Hou Yifan

Hou Yifan (born 27 February 1994) is a Chinese chess grandmaster, four-time Women's World Chess Champion and the second highest rated female player of all time.

A chess prodigy, she was the youngest female player ever to qualify for the title of grandmaster (at the age of 14 years, 6 months, 16 days) and the youngest ever to win the Women's World Chess Championship (at age 16).

In 1999, her father engaged a chess mentor, IM Tong Yuanming, for his five-year-old daughter.

Tong later said that Hou was an unusual talent, showing "strong confidence, distinguished memory, calculating ability and fast reaction".

Hou has said that she took up chess because she was fascinated by the pieces.

In 2003, Hou played against the chief coach of the Chinese national men's and women's chess teams, Ye Jiangchuan, for the first time.

The chess master was surprised that the nine-year-old could identify almost all of his weak moves.

"Then I knew she was an exceptional genius", Ye said.

That year, Hou became the youngest member of the national team and won first place at the World Youth Championship for girls under age ten.

In order to better support her chess career, her family relocated to Beijing in 2003.

Hou's mother, Wang Qian, a former nurse, accompanied her to many international tournaments when Hou was young.

Hou was homeschooled.

As a teenager, she listed her interests as reading and studying and she listed her favorite chess player as Bobby Fischer.

Hou has attempted to balance chess with life outside of it.

Hou Yifan's first major tournament was on 31 August–12 September 2003 at the Chinese Team Chess Championship (Open) in Tianjin.

She achieved the titles of Woman FIDE Master in January 2004, Woman Grandmaster in January 2007, and Grandmaster in August 2008.

At the age of 12, Hou became the youngest player ever to participate in the Women's World Championship (Yekaterinburg 2006) and the Chess Olympiad (Torino 2006).

In June 2007, she became the youngest Chinese Women's Champion ever.

In June 2007, she became China's youngest national champion.

She was admitted to the National Chess Center, an academy for young talented players from all over the country, in Beijing when she was ten, with leading Chinese grandmasters Ye Jiangchuan and Yu Shaoteng as her trainers.

In 2010, she won the 2010 Women's World Championship in Hatay, Turkey at age 16.

She won the next three championships in which the title was decided by a match (in 2011, 2013 and 2016, with a total of ten wins to zero losses and fourteen draws against three different opponents), but was either eliminated early or she declined to participate in the championships in which the title was decided by a knockout tournament (in 2012, 2015 and 2017).

Against the wishes of her trainer, she enrolled in Peking University in 2012, studying International Relations.

She took a full course load and participated in many extracurricular activities.

She was offered a Rhodes Scholarship, and studied for a Master of Public Policy at St Hilda's College, Oxford with the Blavatnik School of Government.

Competitors give her credit for what she has achieved in spite of her lack of preparation, and for her life outside of chess.

Vladimir Kramnik said: "If she wants to stay the best female player, she can probably do nothing. If she wants to achieve her potential, she must concentrate fully on chess."

Hou is aware of this as well, but nonetheless chooses to treat chess as a hobby, not a career.

Hou was the third woman ever to be rated among the world's top 100 players (2014–16 and 2017–22), after Maia Chiburdanidze and Judit Polgár.

She is widely regarded as the best active female chess player, "leaps and bounds" ahead of her competitors.

she has been the No. 1 ranked woman in the world since September 2015 and is 68 points ahead of the No. 2 ranked Ju Wenjun.

She was named in the BBC's 100 Women programme in 2017.

She has been semi-retired since 2018, and became a professor at Shenzhen University in 2020, at the age of 26.

Hou started playing chess regularly at the age of five, but already was fascinated by the game when she was three years old.

Hou's father, Hou Xuejian, a magistrate, often took his young daughter to a bookstore after dinner.

He noticed that the little girl liked to stare at glass chess pieces behind the window.

He later bought his daughter her first chess set.

The three-year-old was able to beat her father and grandmother after a few weeks.

She said in 2018: "I want to be the best, but you also have to have a life."

In 2020, at age 26, Hou became the youngest ever professor at Shenzhen University where she is a professor at the School of Physical Education, which includes chess in its Sports Training Program.