Chess: Checkmate for the Egalitarians
Being in touch with your feminine side now confers such an advantage on modern athletes, that mainstream sports are finally wising up. Cycling, swimming, and rugby have already taken steps to ban ‘trans women’ from female competition, and others are following suit. This means that the men’s B league is having to look further afield for easy pickings. The growth of ill-fitting frocks around the chessboard however, is a move no one predicted—seeing as almost nothing physical ever takes place across it.
Nonetheless, in April of this year a male Kenyan player was ‘caught’ disguising himself in a burka, in an attempt to win a female open tournament. And with FIDE (the chess governing body) receiving increasing number of requests from players who “identify as transgender,” the federation ruled on Monday that trans women will not be allowed to compete in female events, pending a review.
The interesting aspect of this story, is that it seems to have created a perfect storm for the perpetually-offended. The trans women are predictably up in arms at the ban: “This appalling situation will lead to depression and suicide attempts,” said Yosha Iglesias, a transgender chess master. The feminists are none too happy, either. Labour MP (and incidentally 1976 Under-18 Girls champion), Angela Eagle, said the ban was “Ridiculous and offensive to women.”
The great irony however, is the opposition voiced by top level female players (many of whom have spent their careers demanding acceptance from the men), who are now advocating segregation. Chief among them is Susan Polgar, the oldest of three Hungarian child prodigies who were homeschooled by their psychologist father with a particular emphasis on chess. Polgar is unquestionably a great player—a genuine Grandmaster (the third woman to achieve the game’s highest accolade), and one of the game’s best commentators. Notwithstanding, on this issue I believe her opinion is misguided, and I quizzed her about it earlier this year:
https://twitter.com/Frankhaviland/status/1645022840226476032?s=20
Not only am I deeply sympathetic to Polgar’s history, she’s certainly right about the lack of chivalry. Women in chess have faced consistent hostility, with many a world champion being less than gracious. The great Bobby Fischer was dismissive in the extreme, once claiming that he could give any woman “knight odds” (playing her without one of his minor pieces)—an enormous disadvantage. The legendary Garry Kasparov once quipped that “Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players; they are not great fighters,” although he has reevaluated his position over the years. One of Britain’s finest players, former world championship contender Nigel Short was more measured, but still argued that “Men and women’s brains are hardwired very differently…we should just gracefully accept it as a fact.”
The ladies certainly have a point. With a mere 15% of players estimated to be female (and it used to be substantially less), the chess world can be a daunting place. Having played chess semi-seriously for a number of years, I can reveal that the chess community is a Who’s Who of personality disorders. I have observed 80-year-old punch-ups after a lost game, panic attacks, nervous ticks, lager-swilling hooligans … and that’s just the PG version!
The trouble is, the men (in or out of dresses) have a point too: they may simply be better. One reason we can make firm conclusions in chess, with regards to ability, is that the sport incorporates the incredibly accurate Elo rating system. This statistical measure gauges a player’s strength based on his results from the population he has competed against. And on this metric, the gender disparity is substantial. For instance, if I were currently an active player in Britain, I’d be happy to break into the men’s top 1,000; whereas if I were a woman, I’d expect to threaten the top 20. The usual challenge to this line of argument, is that women suffer from underrepresentation in the game, which explains their lower ratings. The trouble is, even when the figures are adjusted proportionally, the men still come up with considerably higher average ratings.
There is a wider point here though: whichever side of the ideological fence you sit, chess is the ultimate meritocracy, and therefore the perfect forum to genuinely test the equality hypothesis. Chess can be played by anyone—on the weekend tournament circuit, one will regularly encounter child prodigies, centenarians, the disabled, and even the blind. The late, great Bobby Fischer (still considered a contender for the greatest player of all time) was raised in impoverished circumstances, and had no opportunity to play other children after his sister lost interest in the game. He circumvented the problem by playing against himself.
Chess is a 100% information game, where the rules are consistent for all. There are no umpires to bias the proceedings, and a very narrow range of performance enhancing drugs to worry about (for which there is testing at the highest level). Access to educational materials has never been so widespread or cheap (in Fischer’s day, he had to teach himself Russian just to keep up with the latest theory!). And best of all for women, the majority of chess is now played on the internet—which means the patriarchy can be avoided entirely.
Despite all this, you’d be hard-pushed to find an egalitarian who likes what they see when the experiment is run—and it has been. The results are unequivocal—in fact, they’re precisely what one would predict, if one were a sexist, misogynist dinosaur like myself. Of the world’s almost 2,000 Grandmasters, only 41 are female (just 2%). And the world’s top female players are nowhere near the men’s top 100.
There are substantial reasons why men may simply be better at chess, and they’re fairly convincing. First of all, in adulthood male brains are at least 10% larger than female brains, a difference which persists even after adjustments for body size. Then there’s the question of intelligence, which is famously skewed according to gender. While men certainly comprise the majority of stupid people, they are also vastly overrepresented at the genius level: at IQ 155, there are eight times as many men as women in the distribution. Men are also naturally more competitive than women, and more driven to boot.
The one exception to this is the aforementioned case of the Polgar sisters, and their father’s world-famous ‘chess experiment.’ It is worth noting that Judit (the youngest of the three, and unquestionably the strongest female chess player of all time) peaked at number 8 in the world, and was selected to play in the Candidates Tournament in 2005 (the winner of which may challenge the world champion), although she did finish last. Her peak rating was well over 2700 (distinguishing her as a ‘Super Grandmaster’), and she defeated 11 current or former world champions during her career. Judit retired in 2014 in order to spend more time with her family.
While the Polgars are clearly outliers, the case of Judit does seem to suggest there is no inviolable reason why women cannot compete at the highest level of chess. But, it would appear statistically improbable that there will ever be a female world champion; nor that the substantial gap between the sexes will be eradicated any time soon.
I have zero objection to women-only events and titles, or women competing with men. What I object to, is those people who want it every which way. You cannot simultaneously demand equal treatment, and object to male participation (even if that masculinity comes in drag). Men pretending to be women to gain an advantage in sport is an ugly practice which needs to be stamped out. Men competing against women in chess however, would seem to be eminently sensible if the egalitarians truly believed their hype. Or at least, until women start identifying as men.
This piece first appeared in The European Conservative, and is reproduced by kind permission.
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