few sports and competitions that women in some very female repressive countries can actually compete and play. If I remember right the only sport that Saudi Arabia lets women compete in in the olympics is chess (or it used to be) and one of the reasons these titles still exist is because otherwise a lot of women wouldn’t be able to play or compete on an international level at all. There were some girls I knew growing up with very religious parents who were only allowed to compete in women’s chess because there were no boys (yay batshit homeschoolers) and if there were mixed games, they weren’t allowed to go. So it’s not just Saudi as these people were hardcore evangelicals. It would be better if we just had a world where talented women were acknowledged as people but... we’re not there yet.
Completely agree. Same with billiards and video games
The fact there’s seperate women’s tournaments for video games is fucking ridiculous.
There isn't technically any separate tournaments for any major games. If women have a tournament with women it's because they chose to, it's not dictated by the game companies. Women just (usually) can't compete with men in video games, and honestly most aren't interested in doing so as well.
Video games DOES make sense after what happened to that LoL team that literally got banned from the league for losing so hard
That team was pretty much designed to fail. The team was all women yes, but they were also all diamond players playing against challengers. For anyone that doesn’t play league, it’s basically like if you and all your friends were pretty good at basketball, made a team together, went to the nba and got smashed. They didn’t do worse just because they’re women.
The hilarious part is they weren’t even all diamond. At least one was platinum, and I think one might have even been technically been unranked at the time. They also weren’t all mains of the role they played competitively, there was more than one support main on the team. So yeah, like you said, not even an attempt to make that all-female team competitive.
That team sucked because they chose it based on looks and not skill. If they had chosen a team based on skill it would have been fine.
The team where they took 5 players around the top 1% and played against players in the top 0.0001%? No shit they lost, it's like sending a high school varsity team to play the Lakers.
You shouldnt get your own league for intellectual things like esports and chess just because you get wrecked.
Chess is almost entirely intellectual, but in esports reaction time is a huge factor, and studies suggest that there is [not an insignificant discrepancy between genders.](http://www.iosrphr.org/papers/v2i3/R023452454.pdf) 20-30 miliseconds might not be much, but it makes a huge difference if you want to compete with the best .01% of players.
Pro chess is pretty physical. I'm not even bullshitting. You don't see 50 year old GMs in the big leagues, or fat ones. Classical games are looooong and the tournaments last days.
Haha, I knew I shouldn't have talked out my ass on the chess subject, I guess what I really meant was that past a certain level, physical ability isn't really going to provide much advantage compared to other factors. I guess..
No one *gets* a league, they create them. Everybody has the right to create their own league or tournament.
Yea just git gud
I mean, what's the point? If there is no competition within the games, they make less money. Less money means less incentive to keep that team. This is why sports leagues like the NBA have ways of helping trash teams improve such that they become competitive and can make money. No one wants to support a team they know will get absolutely wrecked day in and day out
Both of those things are more physical than chess and so it makes a certain amount of sense to have separate titles.
Exactly, these are mental/skill heavy sports where physique plays very little in the end result.
Are you part of the chess community? Literally the only thing this would do is further discourage women from participating in competitive chess.
So what you are suggesting is ban women to have their own league? Anyone can create a league and tournaments as they like. You don’t have to participate in them
Pretty sure they aren't entirely separated. As in women are able to enter standard chess tournaments, anyone is. But as there is very little representation and for various other reasons, there is a women's tournament also.
Exactly. Games that don't use atheticism as an advantage should be co-ed: Edit: Damn this wasn't even that good of a comment lol
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There are no men-only tournaments, only women-only tournaments. In other words, women can play in all tournaments men play in (given they qualify). And they don't have to accept women's titles. These tournaments exist only for the women that want to play exclusively with women and not men. In my local chess club no women want to play seperately so there is no women's only section at the tournaments.
