ChessBase 17 - Mega package - Edition 2024
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Judit Polgar (Photo: Heathcliff O'Malley)
By Rachel Halliwell
Chess has long been a sport plagued by charges of sexism. Earlier this year, British Grandmaster Nigel Short drew blood on the black-and-white battlefield by declaring that female players simply don’t have the right brains for the game. They are, he said, “hard-wired very differently”; comments which echoed his Russian chess rival, Garry Kasparov’s controversial assertion that “women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters”.
As someone who has beaten Short at the board (with a record of eight classical wins to three), Judit Polgar - widely acknowledged as the world’s greatest female player, and the only woman to qualify for a World Chess Championship tournament - was held up as living proof that they’re both wrong. “Only a simpleton,” Short bit back, would believe Polgar's personal score against him disproved his general point, that “fundamentally different cerebral structures [exist] between the sexes.”
Last week, however, the most comprehensive neuroscientific study of its kind concluded otherwise: after analysis of 1,400 brain scans, researchers at Tel Aviv University declared: “human brains cannot be categorised into two distinct classes - male and female brain.” ...
