Thursday, September 3, 2020

A Life to Live

Board game
Chess
By Helmut Pfleger
ZEITmagazin ONLINE No. 37/2020 — September 2, 2020

侯逸凡 (Hóu Yìfán), the best female chess player in the world, has recently become, at 26, the youngest Professor ever at 深圳大学 (Shēnzhèn University). Of course, she wants to attach great importance to chess in the School of Physical Education, Normal College (Faculty of Education), but she avowedly wants to carry on an omni-comprehensive educational program. You couldn’t imagine a better one. When she became Women’s World Chess Champion at 16, Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times: “If there’s a human face on Rising China, it belongs not to some Politburo chief, not to an Internet tycoon, but to a quiet, mild-mannered teenage girl named 侯逸凡 (Hóu Yìfán)”.
She has always looked beyond the 64 squares. She studied Political Science at Peking University and has even received — like several Nobel Prize winners and statesmen, including Bill Clinton — a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship at the University of Oxford, England. 侯逸凡 (Hóu Yìfán): “I want a rich and colorful life, not a narrow life”.
By virtue of her great natural talent — at 14 she was already Grandmaster (!) — she was able to remain the undisputed women’s No. 1, but not to rise to the top of men’s rankings. “You have to choose — you just can’t study and compete”, former World Chess Champion Vladimir Borisovich Kramnik said categorically.
With which splendid move did she, at 15, playing White against Ukrainian Grandmaster Alexander Genrikhovich Beliavsky at Amsterdam, force him to resign immediately?

侯逸凡 (Hóu Yìfán) – Alexander Genrikhovich Beliavsky
3rd NH Chess Tournament; Rising Stars vs. Experience; Amsterdam, August 23, 2009
r7/1pk2r2/4n3/pP1Q3p/7P/8/1P4P1/6K1 w - - 0 39

Position after 38. ... Rg7xf7

(English translation by I, Robot)

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