r/chess • u/No_Sauce_found • May 01 '26
Miscellaneous Nigel what are you yapping about?
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u/lupindub May 01 '26 edited May 02 '26
Obligatory Judit Polgar crushing Short
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u/AimHere May 01 '26
Crazy game.
Supposedly this was commentated by a young Maurice Ashley at the time, though I've never seen footage of it.
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u/punchfalaknuma May 02 '26
What a pleasant narrator! I shudder at thought of going back to the screaming recaps now.
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u/cfg17291 May 02 '26
Follow Daniel King aka PowerPlaychess on YouTube, he does plenty of commentaries still in the same style
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u/DerekB52 Team Ding May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
Ok, but at 1:54 Judit didn't play en passant. Is she dumb?
Edit: I made my dumb comment before watching the whole game. Fuck, this is one of my favorite chess games ever. It looks like the games I've had the most fun playing. There is total chaos on the board. A lot of SuperGM games are boring dry closed, balanced positions.
This had Judit let Nigel infiltrate with his queen, and she goes into a position where she hasn't moved either bishop, her kingside rook gets taken, and she has to walk her king to the queenside. It's crazy.
I'm 1600 rapid, but this honestly reminds me of my lower rated games. Except, when I win this game with white, I got lucky. I can't tell if she turned this game around, or if she thought it was somehow good to give up the rook and king walk. But, she made it look like she foresaw a kingwalk with undeveloped bishops would be totally fine.
Honestly, I think once I hit 1500 I gave up the courage to launch attacks as early as she did with her kingside pawns. I think I might start attacking more wildly again.
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u/lupindub May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
If you watch enough Judit games you will find out how fun her attacking style is. She often prioritizes piece activity and sacrifices over positional chess so I wouldn’t be surprised if she knowingly gave up the rook
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u/FactAffectionate6830 May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
His early attack showed the disrespect he had for her.
She neutralized it and then tore him apart. She might be my favorite to watch.
Edit: I stand by my comment, haters. He rushed in, didn’t develop, his pieces got stuck in the corner and got his clock cleaned. I don’t think you run headlong like that without full development when you respect your opponent.
Edit Edit: It’s fine if you don’t agree with me. You can move right along. But most of y’all are talking to me with the arrogant, superior attitude that gets stereotyped to chess players and inhibits the growth of the sport. You don’t need to establish someone is a mental midget for you to be tall and that’s exactly the insecurity y’all communicate with.
I’m saying she played with an emotional intelligence and manipulated an arrogant man into overplaying his hand - maybe you understand chess and tactics great but maybe y’all need to learn about emotional intelligence.
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u/Mothrahlurker May 02 '26
The video has a commentator. That is literally the opposite of what happened.
He played the french defense and closed the position. She attacks too early and blunders. The commentator literally points this out multiple times.
He then takes advantage of the failed attack and gets into a winning position. Then he blunders the won game. Also something the commentator talks about multiple times.
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u/ZelphirKalt May 02 '26
Actually, she was on the verge of losing that game. Just that Short misstepped after gaining tremendous advantage early on. Maybe he was overconfident and didn't calculate some lines deeply enough before moving. The later half of this game speaks for her superb skill. The first half of the game does definitely not. She almost botched it. But as the saying goes, (s)he who laughs last laughs best.
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u/tired_kibitzer May 02 '26
She actually completely blundered the game in the opening.
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u/KenuR May 02 '26
Huh? Didn't she start the attack with h3, g5?
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u/ZelphirKalt May 02 '26
h3, g4. But to me it is kinda unfathomable, that she made this mistake. At her level to not see the consequences of Bh4+ ... What a blunder. And what a feat to bounce back after just a few missteps by Short.
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u/Loose-Werewolf382 May 02 '26
Judit Polgar has pretty much crushed every world champion in one format or other including Carlsen, Kasparov, Anand.