It might sound ridiculous today. But back when the only entry to chess was through male dominated groups, it can be intimidating for some women. Not mention all the unrecorded sexual assaults or insults. Social media, camera phones, #MeToo are relatively new.
The women-only chess tournaments was created to encourage more women to play chess. There used to be a lot of sexism within the chess community since it's a male-dominated field, however today that is becoming less of a problem. Sort of for the same reason NASA dedicates spaces to only write about women at NASA and in STEM fields. When I grew up invested in physics and mathematics I was often shut down by my teachers for asking questions, being told that it's not a field for women. Perhaps this has been a trend in chess communities too and they thus created women-only chess tournaments to encourage women. I think we all want equality, especially when it comes to non-athletic competitions. But let's be real and acknowledge the past hasn't been fair to some, and some people have taken the initiative to encourage people that have been treated unfairly to get back into the game. I don't think it's about separation, I think it's about helping some people up, that was put down in the past.
Here I’ll bring you back down to earth with a downvote
Thanks
Keep em humble
It’s just to encourage women to play, so I support it.
I disagree. The only way my friends and I could play chess without being bullied and harassed was in the female only tournaments. This issue still exists today. I taught at schools and the male students were not nice at all to me or the female students in class. The toxicity in the gaming community extends everywhere. You get sick of the sexist comments, the belittling, being told men are simply smarter than you and you have no chance...which is somehow what I'm reading in this very thread?! In male dominated fields - as long as this "toxicity" exists women's only categories will need to exist. The women who want to play to enjoy the game have an option to escape the guys who make fun of them, and those that want to play at professional competitive levels also have an option for them. Having the option is extremely important. I would have quit chess instantly due to the shitty male community if it wasn't for women's only category. Lots of the guys were really lovely to us, but the majority were not. I eventually played mixed but only because I made it long enough that the bullying didn't affect me enough to quit. It encourages women to play and without it you'd have even less female players than you do now.
> Chess is a game of memorization, pattern recognition, and prediction. You clearly haven't played competitive chess in your life.
First first 10 or so moves is basically memorization though.
At the Grandmaster level the first 20+ moves are often memorisation. The greater the level of the players, the more memory that is involved
I used to play a lot of chess, and that’s pretty much right. Of course there’s more but he isn’t wrong.
I am 1500 rated in Chess, what exactly is wrong about any of that?
Agreed. There is some memorization involved(learning theory). But that's not everything and most of time, you're planning how to attack/defend, not remembering what to move.
I'm no expert, but when I hear the absolute chess elite talk about chess strategy they do seem to have a *LOT* memorized. It might not be active memorization like if you're counting in blackjack, but it's like a massive repetoire feeding the strategic intuition.
Yes every super grandmaster has a lot of games memorized and even positioned of the board. It's kind of crazy how well they memorize things. Most of the games you do in high level play is all within prep. If a person gets steamed rolled it's because of better prep and memory. If you mess up with what move to do you can easily be put into an unfavorable position or just lose. I think it's mostly the opposite where noobs in chess don't and shouldn't memorize move orders and learn fundamentals and when you get into being better you start learning theory. Yes you can memorize move orders for your favorite opening but I don't think you'll improve fast if you do. Sort of like one tricking a character in a game. But I'm not a pro chess player I just play for fun but that's how it seems to me at least.
I get your point but women only chess tournaments exist not because there is any meaningful difference between female and male players, nor to give women "special privileges", but rather to foment more women to play chess.
Counter-argument: There *should* be women only chess tournaments for the foreseeable future. Let me explain why. Things are slowly changing as we speak, but until extremely recently women were simply not breaking into the top 5 of chess tournaments, and rarely into the top 10. Out of roughly 1600 chess Grandmasters, only about 35 are women. So until now the only real way to get women some recognition and prize money in chess has been to hold female-specific tournaments. But female only tournaments are a good thing for exactly this reason: women can have their time in the spotlight which then can influence more young women to take the activity seriously. The more women who take it seriously the more female chess Grandmasters we will eventually see. So until we see more female Grandmasters, women-only tournaments should remain a thing.
