Chess has always been overwhelmingly male. In the old days there were separate men’s tournaments and women’s tournaments. That changed in the 1980s when Susan Polgar was by far the strongest female player in Hungary. She didn’t have any serious opposition in women’s tournaments there, and wasn’t allowed to enter men’s tournaments, so she started a big fight. The result was that men’s tournaments were abolished and they are now “open” tournaments that anyone can play in, though they are still overwhelmingly male. Women’s events exist basically so that female players don’t have to endure the gauntlet of a socially inept nerd sausage fest in order to play chess.
For a while there was also something called “centaur” tournaments, where a centaur was a human player assisted by a computer. The idea was that the computer could outcalculate humans, but humans still had better strategic judgment, so a human-computer team could outperform either member individually. After a while though, computers became strong enough that human interference just made them play worse. The current strongest chess tournament in the world is called TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship, tcec-chess.com) and it is always running, 24/7/365 unless something happens. Some really incredible games have come out of it.
Ah yes, the two genders: human and woman.
Chess has always been overwhelmingly male. In the old days there were separate men’s tournaments and women’s tournaments. That changed in the 1980s when Susan Polgar was by far the strongest female player in Hungary. She didn’t have any serious opposition in women’s tournaments there, and wasn’t allowed to enter men’s tournaments, so she started a big fight. The result was that men’s tournaments were abolished and they are now “open” tournaments that anyone can play in, though they are still overwhelmingly male. Women’s events exist basically so that female players don’t have to endure the gauntlet of a socially inept nerd sausage fest in order to play chess.
For a while there was also something called “centaur” tournaments, where a centaur was a human player assisted by a computer. The idea was that the computer could outcalculate humans, but humans still had better strategic judgment, so a human-computer team could outperform either member individually. After a while though, computers became strong enough that human interference just made them play worse. The current strongest chess tournament in the world is called TCEC (Top Chess Engine Championship, tcec-chess.com) and it is always running, 24/7/365 unless something happens. Some really incredible games have come out of it.