NICK BARNETT CHESS

SPORTS Illustrated has over the years, been one of the few publications, outside of those devoted to the game, which pays attention to chess. This year it has waded, not for the first time, into the turbulent seas of women’s chess. In an article entitled ‘More Than Five Decades After Lisa Lane’s Success, Equality Still Eludes Women in Chess’, Emma Baccellieri has taken a retrospective and contemporary look at women who have approached the top ranks.

On the 7th of August 1961 Sports Illustrated featured Lisa Lane on their cover – the first chess player to have had that honour. Lisa was a phenomenon. She had learned chess as a teenager and then risen rapidly to become the US Women’s World Champion in 1959.

But she gradually became of aware of how difficult it was to stay at the top. In 1963 she was passed over for a spot on the national team for the Women’s Chess Olympiad. Lane and Gisela Gresser. But the US Chess Federation picked Gresser and a lower-ranked player named Mary Bain. Lane went to the media and the federation acknowledged that part of its reasoning had been that both Gresser and Bain could pay all of their own expenses for the tournament in Yugoslavia. The 1966 U.S. Women’s Championship prize was $600. The U.S. Championship had just paid its men $6,000. It was simply too much. ‘I decided to complain at the tournament,’ Lane says. ‘And I found that I couldn’t get any of the other women to be interested in mounting any kind of complaint. They were all just too happy to be there.’

She finally left the competition to follow other interests, namely a series of shops catering to the alternative market.

The article goes on to explore the state of womens’ chess with the Polgar sisters, Jennifer Shahade and the chair of the women’s committee at the US Chess Federation, Maureen Grimaud. All of them agree with Grimaud ‘It’s a total and complete numbers game. What the women’s committee is trying to do is to grow the base.’

But first the prize fund must be equal. In the 2018 World Chess Championship, two men split $1.1 million; 64 women shared the $450,000. The women’s champion, Ju Wenjun, took home $60,000. Carlsen left with roughly $620,000.

Even though next year things are improving, the women’s fund will still be half of the open championship’s minimum—$550,000, split between two players in the new format.

Susan Polgar has the last and truest word: ‘It’s as if they, on purpose, want to make the point that girls don’t deserve as much.’

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