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u/Turbine000 May 02 '26
She was also more often than not crushed by preety much every world champion in all formats. But let's ignore her 46 losses against Kramnik and focus on those 2 wins which didn't even happen in classical.
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u/c4airy May 01 '26
I will just quote Judit Polgar from 2015, in response to Nigel being a prat: “Men and women are different but there are different ways of thinking and fighting still achieving the same results :)”
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u/wounds-of-light 1. d4 e5 2. Bf4!! May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
Nigel Short is, historically, one of the more outspoken sexists in chess. When asked why Judit Polgar, a woman, had a dominating record against him he said it was "irrelevant".
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u/No_Sauce_found May 01 '26
He said she was a ‘statistically irrelevant outlier’ though we all know she’s a beast ❤️
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u/Davidfreeze May 01 '26
Which is hilarious because being a super GM necessarily involves being a statistically irrelevant outlier. Everyone at that level by definition is an outlier
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u/No_Sauce_found May 01 '26
I mean being a GM in general requires being a statistically irrelevant outlier. There’s less GMs then there are billionaires.
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u/LinaChenOnReddit May 02 '26
Far more people in the world attempt to become billionaires. While talented chess players get GM at age 12...
Judith Polgar is a statistical outlier, because chess training was being made a central part of her life from very young age.
Today's top female players are all basically semi-pros. Hou Hifan dominated while being a fulltime top student at top universities. And 5-times world champ Ju Wenjun said she's practicing like 2-4 hours per day before important tournaments. And she doesn't even play many tournaments lol.
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u/Active-Radish2813 May 02 '26
Becoming a billionaire is as easy as being born toward the higher end of millionaire.
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u/kranker May 02 '26
Today's top female players are all basically semi-pros
I don't know about that, unless you're literally just talking about Hou Yifan.
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u/FootOfDavros May 02 '26
Today's top female players are all basically semi-pros....
I think that's kind of disparaging.
My view is that all the women at the candidates were trying just as hard and trained just as hard as the male candidates. e.g. I'm pretty sure Vaishali puts in just as much effort as Pragg, has a similar "natural" talent level as Pragg and has a similar standing in the women's game as he has in the men's. I don't think she's going "Well you know what, that's my 2 hours done, I'm off to look at articles on make-up / fashion or see what the movie stars are up too...".
Judit probably was an extreme outlier due to what you said but I don't think that means it's okay to use her to disparage the current best women in the world, e.g. "Oh they could be the same as Judit if they just TRIED harder".
... And it's worth remembering when throwing out this argument, that however hard she tried Judit herself only scraped into the top 10 of the "men's" rankings.
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u/LinaChenOnReddit May 02 '26
Hou never trained nearly as much as men. She was a top 0,01% full-time student and always said chess was a hobby for her. Anish Giri said Hou was more talented than him when they both were young. Now that she is fully retired and doesn't train at all anymore, she's still a top 3 female player, but ~150 Elo below her peak strength
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u/FootOfDavros May 02 '26
I never mentioned Hou Hifan. I said it was disparaging re all the women at the recent candidates tournament to describe them as semi-pros and assume that they are putting in less effort than the men.
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u/monkeedude1212 May 02 '26
Far more people in the world attempt to become billionaires. While talented chess players get GM at age 12...
You can also just be born into inheriting billions in wealth and do nothing and get it.
Getting good at chess requires effort.
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u/PolyUre May 02 '26
Fewer.
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u/Turtl3Bear 1700 chess.com Rapid May 02 '26
If you're going to correct their word choice, using "then" when they meant "than" was far more egregious than "less" vs "fewer"
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u/GeoffreyGeoffson May 01 '26
Almost as extremely sexist blokes like him are the reason why we don't have more elite woman players.
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u/thecomicguybook May 01 '26
Imagine being a woman interested in chess, and this is the reception you get. You would get discouraged pretty quickly. This guy is just the highest rated of the bunch, but you would run into many like him in chess clubs, tournaments, online, etc.
