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| Ninth Women's World Chess champion Zhu Chen of
China.(newsphoto/file) |
Chinese grandmaster Zhu Chen, 27, the ninth Women's World Chess
champion, won the Accoona Women's World Chess Championship on Tuesday by
defeating American rising star Irina Krush, 21, in a dramatic two-game
match in the ABC Times Square Studios in New York.
Chen won one game and drew the other. Chen and Krush played in the
windowed studio at street level, making the Accoona event the most public
championship in the history of chess.
Accoona.com, a new SuperCool Artificial Intelligence Search Engine,
organized the match as a cultural exchange event between China and
America. Accoona.com enjoys a unique partnership in China with the China
Daily Information Company, the largest and official English Language Web
destination in China, from which Accoona has access to over 10 million
unique visitors per day.
The Accoona Women's World Chess Championship was sanctioned by the New
York City Sports Commission, the US Chess Federation, and the Association
of Chess Professionals.
When the first women entered an international
chess tournament in London in 1897, commentators dismissed their chances
on the grounds that "they would come under great strain lifting the
leaded, wooden chess pieces." More than a century later, world-class chess
is still dominated by men, but a few remarkable female players have made
it to the highest echelons
.
On Tuesday, Chinese grandmaster Zhu Chen and
international master Irina Krush left no doubt that they could play
brilliant top-notch chess. The two women have an intense personal rivalry
that dates back half a decade. At the 2000 Women's World Championship in
New Delhi, India, a knockout
tournament among 64 first-rate players, 16-year-old Krush turned back the
heavily favored Chen in the first round, dashing her championship hopes
for the year. In 2002 Chen finally got her revenge when she faced Krush in
a four-game match between China and the United States and won three of
them. With yesterday's victory Chen improved her lifetime record over
Krush to four wins and two losses.
Over the past two decades, chess has skyrocketed in popularity in China
from a game played by a few thousand people to a game played by five
million. Zhu Chen first gained international prominence in 1988, when she
won the World Girls Under 12 Championship in Romania; it was the first
time a Chinese player had won a world chess competition. In 2001, when
Chen was 25, she became the ninth Women's World Champion.
"I am a woman who plays a man's game," Chen said after clinching the
title. "So I balance feminine emotions with masculine logic to become the
strongest player possible."
Irina Krush was born in Odessa, Ukraine, on Christmas Eve 1983. She
learned to play chess when she was five, in 1989, the year she emigrated
with her parents to Brooklyn. She was a master when she was 12. In 1988,
at 14, she became the youngest player ever to win the US Women's
Championship. In 2000 she continued to break records by becoming the first
American woman to earn the title of international master. In October 2004
she played second board for the US Women's Team that won a silver medal in
the Chess Olympiad in Spain. In December 2004 she defeated French champion
Almira Skripchenko in the first Accoona chess challenge.
(China Daily) | 
Updated: 2005-03-03 11:03