Former Women’s Chess Champion Close to Regaining Title

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/sports/former-womens-chess-champion-close-to-regaining-title.html

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Hou Yifan, a former women’s world chess champion, took a big step toward regaining the title on Wednesday as she won Game 6 of her title match with Anna Ushenina, the reigning champion. The match is being held in Taizhou, China.

Each player earns one point for a victory and half a point for a draw. After six games, Ms. Hou leads 4½ to 1½. The winner will be the first player to amass 5½ points.

The champion will earn 120,000 euros, about $160,000, and the runner-up 80,000 euros, about $106,000.

Ms. Hou, 19, a Chinese grandmaster, won the title in 2010 and defended it in 2011. But in 2012, she lost in the second round of a 64-player elimination championship tournament that was eventually won by Ms. Ushenina, 28, a Ukrainian grandmaster.

Ms. Hou earned the right to challenge Ms. Ushenina this year by winning the 2011-12 Women’s Grand Prix, a series of six tournaments featuring most of the world’s best female players.

Though Ms. Ushenina is the reigning champion, she was the underdog at the start of the match, as she is ranked No. 17 in the world among women, and Ms. Hou is No. 2. The way that the match has unfolded has underscored a recurrent criticism of elimination tournaments as a method for selecting a champion: the best player does not always win.

An exceptional feature of the current match is that Ms. Hou has won all of her games when she has played Black, which is usually disadvantageous, because White moves first.

Ms. Ushenina’s problems have not been in the opening phases of the games, where she has generally achieved small advantages. Rather, she has consistently made miscalculations later in the games, or missed possible moves in complicated positions.

That is what happened on Wednesday. She blundered on Move 33, which allowed Ms. Hou to push a pawn, attacking Ms. Ushenina’s queen. That pawn kept moving forward, and when Ms. Ushenina resigned on Move 40, it was because the pawn was about to promote to a queen, after which Ms. Hou would have had an overwhelming material superiority.

Game 7 is scheduled for Friday, and Ms. Hou will be White. If she wins, the match will be over.