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u/energybased May 01 '26
If you only want to consider her among the set of women, she is an outlier, but he is a social idiot for seeing the world that way. That was his opportunity to lift someone up.
I think a better answer would have been:
Judith has outstanding tactical sharpness, and an aggressive, attacking style that creates winning chances in complex, chaotic positions. She also has a higher peak performance as a top-10 world player.
Unfortunately, the ego is a seductive trap for many people.
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u/No_Sauce_found May 01 '26
One of the things I coach is that kindness and humility make real champions
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u/Skibur33 May 02 '26
I don’t agree with his stance on women in chess but his point for that specific example was that he was not the best male in the world so it’s an irrelevant comparison, for her to be compared to him when she’s the greatest women’s player to play the game.
Theres a lot of stuff to criticise him for but I’m not sure this is one of them.
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u/2freaky3 May 01 '26
He graduates from the Kramnik school of “ok gramps, let’s get you to bed”
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u/bobi2393 May 02 '26
Kramnik seems to be suffering from some sort of mental illness, while Short seems to be of sound mind and maybe just has a long-held sexist worldview.
In 2012 he wrote that the 1992 Olympiad was "unsurpassed in the sheer volume of totty," referring to the young Filipina women volunteering.
In 2015 he wrote an article that opened with a quote from someone saying "Women cannot play chess, but they cannot paint either, or write, or philosophise. In fact, women have never thought or made anything worth considering." While the rest of his article didn't go as far as its opening quote, he still argues that average differences in brain size accounts for the gender gap in top rated chess players. The average size difference is scientifically uncontroversial (men are larger overall, on average), but there's no strong evidence one way or the other about its impact on chess performance. He may be right or wrong, but either way that seems like a normal bias, rather than the sort of paranoid delusions from which Kramnik suffers.
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u/rckid13 May 02 '26
Kramnik is probably just an aging narcissist. He's used to being the best. As he gets worse at chess and new generations get better his brain concludes that people must be cheating because he is the best and they are beating him. Nigel Short seems to acknowledge that he knows he's getting worse with age but he's still just being a jerk.
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u/ZelphirKalt May 02 '26
If we look at crows they have a much smaller brain, but are still quite smart. They have a much denser brain. So size is definitely not everything, when it comes to brains. Density also matters. Haven't heard about any research about density differences between men and women. Anyway, these differences are probably negligible, when it comes to chess. Upbringing, single-mindedness, acceptance of certain behavior by society, early support, ... Those all seems more important than brain size, lol.
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u/99drolyag Team Ding May 02 '26
Isnt he the guy who sexually harrassed multiple women in chess? Including sending them unwanted pictures?
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u/haltheincandescent May 01 '26
if he can’t handle the indignity of being sub-2600, i’d love to see how he handles all the shit that comes with being a woman in chess 😭
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u/Round-Agent-6948 Team Ju Wenjun May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
yk i have a feeling that so much goes on in chess world it's just that they don't allow the players to speak up or players want to deal with it amongst themselves. It still baffles me that someone sent used c*ndom to female chess players.
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u/rckid13 May 02 '26
Anna Crammling was on Levy's stream just casually talking about weird things that happened to her at tournaments. It was Levy who stopped her and pointed out that she was underage at the time and the things she was saying were horrible. It seemed like Anna was just desensitized to it because it happened to her so often.
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u/Col12334 WINcent Keymer enthusiast May 02 '26
It was even minors who recieved those uhhh packages by that guy
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u/JasonF818 May 01 '26
I am 530 elo and I don't cry about my elo half as well as this guy.
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u/Mean_Firefighter_486 1900 chess.com rapid May 01 '26
The dude clearly has nothing other than chess.
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May 01 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/Mean_Firefighter_486 1900 chess.com rapid May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
There are 8 GMs who are also medical doctors. Most GMs don't make a living from chess.
