It’s not a physical game, yet I have never seen any women playing against men. I remember once there was a charity game where men and women played but not official Fide tournaments.
Forgive me if they have, they r very rare at least.
Is there a proper reason ?
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Women can play with men. But as there are many more competitive men chess players, a women only tournament might encourage more women to participate.
They do!
There are women tournaments and championships where only women can participate.
But most tournaments are opens, which anybody can participate no matter their gender. (You said you never saw it but it is common, watch any woman chess streamer such as Anna Cramling going to an tournament, she will face men and women).
Now you don’t see them at top level tournament because they are less good. Hou Yifan is 2632 right now, which does not put her in the top 100 (not too far though), and then the second woman is 2559 which is really a step below.
Then your question may be, why are they less good at top level? The best explanation we have is educational environment. Boys are trained earlier and pushed more to dedicate their life to it, role models are all men etc…
It may change with the next generation of Indian and Chinese players, we’ll see.
Not all tournaments / organizations section people by gender.
However, as with many other cases, it has roots in the game being male-dominated early on, and either for social rules/values or personal interest reasons, women largely did not play, or were discouraged from playing. Women-only divisions aim to build interest in chess among women, or to create tournaments that are less dominated by male players who might have an advantage or longer span of experience/support on average.
In addition, some nations also just have rules that divide competitive games/sports of all kind into men and women divisions.
Did “The Queens Gambit” lie to me?
They do.
There are mixed feelings about it though.
Hou Yifan, the youngest women’s world champion, has stated that competing with top males is an opportunity.
She however resigned from a tournament claiming that matchmaking was fixed against women causing them to finish lower than they would if the matchmaking was fair against them. The way it was fixed was by putting women against other women more than they should have been, making women getting knocked out being guaranteed from those matches.
In Hou Yifan’s 10 matches, she was paired with other women 7 times despite women being less common in the tournament.
[https://www.chess.com/article/view/hou-yifan-interview-chess](https://www.chess.com/article/view/hou-yifan-interview-chess)
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/feb/03/hou-yifan-resigns-after-five-moves-gibraltar
Men and women play in chess tournaments against each other all the time. Most tournaments are open class meaning everyone can play, or rather they are classed by rating.
The problem that chess and a lot of other sports have is that there are less women joining the sport and women are more likely to leave the sport as well. So there are far more men then women playing competitive chess. In an effort to promote top female chess players the top tournaments have separate female classes in addition to the open class. When signing up women can chose which class to compete in. But if they sign up for the open class they are going to face much stronger competitors and get much lower scores which means less exposure and less prize money.
This have helped get more women into chess as it have made several top raking female chess players famous. Something their equally strong male competitors have not been. However this system have gotten some criticism, even among these top female players. Some have been facing a dilemma when signing up to tournaments as they can do pretty well against the top competitors in the open class but will be guaranteed to win the female class.
Let’s say you’re in the top 10 of women in chess. You’re probably 200-400 in the world.
You can either play woman’s tournaments (woman’s Grand Swiss, woman’s world cup…) and try to qualify to become world champion. And earn a significant amount of money.
Or you can play the open section (i.e. male and female but in practice almost always male) and have almost no chance of winning.
What do you choose?
But sometimes women play in the open section. Ju Wenjun played in Tata Steel 2024. She was probably mostly invited because of her rating (a male 2549 rated would probably not have been considered unless he had some out of the ordinary trait) but in the end she didn’t perform that bad ending on 10th place (out of 14)
The Eli5 is, there are less women who are that competitive in chess VS men who are competitive in chess
Basically it’s more profitable to promote female chess as a separate sports. If you have men and women all playing together, women would be submerged by their counterparts. From a marketing point of view, it doesn’t help female players to shine as stars since they keep losing, nor adding too much quality to chess game itself.
On the contrary, segregation makes some female players become “top players” even though they’re not even top 100. It helps the tournament to promote the individuals as well as encouraging more young girls to play the game.
As most comments have answered – they do in fact. Very often. My question is – why would you ask the question as a statement that is true when it is not.
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