Where's Bobbi Fischer?
Hana Schank
July 13, 2015
Published online at Aeon
Little girls sign up to play chess in droves.
So why are so few of the world's top players women?
Here’s a story my father likes to tell. When I was five, my family spent several months living in Barbados. Since we were in a rental house, there weren’t many games or toys around, save for the beat-up travel checkers set we’d packed in our suitcase. The hours I didn’t spend in school learning to add a ‘u’ to the word color, or inspecting shells on the beach, I spent playing checkers, first with my family, and then, when they got sick of it, with the visitors who straggled through our cinderblock bungalow. One of them, a computer science professor, thought he’d humour my parents by playing with their sunburned kid. I destroyed him in two games. ‘I told you she was good,’ said my father. ‘Yes,’ said the professor, ‘but the second gameI was trying.’
I don’t remember this particular instance because it was unremarkable. I destroyed lots of people in checkers. The game turned out to be my gateway drug, and soon I began playing chess. Chess didn’t have the speed of checkers or the satisfying click the pieces made when you snapped one on top of the other and whispered: King me, but I liked that it had a story and characters and the ability to come back from near‑annihilation in a few swift moves. So when my school offered a chess club in fourth grade, I promptly signed up.