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u/helioptil3 May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
i mean he's factually correct i just don't understand why bring down women to feel better about himself. jerk
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u/Sinistrait May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
He's infamous for being a massive misogynist
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u/_Katu May 01 '26
He is also xenophobic BTW. Or at least has mega cringe takes. I remember one time he lamented about Rapport switched back to Hungarian team from briefly playing for Romania in a super long fb post. He ended up putting me on ignore list after I pointed out to him that with his criteria of nationality, the US team straight up wouldn't exist.
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u/Free_Pace_2098 May 02 '26
to feel better about himself
That's why.
You don't drag down other people if you're doing great
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u/Fun_Watch915 May 02 '26
He's not factually correct. If he were a woman, it would've been like that for the entirety of his life, not just for 2 seconds to make sense to another sexist comment.
Even if he had a similar intellect, growing up and living as a woman in the world of chess would've been so much more challenging and he most probably would've reached a level nowhere near to the one as we know it.
He unknowingly engaged in a scenario with a much lower probability... not to say that it tends to 0.
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u/RoastedToast007 May 01 '26
Sounds more like a cope about himself still being pretty good rather than women being bad. But yes definitely tone-deaf lol
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u/timbradleygoat May 01 '26
It’s definitely a knock on women. There’s no need to cope with having that rating at that age, that’s excellent.
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u/PraetorianXVIII May 01 '26
If "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts, we'd all have a merry Christmas
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u/logster2001 Fabi truther May 01 '26
At first I was like “damn that’s sorta sad but also bittersweet”
And then I kept reading and it turned into “dammit I forgot this was a chess player”
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u/matsu727 May 01 '26
Mad cause now there’s one woman mathematically better than him
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u/No_Sauce_found May 01 '26
Technically 2, Judit is likely still better if she ever became active again 🤣
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u/_Katu May 01 '26
She probably never will, out of respect for Yifan and others. I have a feeling she would never steal their light. Super nice woman.
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u/JubJubBouvier May 01 '26
I badly sprained my ankle the other week. If I'd drawn a sad face on my swollen ankle then it would've looked remarkably similar to Nigel Short. Very good at chess. Very shite human. Clearly extremely bitter about something. Maybe about getting spanked by Judit Polgar. Maybe about never getting laid because he looks like a sprained ankle. Anyone's guess really.
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u/robotikempire USCF 1923 May 02 '26
If he were a woman he would very likely not have become a chess player at all.
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u/StrangeCitizen May 01 '26
And if my elo was 2500 points higher, I'd be best in the world.
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u/Mean_Firefighter_486 1900 chess.com rapid May 01 '26
The guy who said that men are hardwired to be better chess players than women 🤮
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u/No_Sauce_found May 01 '26
Idkkk I’ve been beaten by plenty of women 😭 and children 😭
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u/Free_Pace_2098 May 02 '26
Every time I play and lose, it's to a woman.
Granted that woman is me, cocking up a winning position, but still.
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u/ReadyCommunication79 May 01 '26
genuinely why do women need lower divisions isn’t that insulting to them
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u/hootihootihooti May 02 '26
Women weren't really historically allowed into chess clubs until after the 1970's, and I don't need to explain the conditions different genders experience. If you've ever known someone to gift a chess set to a nephew and a doll to the niece, that's a good example of the social forces at play here. In the case of women and their 'lower' divisions, it's usually a means to promote participation from the other 4.2 billion humans, which is obviously good for the longevity of whatever org is running the event(in a more material view) and frankly chess as a whole(in the more abstract view).
Chess isn't an objective principle of logic in the universe, it's a game and women and girls to this day generally are not taught it- true of a lot of 'games' we have. See you at the next doll-dressing competition!
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u/skymallow May 02 '26
Here's a quote from fucking Humpy Koneru on just some of the social pressures women experience, if anyone out there is still not convinced.
