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Top 10 Remarkable Facts about Hou Yifan

She was born on 27th February 1994, in Xinghua, Jiangsu, China. She is a female Chinese chess prodigy.

She was the youngest to ever win the title of Women’s World Chess Champion from 2010 to 2012. She was the youngest female player to ever qualify for the title of Grandmaster.

She has a whole challenge under her name(the Hou Yifan challenge) in which a 17-player rapid round-robin takes place on chess24 from September 18-21.

She began playing chess at the young age of six years old, she began studying chess under Tong Yuanming( an international Master and member of China’s national chess team.)

When she was seven years old, she moved to Shandong with her family and attended chess classes. Two years later, she joined the national team and her family moved to Beijing.

1. First Woman World Champion Winner

Yifan stood out above all the standards of chess prodigies. It wasn鈥檛 so much the way she played the game but dynamically not dazzlingly.

She had an aggressive but flexible style. Thirteen years after she became a Grandmaster, at the age of fourteen, people still mention the two big barrettes that used to pin back her bobbed hair.

Chess is not like basketball or soccer. Men and women face one another on equal terms, and no one can tell the gender of a player from the moves on a scorecard. Still, of the seventeen hundred and thirty-two Grandmasters in the world, just thirty-eight are women. Much of this gap stems from how many women compete, versus the number of men who do: around sixteen per cent of tournament players identify as female, and most of them are children. As a purely statistical matter, you would expect few, if any, women at the extremes of the rankings. Still, this appears to be an incomplete explanation of the disparity at the top of the game, about which Hou is blunt. 鈥淵ou cannot deny it, you cannot pretend it doesn鈥檛 happen,鈥� she told me, of the absence of women from chess鈥檚 highest echelon. For years, she has been the only one who stood a chance.

2. International Wins

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In 2008, she was defeated at FIDE Women’s World Chess Championships held in Nalchik, Russia. However, this did not stop her from achieving the title of Grand Master later in 2008.

Hou won the 2010 FIDE Women’s World Chess Championship(in Antioch, Turkey) at the age of sixteen.

Hou defended her title in the 2011 FIDE Women’s Chess Championship in Tirana, Albania She regained the title in 2013(Taizhou, China) after losing it in 2012. She won it for the fourth time in 2016 in Liv, Ukraine.

3. Outside World

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Hou enrolled at Peking University in 2012 where she studied International Relations. She participated in many extracurricular activities, she was then offered a Rhodes Scholarship and studied for a Master of Public Policy at St Hilda’s College.

The competitions she participated in gave her credit for what she achieved despite her lack of preparation.

In 2020, Hou become the youngest ever professor at the school of Physical Education which includes Chess in its Sports Training Program. She began working full-time at Shenzhen University in July 2020.

4. Chess Overview Gap

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Hou felt that there is a physical aspect to long chess games that advantage men. She claimed that girls in chess were encouraged to aim for the girl’s title which lowered their motivation.

5. Possible Retirement

In 2019, she expressed that she didn’t have time for chess alongside her education. Being that chess is her passion but not her top priority, she might likely want to venture out of the world of chess and explore new stuff, new things she doesn’t know.

On July 10, 2020, Hou became the youngest professor at Shenzhen University. It is still unclear whether or not she will step back into the world of chess and yet again regain her title as FIDE Women’s World Chess Champion.

5. Ranking

After more than a quarter of a century, Judit Polgar was stripped from her title of the highest-rated woman in the world.

It was historic if not memorable, that Hou was able to defeat the highest in women’s chess and she set a record at such a young age.

However, it would have been life-changing if both ladies played against each other in a ‘World Championship’ match.

7. Exhibitions

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Hou Yifan has made several appearances on the board and played friendly matches sponsored by the Timchenko Foundation in China. She has successfully faced off against Russian grandmasters, and former European champions and even managed to defeat some of them.

8. Quitting

In 2017, she took a stand, showing up thirty minutes late to her final round, and resigned after five moves.

She later explained that she was protesting being paired against women in seven of her ten matches.

The tournament officials said that the pairings were an unlikely but possible accident. Her resignation sparked an unusually heated debate.

9. Youngest Full Professor at Shenzhen University

She is a professor at Shenzhen University, Faculty of Physical Education. Last year, at twenty-six, she became the youngest full professor in the university鈥檚 history.

Her parents never taught her what a girl should do neither did the teachers but she took her own initiative to learn until she achieved her goal academically.

She spent a year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, studying public policy. She is the only woman among the hundred best chess players in the world, at No. 82.

The second-ranked woman, Aleksandra Goryachkina, a Russian in her early twenties, is outside the top two hundred.

10. She is Gorgeous

These days, her hair falls to her shoulders, and black cat鈥檚-eye glasses frame her face.

She speaks English quickly. and precisely. She spent a year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, studying public policy.

She is the only woman among the hundred best chess players in the world, at No. 82. The second-ranked woman, Aleksandra Goryachkina, a Russian in her early twenties, is outside the top two hundred.