How many women have beaten super-GMs?

Last month, Tan Zhongyi joined the ranks of women who have beaten super-GMs with a fantastic victory over world No. 24, GM Richard Rapport (2722), in the long-running TePe Sigeman super-tournament in Sweden.

Tan had lost her first two games of the event, including Round 1 vs. another super-GM, Javokhir Sindarov, against whom she had won an exchange and had a winning advantage. With Black in Round 3 against super-GM #2 and still on a duck, Tan seemed to play it safe and closed the position in hopes of a draw. Rapport though, was undeterred and managed to unclose the position, forcing Tan to find a few sequences of only moves just to maintain equality. When she did, Rapport was presented with problems of his own, and at his first major opportunity to make a mistake, he did. Tan won the game a whole rook up.

Tan beat 2700+ super-GM Richard Rapport with Black just last month. Credit: Mikael Svensson.

Tan had beaten a 2700+ player! But wait, how often does this happen? How many women have done this? These are the questions we obviously want to know the answer to. Judit Polgar was 2700+ herself, and Hou Yifan came within 15 Elo of that mark. Obviously, they have done it, and done so many times. But for other women who never approached 2700 rating, those answers are not well-tracked. Indeed, when press coverage of TePe Sigeman came out, no journalist put the victory into historical context. They would need a list of all the women who have beaten super-GMs, but no one has ever made such a list — until now.

2700+ (super-GM) victories

I present to you the first list of all the times women have beaten super-GMs in classical chess. This list was compiled mainly with the help of chesstempo. The first list includes all players, including Judit Polgar and Hou Yifan. It’s followed by another list with those two removed to focus mainly on all the other women who have beaten 2700s.

Super-GM victory list. Credit: @OnTheQueenside.

The number of super-GM victories each player has is:

Number of super-GM victories. Credit: @OnTheQueenside.

Here are all the super-GM victories by anyone other than Judit and Hou Yifan:

Super-GM victory list (w/o Judit and Hou Yifan). Credit: @OnTheQueenside.

There have been no less than 18 different women who have beaten super-GMs (players rated 2700 or higher at the time of the encounter). The first instance came in 1994 when Judit Polgar beat Alexei Shirov (then world No. 2) at age 17. Judit has the first 19 super-GM victories, and nearly half of all the victories on the list (32 / 71). Hou Yifan beat her first super-GM at the even younger age of 14, and she has 17 super-GM victories in her much shorter career.

After Judit’s 32 and Hou Yifan’s 17, that leaves 22 out of the 71 for everyone else. Ju Wenjun is the only other woman with at least 3 super-GM victories, and she has 5 after beating Alireza Firouzja and Vincent Keymer just last year. The only two other women with multiple super-GM victories are Antoaneta Stefanova and Anna Muzychuk, who each have 2. That leaves 13 women with one super-GM victory, with the most recent of course being Tan Zhongyi.

Top 30 victories

Looking at that list above, you might be thinking it’s strange that all of Judit’s initial super-GM victories were also against very high-ranked players, while super-GM victories nowadays may be ranked much lower. That’s because the number of super-GMs has changed a lot over time. Today, there have consistently been around 30 to 40 super-GMs for the past 15 years, but it wasn’t always like that. In 2000, there were only ten super-GMs and back in 1990, there were only two! This is due to a combination of rating inflation and there just being more chess players today compared to a few decades ago.

Women that beat top players from the 1990s and earlier are excluded from the list just because there were so few super-GMs at the time. That’s not really fair. A better way to look at things for players back then would be to make a list by rank instead of rating. That begs the question: How many women have beaten Top 30 players? Why 30? Because usually when people ask “How many top players can make a living off of just playing chess?”, the answer given is usually 30. That’s also about the rank you need to consistently get invited to the top super-tournaments.

If we make that list too, this is what it looks like:

Top 30 victory list. Credit: @OnTheQueenside.

The number of Top 30 victories each player has is:

Number of Top 30 victories. Credit: @OnTheQueenside.

The players unfairly excluded from the super-GM victory list include famed five-time Women’s World Champions Maia Chiburdanidze and Nona Gaprindashvili, and none other than Judit herself. Even though Judit did have 32 super-GM victories, that severely downplays her level of success. It is far more telling that she had 76 Top 30 victories, and more than half of the victories on the list overall (76 / 134).

Five-time Women’s World Champions Maia Chiburdanidze and Nona Gaprindashvili didn’t beat any super-GMs, but they did both beat a few Top 30 players, the equivalent to a super-GM at the time. Credit: NewsGeorgia.

Another big name who had been missing from the other list was Vera Menchik. If we estimate her opponents’ rankings using Chessmetrics (there were no official ratings at the time), she had no less than 11 Top 30 victories, nearly as many as Hou Yifan. And Xie Jun, the four-time World Champion of the ’90s had 4 Top 30 victories, including two over Viktor Korchnoi in 1999 when he was still Top 20 in the world.

Points of Interest

It’s worth noting that one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, women don’t have more wins against super-GMs and Top 30 players is they just don’t get the opportunity to face top players that often. For the 13 women with exactly one win against a super-GM, they only have about 8 games on average vs. super-GMs, and only Goryachkina has faced super-GMs at least 20 times. On the other hand, all five women with multiple wins against super-GMs all have at least 20 games against super-GMs.

If you want to see women beat super-GMs more often, we need to have more tournaments designed for women to face super-GMs. That could mean inviting more women to super-tournaments with 2700s. It could also mean arranging more Swiss tournaments that are structured to include both the top women and 2700s.

Take another look at the list of 22 times women other than Judit and Hou Yifan have beaten super-GMs. A whole 8 out of 22 (36%) of those victories came at one tournament: Gibraltar. Why? Because it was basically the only Swiss tournament that really tried to get both the top women and the top men to play. Unfortunately today, the Gibraltar Masters is no more. The chess world is waiting for another Swiss tournament to step up and fill that gap so we can go back to seeing women beat 2700s in Swiss tournaments.

Ju Wenjun was one of eight different women to beat a 2700+ GM at the Gibraltar Chess Festival over the years, the most at any one event. Credit: John Saunders.

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Back to our original goal: When Tan Zhongyi beat Richard Rapport, she became the 18th woman to beat a super-GM. It was just the 22nd time it happened by someone other than Judit or Hou Yifan. Including Judit and Hou Yifan, Tan’s victory was the 36th-highest-rated win by any woman ever out of 71 super-GM victories. She also became the 21st woman to beat a Top 30 player, and it was just barely in the top 100 of highest-ranked wins by women all-time.

Looking at the feats of the other top players today, Ju Wenjun is already in rarefied air as the only woman besides Judit or Hou Yifan with at least three super-GM victories, and she has five. But to reach similar rarefied air on the Top 30 victory list, she would need to also get to five, and right now she only has three. Whether or not she gets those two more Top 30 more victories is one of the key milestones to watch out for in the rest of Ju Wenjun’s career.

It’s also worth noting that Ju Wenjun’s victory over Alireza Firouzja last year was the 9th highest-rated win by a woman ever, while Alexandra Kosteniuk’s victory over Nodirbek Abdusattorov was the 5th-highest rated win by a woman ever.

Do you know of any super-GM or Top 30 victories missing from the lists? Let me know in the comments, and I will update the article accordingly.

UPDATE: The Top 30 victory list has been updated to include Sonja Graf's victory over inaugural GM Gideon Ståhlberg, who was estimated to be Top 10 in the world at the time.

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