Accoona Women’s World Chess Championship
Chess Queens Face Off in the Big Apple
March 1, 2005, 5pm at The ABC Times Square Studios
Press Release
Accoona.com, the new SuperCool Artificial Intelligence Search
Engine, announced today that it will present the Accoona World Women’s
Chess Championship on March 1, 2005, 5pm, at The ABC Times Square Studios,
in the heart of New York City. This world-class Chess event, sanctioned by
the New York City Sports Commission, the US Chess Federation, and the Association
of Chess Professionals, promises to be an exciting cultural exchange between
China and America.
“On behalf of New York City I am proud to welcome the Accoona Women’s
Chess Championship to New York City,” said New York City Sports Commissioner
Ken Podziba. “Chess fans throughout China and worldwide will be watching
closely as these champions square off in a battle of great minds,” continued
Podziba.
Accoona 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.
Women in Chess
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 largely dominated by
men, but a few remarkable female players have made it to the highest echelons
of the game.
On Tuesday, March 1, two of these rare women, Grandmaster Zhu Chen, 27, the
ninth Women’s World Chess Champion from China, and International Master
Irina Krush, 21, a rising American star, will play for the Accoona World Chess
Championship in ABC’s Times Square Studios at 46th Street and Broadway.
The chess match will start at 5:00 pm, and Chen and Krush will go to battle
in the windowed studio at street level in Times Square, making the event the
most public championship in the history of the game. The women will play two
games of rapid chess, with each dramatic encounter lasting at most one hour.
If the match ends in a tie, the champions will play a ten-minute sudden-death
game.
Irina Krush |
Zhu Chen |
Krush and Chen 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. If Krush wins the
Accoona World Championship, she will even her lifetime score with Chen or pull
ahead by one game.
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.
Krush views chess as part sport, part art, part science. “Chess is a
noble activity,” she says. “I believe I become a better person
each time I play.”
Move-by-move commentary at the match will be provided by best-selling author
and television personality Paul Hoffman, who has covered chess for the New
York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, and ESPN. He is working on a book
about his obsession with top-level chess. Joining him will be two-time Canadian
Champion and International Master Pascal Charbonneau and two-time US Women’s
Champion Jennifer Shahade, author of the forthcoming book, Chess Bitch: Women
in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport.
Paul Hoffman with his wife and President Bill Clinton
About Accoona: www.accoona.com,
is a Web Search Technology company dedicated to making it easier for people
to find information on the Internet. The Accoona Artificial Intelligence Search
Technology understands the meaning of words and allows users to “Supertarget”
key words within a search query, thus providing more relevant results. The
Accoona QuickProfile also grants users one-click access to pertinent business
information which often can be difficult to locate, such as Business Contact
Information, Telephone and Fax numbers, sales figures, and other useful business
information.
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