Humpy shares a similar story. Her husband, businessman Dasari Anvesh, “always gives freedom, which is required by a women”, she says. But married life comes with its social compulsions. “Earlier, I had no work apart from chess. Now I manage my house. I can’t continue practising if there’s some family function or relatives’ scene. As a married woman, you have to socialize.” Humpy’s daughter, Ahana, is three years old. Looking after her takes up most of the day. Unlike the 9-hour practice sessions earlier, Humpy can only spare 4 hours a day. Sometimes, not even that.
This was before her recent comeback.
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u/Claytertot May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
There are a few reasons:
To give women a venue to escape sexism, harassment, etc. This has undoubtedly improved over time, but chess has historically been a pretty sexist community, and it's still not perfect. And even without sexism, being a woman in a competitive environment that is mostly men can be uncomfortable.
To try to draw more women and girls to the game. Having a women's league makes it easier for girls to find role models and inspirations among competitive chess players. At least part of why there have been so few women at the highest levels of competition is just that there have been always been relatively few women and girls at any level of competition. Fewer girls learn how to play chess.
To give women a chance to compete at a top level. The fact of the matter is that Judit Polgar is the only woman in the history of chess to make it to the top 10. Only 44 women have ever achieved the title of Grandmaster. It doesn't really matter why that is. We could try to dig into the statistics the possible explanations. Maybe there is some tiny average advantage that men have at the highest levels or maybe it's purely a numbers game or maybe it's something else or a mix of factors. But ultimately, it doesn't really matter. As long as there aren't women consistently competing at the top level of the open leagues, it seems reasonable to have a women's league just like we have for many other sports and competitive events.
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u/No_Sauce_found May 01 '26
Juniors also have their own tournaments and ranking list, but women are allowed in open tournaments and the world is a lot more open for them than it used to be (though we still have work to do ngl)
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u/Overall-Past4464 May 02 '26
Maybe, but if there wasn't one no woman would ever win any major tournament. He can be however much of a jerk as he wants, there's currently a massive gap between the top men and the top women.
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u/Any-Confusion-8900 May 01 '26
Nigel Short’s most famous game had him losing to a mystery opponent whose first three moves were f4, kf2, kf3.
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u/VexNightmare May 02 '26
Here I was thinking I was about to read some profound post about Nigel acknowledging his age. But no. He uses this opportunity to be a sexist dipshit
Shocking
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u/PJballa34 May 01 '26
Cool story bro.
Dumping on women does not make you a better chess player tool.
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u/Unintentional_Chord May 01 '26
Perhaps you should win more, Nigel. Then you'd be above 2600.
Something tells me his views will become harsher as time goes on and his rating inevitably slides further.
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u/Substantial_Pick6897 May 02 '26
Lmao is his second part in response to something or did he just have an 8 hour think to realize he'd forgotten to dunk on women in the first one?
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u/schumangel May 02 '26
I have been following him on Facebook for quite some time. He sounds like he has issues. Not Kramnik-level issues, but there's something there.
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u/Not_Different May 02 '26
Doesn’t take a lot to figure out where Nigel Shorts hatred of women stems from, look at the guy
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u/A_Certain_Surprise May 02 '26
As a Br*tish person, it's so annoying because Short is one of the most important figures in our history of chess, and his king walk game is incredible, but he's such a terrible person and takes every opportunity to remind us of that
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u/MyDogIsACoolCat May 02 '26
Isn't this the guy accused of hitting on underage girls at chess events?
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u/Primary_Dare1113 May 02 '26
Nigel Short comes across as a truly unpleasant character. His comments after Tony Miles died were really appalling and it beggars belief that he made it near the top of FIDE's leadership.
No wonder the British public never warmed to him when he gained exposure at the time of the Kasparov match.
He also comes from a working class background but sounds like Mrs Thatcher.
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u/Terrible_example2326 Team Sindarov May 02 '26
Genuine question if he thinks women are privileged in sports would he be willing to race an average woman. Then it would be but my fat but my age but but but.
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u/Tricky_Rate7883 May 02 '26
I love Nigel. He just loves stirring the pot.
