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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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The reason chess is a segregated sport is because the male players couldn't cope emotionally with co-ed.
Not only was their the sex-pest harassment stuff, but men who lost to women would become hysterical, hostile, and aggressive.
Women just needed clam, rational, and stoic people to play with, so they had to exclude men.
I especially like playing chess with clam people.
I like to play chess with people which are way better than I am in it
I like to play chess and stare at boobs
When my sister was on the chess team in highschool she would always wear a low-cut top with ample cleavage to the tournaments. She said it was very effective when her opponents spent more time staring at her chest than the board!
May be a gross oversimplification, simply because, ignoring everything else around professional chess, the world championship is technically open for all genders...
But considering how FIDE makes women gain ELO by taking it from other women in mixed tournaments, its 2023 ruling on transgender players, and how former World Champion Garry Kasparov reacted to losing to a women, it might as well be the truth.
In Kasparov's eventual defense, he did say this after losing to Polgar:
“I was wrong about women playing chess. I gave an opinion a long time ago that I no longer believe.”
and later in his book wrote:
‘I won’t hide from the fact that I did make regrettably sexist remarks about women in chess around this time. In that 1989 Playboy interview I said men were better at chess because “women are weaker fighters” and that “probably the answer is in the genes”. The possibility of gender brain differences aside, I find it almost hard to believe I said this considering that my mother is the toughest fighter I know.’
Thank goodness online adaptations allow people to play without having to consider the identity of their opponent (because I don't mind who I play against).
The selection is already biased. High ELO ranked chessplayers are not all that stable to begin with.
Yes, almost every sport where men are actually at an advantage allows women to compete in the "men's" leagues as well. Only when they actually start winning against the men do the rules start excluding them
What are the examples for the second sentence? Climbing?
Pretty much every shooting sport (excluding poundage-categorized archery because of draw weights), at very least.
~~Habing chess separated for gender is a huge red flag.. i feel like both women and men are ok with it for some reason cause otherwise i dont know how this is still a thing in 2026~~
I stand corrected
Chess is not segregated by gender. There are women’s tournaments and there are open tournaments. There are no men’s tournaments. Men are way overrepresented at all the open tournaments, but women do compete in all of them.
Women’s representation is increasing at the top levels but it’s a gradual process. Judit Polgar and Hou Yifan (侯逸凡) are so far the only women to reach the top 100 players in the world and regularly compete with success at the top open tournaments.
The main world championship and title of GM is open to everyone, so it's not truly split.
There are FIDE women only tournaments but that's due to there being less participation of women. When you have something like this where the skill distribution is gaussian, if you have like 50 women compete and 1000 men, you will notice that it's extremely unlikely for a woman to ever reach 1st place just due to statistics. Replace women and men with brown hair and blond hair and you'd see the same phenomenon.
The tail of the statistics where you see extreme deviations of improved skill would be dominated by the population with much larger participation.
To counter this, they have women only tournaments so that you always have a woman in 1st place in some tournament, basically to improve participation and convince more girls to play when they're young.
There are of course probably other factors but these things improve participation and are meant to help get more women in chess, not separate them out.