Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Abolish Women Chess Title - What Do You Think ?

The Wall Street Journal publish an interesting article about abolishing the women chess title. As you know, FIDE specificly award lifetime chess titles for men and women players who reach a certains tournament result. Women players has their own "exclusive" titles -WGM, WIM, and WFM and they also can attain the men titles - GM,IM and FM while men can't do otherwise...talking about gender bias...:)

Anyway in my opinion, there should have been a single titles system for both gender. This is because, there are many strong women players who is equivelent ( sometimes stronger!) with their men counterpart. In some cases, a women chess players have WGM titles and at the same time has the IM titles. This sometimes cause a little confuses about using the men or women title, especially for the laymen ( read - non chess playing person and further read....sponsors )

For example, for laymen - a women grandmaster (WGM) sound stronger then International Master (IM) although the latter is actually stronger !

I've create a poll about this topic in the side bar. You opinion are welcome.

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