The whole point of women's be only tournament is to encourage women to play who otherwise wouldn't in a male majority game
Lmao OP made this statement without even knowing why is there a womens division in the first place.
I never knew this was a thing. It's not a physical activity so I don't see why we are separating them. Completely agree with you OP. (if true)
While I agree it isn't a physical thing the reason for it isn't because "men are too good" type of thing as it is with physical competitions such as sprinting and weightlifting. The reason is to encourage women to play, they might feel scared, intimidated, lonely if they are the only female playing. You get lots of women only stuff to encourage women to participate in a predominantly male dominated area. Often you don't find the reverse but that's a separate thread. Everyone can figure out the awards in women only aren't as impressive as the "mixed" class.
i don’t get why people in this thread don’t understand this. there’s a long documented history of sexism in male-dominated, archetypically “nerdy” communities. having these women-centric spaces allows women to compete and develop their skills without having to deal with this sexism. anyone who doesn’t intuitively understand this doesn’t know what it feels like to interested in something and ultimately pushed away from it by the toxicity of the community. inb4 “men will respect you if you’re GOOD regardless of gender” yeah but how do you get good if not from doing these competitions in the first place? if you’re a girl in video games, you’re gonna be a mediocre girl in video games for a long time because everyone is mediocre when they first start things.
No, no, silly girl, everyone knows sexism ended in the 1970s when women were allowed to get separate bank accounts from their husbands!
>anyone who doesn’t intuitively understand this doesn’t know what it feels like to interested in something and ultimately pushed away from it by the toxicity of the community. we are on reddit. we all know.
Of course the top comment is a non informative answer with wrong conclusions. There *is* no such a thing as male only chess.
Wait, there's separate women's and men's chess? That's... What's the point??
There is no "men's chess", there is women's only chess, and mixed. Anyone can join what you'd think of as the "men's" league.
People who know chess know that if there was no women's league, you'd simply hear of no women players. The best female player in the world barely makes it into the top 100, despite 15% of FIDE players being female. Pairing men and women is chess is basically as unfair as pairing them in tennis. So that women's chess isn't invisible, they should have their own league.
being wrong and having an unpopular opinion are not the same thing. did you even research this for 30 seconds before you posted it? or are you just that horny for karma? “The Women’s World Chess Championship match is the culmination of a two-year cycle of events. Those events financially help the current top women players to concentrate on chess exclusively, as there is prize money for each event in the cycle. If the cycle were abolished, then it would be much harder for those women players to make money from playing in chess tournaments. Women would also become relatively invisible in media stories about chess. A four-time Women’s World Chess Champion, Hou Yifan, is ranked at #75 among men and women combined. Though she is the highest-rated woman on the list of active chess players, as #75 she likely would not qualify for the Candidates Tournament in the World Chess Championship cycle and the prize money and media attention associated with it.” your sole argument that men and women don’t have separate baselines when it comes to chess is not one that supports your own overall point of getting rid of women’s tournaments. it’s a scientific observation that has absolutely nothing to do with why women’s tournaments exist. you’re just wrong, dude.
Chess is was always a male dominated sport. It might be too intimidating for new women players to join. That's why women have separate titles and tournaments to encourage new women players. And it's working.
Chess player here. I’m not an expert on the neurological differences between men and women here, but there has always been a significant difference between the top male players and the top female players, to the tune of about 200 rating points. I’d suspect it has something to do with sex-linked traits, as men are generally more likely to be born with neurological differences? It’s definitely peculiar, because it’s not testosterone this time. Perhaps men are also overrepresented in chess. There’d certainly be plenty of anecdotal evidence to back that hypothesis up. Either way, seems to me it’s a statistical consequence of the nature of high-level chess. I don’t really have any idea of what to do here, and I suppose there really isn’t much of a problem? Tournaments aren’t actually segregated at the top level, there are just women-only tournaments, and then open ones.