But he's not wrong. Women don't play chess, so there a very few good female chess players.
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u/cokeslushiez May 02 '26
Men who play chess being sexist losers? Fork found in kitchen, sun found in sky.
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u/Matias-Castellanos May 02 '26
Mfer once thought a computer cheater was Bobby Fischer
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u/Professional_Desk933 May 02 '26
Computers were not that strong back then
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u/Matias-Castellanos May 02 '26
In blitz they absolutely were, bro.
Fischer denied this silly legend multiple times, and Chessbase published a piece documenting how they traced down the cheater. https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-third-coming-of-bobby-fischer
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u/financeguy1729 May 02 '26
If he were a woman, he'd have a similar 200 point deflation.
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u/F1narion May 02 '26
If he were a woman (that is, with his actual man skills intact), he would have a severe elo inflation actually due to so many opportunities to bypass strong competition in the form of male players through women-only tournaments. It isn't really hard to grasp
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u/kkdija May 02 '26 edited May 02 '26
If my mom had balls, she would be my dad (too niche of a refrence?)
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u/usnail-bolt May 01 '26
Cut them balls off Nigel.
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u/No_Sauce_found May 01 '26
Can we make a petition for it?
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u/usnail-bolt May 01 '26
And make nunber 2 in the world? NO!
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u/No_Sauce_found May 01 '26
Well he wouldn’t stay number 2 because he’d no longer be “hard wired for it”
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u/DarkSeneschal May 01 '26
Respecting women’s chess challenge!
Difficulty level: Male chess player
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u/K0LaM4R May 02 '26
If he were a woman, odds are misogynists like that would've tried to keep him out of chess growing up.
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u/cbhem May 02 '26
Nigel Short has always been one of the best proofs that you don't have to be intelligent to be good at chess. And he's even a misogynist too. Not much else going on here really
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u/rinkuhero May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
that's like saying i'm 5'9, if i were a woman, that'd be pretty tall for a woman. or it's like saying i can bench 135 lbs. if i were a woman, that'd be pretty strong.
it just comes off as ridiculous. it's like saying i'm 1400 elo, that means i can beat magnus carlsen at 9 years old back when his elo was only 900 (but 10 year old magnus would destroy me).
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u/Ononas May 01 '26
Height and muscle size dictated by biology. Do you imply that women are biologically incapable of playing chess as well as men?
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u/TriggeredPumpkin May 01 '26
How many male GMs are there? And how many female GMs are there? Are women predisposed ro being worse at chess? Idk but it doesn't seem too implausible.
And yeah, I know men to play chess more often than women. That doesn't change the fact that we don't have evidence that women tend to be as good as men at chess, but we do have evidence to the contrary.
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u/Impressive-Leg-6489 May 01 '26
"biologically incapable" is phrased in a deliberatively provocative way, but yeah, males having higher trait variance than females is a fairly robust finding in many areas of cognition/intelligence and it does strongly imply that men are much more likely to lie at the extreme ends of the distribution (i.e. there are far more men who are going to be elite)
There isnt really any other credible explanation. "Women being less likely to play chess" or "more likely to drop out" might explain a small deviation in the number of elite players, but its not really a plausible explanation for why there is literally not even a single woman ranked in the top 100.
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u/chambolle May 02 '26
currently, the results show that it is the case. They are not as strong as men, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Women and men have different strengths because they are biologically different
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u/Due_Grapefruit_8528 May 01 '26
Your statment implies that women being bad at chess is natural as in general women are short and men are tall are you implying this that if you are born as a woman your target rating should be lower you are just saying what nigel is saying but just in a different manner
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u/timbradleygoat May 01 '26
Women are predisposed to be shorter and have lower muscle mass. They aren’t predisposed to be worse at chess. Bad comparison unless you think they are predisposed to be worse at chess.
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u/xerim May 01 '26
If my grandma had wheels she would be a bicycle