World female chess champion and grandmaster Hou Yifan deliberately lost a match in the final round of the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess tournament to protest being paired up against mostly women in the tournament.
Hou, 22, who became the women’s world champion at age 16, lost the match against Indian grandmaster Babu Lalith in five moves. Lalith is a male player whom Hou outranks, according to The Washington Post.
Tournament organizer Brian Callaghan said he is sympathetic about Hou’s pairings, but that they are made by a machine and not by people.
“I understand, if I was in her shoes and I was playing and suddenly I pulled a draw of 6 girls — one after another — I would say also, ‘What’s going on here,” he said, the Post reported. “But clearly nothing was going on. It comes out of a machine and sometimes odds fall that way.”
“I think she recognizes that, and I think that we need to move on,” Callaghan added.
Hou said she had tried to draw attention to the pairings, but nothing was changed.
“I should apologize to all the chess fans for what I did to this game,” she said, the Post reported. But she also said, “For the future events it should be a 100 percent fair situation.”
There were more men than women competing, yet Hou still played seven of 10 women in the tournament.
Hou spoke out earlier this year about the World Chess Federation using different rules in women’s and men’s tournaments and said she would only attend open events.
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