Pioneer Wojtek, was: RE: [lbo-talk] it's inevitable

ravi gadfly at exitleft.org
Thu May 4 08:37:57 PDT 2006


At around 3/5/06 10:43 pm, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> In all fairness, though, for whatever resaons, women
> have not excelled in chess. Judit Polgar and her
> sister (also quite good), who are also Hungarian, btw,
> and thereforte I have an extra soft spot for them, are
> GMs but not in the league of Kasparov, Karpov, Fisher,
> Alekhine, Capablanca. I have played their their games,
> and I agree with the redceived opinion. Either of
> those women could beat me flat in 15 moves with a
> Queen handicap, but I'm just a 1250 ranked woodpusher.
> Was -- been a long time since I was rated. Women's
> backwardness in chess may change, but it has been the
> history.
>

What does "in the league of Kasparov" mean? If it means that Judit (whom we should confine the analogy to, since the record seems to show that Szusanna [sp?] herself may not be in Judit's 'league') will not go down in history as one of the greatest players (say top 25), yes perhaps that's true. Though I am not sure how meaningful these sort of historical rankings are.

But she is in Kasparov's league in that she plays games against him, has been ranked in the top 10 players in the world, and has earned respect from other players in that league, such as often #2 ranked Viswanathan Anand.

It doesn't seem to add much to reiterate that women's presence in chess has been minimal, historically. Why that is so, is an interesting question, for which we have some answers. That Judit Polgar can hold her own against top ranked men demonstrates that at least today, there is no inherent [ability based] reason for this under-representation. I think the parsimonious explanation suffices.

--ravi

-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list