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Playoff Will Decide Women's World Chess Championship — History will have to wait one more day. Ruan Lufei won the last regulation game of the Women’s World Chess Championship final to force the match into overtime. Ruan had trailed the best-of-four match against Hou Yifan by one point and needed to win to stay alive. She did just that in a tension-filled game in which both chess players, unsurprisingly given the stakes, made some mistakes. Ruan won all her previous matches in the championship in tie-breakers, so she feels right at home in the format. But Hou is the higher-ranked chess player, so she has the edge, at least on paper. Of course that was true in the regulation portion of the match also, and she was unable to win. The tie-breaker will ...

Record Set for World's Youngest Chess Champion — Hou Yifan, a 16-year-old chess player from China, became the youngest world chess champion on Friday, toppling a record held since 1978. Ms. Hou defeated another Chinese player, Ruan Lufei, in the final of the Women’s World Chess Championship, which was held in Antakya, Turkey. In a telephone interview after the competition, Ms. Hou was excited, but also critical of her play against Ms. Ruan, a lower-ranked opponent. The final was decided in playoff games after the four-game regulation match ended in a tie. “I think before the final, my play was very good,” Ms. Hou said. “The final match, I am not very satisfied with that.” Maia Chiburdanidze of the Republic of Georgia had previously ...

At Title Event, Asian Women Pursue World Domination — The Women’s World Chess Championship has provided more evidence of a shift in the balance of power in the women’s game to Asia from Eastern Europe. When the chess tournament began early this month in southern Turkey, 24 of the 64 players in the field were from Eastern Europe, which has long dominated women’s chess. By the quarterfinals, only one of the Eastern Europeans, Kateryna Lahno of Ukraine, was left in the competition. Four of the quarterfinalists were from China, and two were from India. The last quarterfinalist, Almira Skripchenko, is French, although she was born in Moldova. Lahno and Skripchenko were eliminated in the quarterfinals, and the semifinalists were ...

Chess Game of the Year — Every year, there are so many well-played chess games that it is almost impossible to choose one that was better than the others. Objectively, finding the best game of the year is probably impossible; what appeals to one person may not appeal to someone else, and vice versa. Still, it is an interesting exercise. Last year, this blog suggested that a game between Alexander Morozevich and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave played at the Biel International Chess Festival was a worthy candidate for game of the year because of its hair-raising complications and how it ebbed and flowed. This year, it is more difficult to choose one game that stands out. The games shown on this blog each have ...

Chess: The unglamorous art of defence — It might not be fun, it might not be pretty, but a solid defence is essential. We need little excuse to look at attacking chess, but the other side of the argument, the art of defence, we rarely discuss. No surprise really: in the playground did you dream of keeping a clean sheet or scoring a hat-trick? So to maintain a balance, it's the unglamorous but vital theme of defence in chess that we'll be considering over the coming weeks. RB: After failing miserably to find a plausible continuation in last week's position, I was hoping to redeem myself here. But no. All this does is reinforce my sense of chess inferiority. I imagine Howell must have been feeling pretty pleased with himself at this point. Although his ...

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