Last Girl Standing
Submitted by
polleke on Tue, 08/12/2008 at 7:58am.
Having nothing important to occupy my brain with, it occurred to me that female chess players are often good looking. Of course there's taste involved, and given the low number of “girls in chess” the outcome of my pondering is statistically unreliable. I think I can make one reliable statement about women and chess though… most good looking women don’t play chess at all!
When I envision my average opponent, I see a clever person, about 40 years of age, a little overweight giving away the sitting hobby, more often than not with the unavoidable nervous twitch each self respecting player needs to have. But above all, the average opponent is a man and behaves like one. In hundreds of official games I played against 10 female players at max. My score against them is horrible and I think I managed to win only one of these games. The post mortem was always nice though, so here’s one more statistically unreliable opinion: I think women are better winners than men. At least, they seem to be less aggressive than their male counterparts during analysis afterwards. So, since they’re with so few and keep us well behaved, I think we should do what we can to save them for the game 
.
Some ten years ago I was a youth coach at my local chess club and in my group of 8 kids I had the only remaining female member of our club. She was one of my favorites in the group since she paid attention to all the nonsense I’d teach, and as opposed to the other 7 year-olds she understood the concept of sitting on a chair for more than 1 minute. She also was a gifted player, and, nice when you put some effort in preparation for the classes, she was always present. One Monday night she did not show up though, and instead her father handed me a letter. “Dear teacher Paul. I will not be coming to the chess club anymore. Not because I think it is boring, but because there are no other girls in the club. I think the boys are very childish and I do not want to play with them anymore. I will go to ballet class instead. Well, I want to thank you for the lessons and wish you all the best, kind regards, E.” So this is how I saw the last Queen jump ship, leaving us with just Kings in the club.
Why are there so few women that play chess? Are we unpleasant to deal with? Do we smell? Is chess not that sexy after all?
Maybe it's not us, and then we should probably launch a global campaign to interest women in chess. Not hopeful though that it is going to yield much success. So for those of you that think that joining a chess club will do you good in the dating department… if you’re a guy, maybe you’d better join a ballet class!