OnTheQueenside: “Over 50 times women have won against SuperGMs”
Over 50 times women have won against SuperGMs, says OnTheQueenside at the new article at Lichess. Judit Polgar leads the list with 32 victories, Yifan Hou is with 17, Ju Wenjun is with 5, Antoaneta Stefanova and Anna Muzychuk are with 2.
Article by OnTheQueenside (Twitter/X https://x.com/OnTheQueenside)
Last month, Tan Zhongyi joined the ranks of women who have beaten super-GMs with a fantastic victory over world No. 24, GM Richard Rapport (2722), in the long-running TePe Sigeman super-tournament in Sweden. Tan had lost her first two games of the event, including Round 1 vs. another super-GM, Javokhir Sindarov, against whom she had won an exchange and had a winning advantage. With Black in Round 3 against super-GM #2 and still on a duck, Tan seemed to play it safe and closed the position in hopes of a draw. Rapport though, was undeterred and managed to unclose the position, forcing Tan to find a few sequences of only moves just to maintain equality. When she did, Rapport was presented with problems of his own, and at his first major opportunity to make a mistake, he did. Tan won the game a whole rook up.
Tan had beaten a 2700+ player! But wait, how often does this happen? How many women have done this? These are the questions we obviously want to know the answer to. Judit Polgar was 2700+ herself, and Hou Yifan came within 15 Elo of that mark. Obviously, they have done it, and done so many times. But for other women who never approached 2700 rating, those answers are not well-tracked. Indeed, when press coverage of TePe Sigeman came out, no journalist put the victory into historical context. They would need a list of all the women who have beaten super-GMs, but no one has ever made such a list — until now.
2700+ (super-GM) victories
I present to you the first list of all the times women have beaten super-GMs in classical chess. This list was compiled mainly with the help of chesstempo. The first list includes all players, including Judit Polgar and Hou Yifan. It’s followed by another list with those two removed to focus mainly on all the other women who have beaten 2700s.
The number of super-GM victories each player has is:
Points of Interest
It’s worth noting that one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, women don’t have more wins against super-GMs and Top 30 players is they just don’t get the opportunity to face top players that often. For the 13 women with exactly one win against a super-GM, they only have about 8 games on average vs. super-GMs, and only Goryachkina has faced super-GMs at least 20 times. On the other hand, all five women with multiple wins against super-GMs all have at least 20 games against super-GMs.
If you want to see women beat super-GMs more often, we need to have more tournaments designed for women to face super-GMs. That could mean inviting more women to super-tournaments with 2700s. It could also mean arranging more Swiss tournaments that are structured to include both the top women and 2700s.
Take another look at the list of 22 times women other than Judit and Hou Yifan have beaten super-GMs. A whole 8 out of 22 (36%) of those victories came at one tournament: Gibraltar. Why? Because it was basically the only Swiss tournament that really tried to get both the top women and the top men to play. Unfortunately today, the Gibraltar Masters is no more. The chess world is waiting for another Swiss tournament to step up and fill that gap so we can go back to seeing women beat 2700s in Swiss tournaments.
Back to our original goal: When Tan Zhongyi beat Richard Rapport, she became the 18th woman to beat a super-GM. It was just the 22nd time it happened by someone other than Judit or Hou Yifan. Including Judit and Hou Yifan, Tan’s victory was the 36th-highest-rated win by any woman ever out of 71 super-GM victories. She also became the 20th woman to beat a Top 30 player, and it was just barely in the top 100 of highest-ranked wins by women all-time.
Looking at the feats of the other top players today, Ju Wenjun is already in rarefied air as the only woman besides Judit or Hou Yifan with at least three super-GM victories, and she has five. But to reach similar rarefied air on the Top 30 victory list, she would need to also get to five, and right now she only has three. Whether or not she gets those two more Top 30 more victories is one of the key milestones to watch out for in the rest of Ju Wenjun’s career.
It’s also worth noting that Ju Wenjun’s victory over Alireza Firouzja last year was the 9th highest-rated win by a woman ever, while Alexandra Kosteniuk’s victory over Nodirbek Abdusattorov was the 5th-highest rated win by a woman ever.
Read the full article by OnTheQueenside at Lichess