2023 Online Women's Chess Year in Review
Vaishali, Polina Shuvalova, and Hou Yifan showed up!
Online chess is here and it’s here to stay! I’m talking about the big-time online prize money tournaments that were never really taken seriously until all of chess went online in 2020. Now with the acquisition merging chess.com and chess24, all of the top online chess tournaments are under one roof. Magnus and Hikaru. A chess.com Champions Chess Tour. All the top online women’s tournaments too, maybe?!
The women’s online chess scene hasn’t really taken off yet like the overall online chess scene. None of the women’s top 50 are prominent regulars (or regulars at all?) on chess.com. They do have many prominent women streamers, but they haven’t had many tournaments targeting top players. Before the merger, the only tournaments chess.com had that prominently featured top women players were the Women’s Speed Chess Championship and the I’M not a GM Speed Chess Championship, while chess24 only had the Challengers Chess Tour, a mixed event only for juniors. Would the merger signal any sort of change?
Pro Chess League
The biggest change chess.com made for online women’s chess this year was with the Pro Chess League. Making its emphatic return from the “pipi in the pampers” incident of 2020, the PCL now featured new roster rules placing a woman in every lineup. And it paid off.
The PCL format pits each player against all four boards of the opposing team, from top to bottom. Even with most of the women on Boards 3 or 4, they still all got to face the top boards of the other team, including the Board 1s that were often 2700+. Easy win, right? Wrong. Some of them got dropped. Vaishali beat Dubov. Alice Lee beat Deac. Josefine Heinemann beat Hikaru. In other words, agadmator video! agadmator video! agadmator video! Levy covered it all too. This is way more attention than top-level women’s online chess ever got before, and it was also giving lower-rated players than usual a chance to play at the top!
Vaishali (Indian Yogis) was arguably the best women’s player, making an “online GM norm” through the first 11 rounds of the main event. Ju Wenjun (Shanghai Tigers) on Board 2 fared even better in the main event, but it was her upset in the final at the hands of young rating roller-coaster Alua Nurmanova that really shifted all the momentum towards Alua’s Gotham Knights, who would go on to win the title!
Tournament score: 9/10 | A
Player of the Event: Vaishali Rameshbabu
IM Speed Chess Championship
The I’M not a GM Speed Chess Championship returned with a whole new format, and it was for the better. The first segment was played as a round-robin: three matches per player and just two games per time control (5+1, 3+1, 1+1). Only the group winners advanced to the knock-out semi-finals, where they battled it out in the usual timed format.
It almost started out with a bang when Eline set up a great chance to make the semi-finals! Eline started slow by losing her match against Meri Arabidze, but bounced back to beat Greg Shahade. She was pushed to the brink by David Czerw, but struck back and won three games on demand (including armageddon!) to tie for first in the group with Greg! In the group tiebreak, Eline had to win a fourth game on demand and did just to force another armageddon! She was winning the armageddon too, but it fell back to equal, enough for Greg to move on.
It wasn’t totally bad because Polina Shuvalova still got to represent the women in the knock-out, and Eline was avenged by Levy Rozman of all people. The final was set: Polina vs. Levy, the two top seeds! It came down to the very last game. Levy had one chance to win, but Polina prevailed! The second woman to make the final, and the first to win it! A great event, but I have to deduct for only having five women in the field this time, down from seven last year. (Let Anna-Maja play!)
Tournament score: 7/10 | B+
Player of the Event: Polina Shuvalova
Women’s Speed Chess Championship
This is it! chess.com’s flagship women’s chess event! They seemed to have trouble scheduling it this time. The Women’s Speed Chess Championship was originally supposed to be in June, but that’s when the Cairns Cup ended up happening, likely why this got pushed back to November when it still had a conflict with the European Team Championship. I’m guessing that’s also why the field size was reduced from 16 to 8.
Hou Yifan may be mostly retired, but her speed chess skills haven’t faded and she also entered this event coming off her best classical tournament performance in years at the Asian Games! She coasted to the title without much challenge! The old guard held their ground, as none of the young players even made the semi-finals.
I didn’t think this event turned out too well. Way fewer players, and pretty much only from “Asia” (including Russia), but still missing both of this year’s World Championship match contestants. Only one of the matches seemed competitive. The new IM SCC round-robin format might work better for the Women’s SCC too: If Hou Yifan is going to win, give more players their shot at her and put more at stake game by game too!
Tournament score: 4/10 | C+
Player of the Event: Hou Yifan
Overall, this year was a big improvement from last year, mainly because of chess.com’s changes to the Pro Chess League. The rest of the calendar year though is still pretty empty, a far cry from the men having showcase events just about every month or even every week including Titled Tuesday.
Before the chess.com and chess24 merger, both flagship events from chess.com (the Speed Chess Championship) and chess24 (the Champions Chess Tour) included the top women’s chess players either as a separate event or together with the top male players. But now since the merger, the speed chess championships have taken a back seat. The new overall flagship tournament series (the chess.com Champions Chess Tour) doesn’t have any women in the main event or any counterpart event, let alone in any prominence.
With the dawn of the chess.com revamped CCT, there is a gap waiting to be filled for a new flagship event to showcase the top women’s players once again. The developments in this year’s Pro Chess League offer promise chess.com can make it happen.
Addendum: Not every online women’s chess event this year was under the main chess.com scope. France’s top streamer BlitzStream hosted two editions of the “in-person online” B-Cup, the first of which was won by Alexandra Kosteniuk over some elite French GMs. And shifting away from the top players, there was also the actually-online Rapid Streamer League, one of the few women-majority tournaments (the only one?) I can think of, which was won by Marepant, one of the lower seeds, edging out Lile Koridze and Nikola Stojsin.