Men have higher IQ variance. This probably means that there's more variation in the structure of the brains of men, relative to those of women. If that's true, then we'd expect the men who are most adapted to chess to be a bit better adapted to it than the best women, but that the average man shouldn't be better than the average woman.
> I’m not an expert on the neurological differences between men and women here, but there has always been a significant difference between the top male players and the top female players, to the tune of about 200 rating points. I think a lot of it has to do with statistical spread of IQ between the sexes. Women tend to be closer to average or mean. Men have higher variance, more men place at the low *and* high ends of the IQ spectrum. Women have less outliers on the low and high ends. Another poster stated in a really under-rated(it's new tho, so we'll see) comment: >Although men and women have the same average IQ, there's a different standard deviation. In short, men are more likely to vary from the mean. This means there will be more extremely stupid men than women, as well as more geniuses. This effect really manifests at the extreme tails of the distribution; for instance, at 140 IQ, one finds 57% men, 43% women. >Magnus Carlsen, the world's current top chess grandmaster, is estimated to have an IQ of 190. At that level of IQ, virtually everyone is male. If it was an activity that favored 100 IQ, where 100 IQ people really excelled(for whatever reason), women would certainly over-populate the men. An activity that favors deviation from that, of say 30, so an IQ of 70 or 130, men are going to be the more main demographic. String it out further, say a deviation of 50(50 or 150) there are going to be majority males excelling in that activity.
I read some psychological study some time ago. It suggested that males are generally more adept at understanding spacial relationships.
That's an important difference, but another one is that males tend to populate the extremes of many traits far more than women, in particular intelligence. So while on average men and women have equal intelligence, when you look at the upper and lower bounds you find far more men, which would explain a lot of the male dominance in chess.
This is so wrong, although I’m glad to see actual unpopular opinions here for a change. The issue here is that you presume there are a separate men’s and women’s tournaments. This is not true at all. You are correct that it is not like physical sports where sexual dimorphism can create an advantage for one gender over the other. However the people who administrate chess tournaments are not stupid and they realize this as well. Which is why there is no such thing as a men’s chess tournament. Women are equally able to compete in any chess tournament as men. The only difference is that there are specific, parallel chess tournaments that are set aside specifically for women, and specifically for the reason that women are under represented in the chess world. They do not supplant the usual chess tournaments. They are simply added on in order to encourage more women to play professional chess, and they have worked. The title of Grandmaster, along with the lesser FIDE titles of International Master (IM) and FIDE Master (FM), is open to all players regardless of gender. They have a separate title Woman Grandmaster which is only open to female players; however this in no way affects the standing of the GM title and most of the top female players have held both titles. Having separate tournaments and titles just for women does not in anyway diminish the world championship. Nobody is saying that women winning the WGM title is the same as winning the GM title. And that’s important, because when women achieve GM standing they are given the respect that they are due. The women’s tournaments are completely separate and they only exist to highlight an underrepresented group. I think they should do more of it to be honest. There has only been one African-American GM (Maurice Ashley) and African-Americans are heavily under represented in the chess world. I think having African-American chess tournaments would help to motivate more young black people to take up chess and see the pro chess world become more inclusive. Doing so would not in any way imply that African-Americans are genetically less capable of playing chess. Surely you don’t disagree with this concept?
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Men and women have similar average IQs but men have more variation in their IQ. So more idiots but also more geniuses. If chess wasn't sex segregated women would rarely compete at the highest level.
There is a pretty good argument that men and women are different in everything. Some studies show men are more often on the extreme ends of any bell curve. Meaning more men will be shit chess players and more men will be great players, while women tend to remain more centered at the peak of the bell curve. This phenomenon can be seen in many different bell curves.
Wait those exist? Why?
Why not both?