Sincere congratulations to Ju Wenjun on retaining the women’s world title. Aleksandra Goryachkina was a very serious challenger, the young star of Russian women’s chess. The prize fund was huge, 500,000 euros (split 55% to the winner, 45% to the loser). I am glad Ju won. She got the disadvantage from almost every opening and had to play better overall to make up for the Russian team opening prep.
Ju won the match in a city that Russia captured from China and renamed Vladivostok, which means “Rule the East”. Those Russians can be friendly folks!
The main match commentator was Nigel Short, who was also head of the appeals committee (sort of strange, but fortunately there were no appeals I know of.) I had the impression that Short was rooting for Goryachkina, he didn’t come across as unbiased. His commentary was technically good, I just didn’t like his attitude. Maybe FIDE wants a different titleholder.
Short was joined as commentator for most of the second half of the match by Hou Yifan, who now follows Judit Polgar as having “graduated” from the women’s world championship and no longer competes for it. When interviewing Ju after her win in game 9, Short mocked her pretty badly in the interview and took full advantage of Ju’s limited English fluency and willingness to cooperate by not speaking Chinese. Hou said nothing to her the whole time but laughs along with Short, and they’re teammates on the Chinese team. No evidence of support for her teammate. See at 5:05:22 (it starts off OK and gets pretty bad later on) wwcm2020.fide.com/tpost/h5zpok4iln-game-9
One could see a difference on the Russian commentary in how Sergey Shipov treated Goryachkina (who didn’t try to speak English). Shipov was a cheerleader and did everything to make her feel better after a tough loss.
When Ju qualified for the GM title, one of her norms wasn’t signed off by the arbiter. So it seems like she had to go get a whole new set of norms, they couldn’t just chase down that signature, or even let her get just one more norm. She finally got her GM title with 6 norms. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ju_Wenjun
In every game, Goryachkina seemed to have a new opening innovation. The Russian chess machine that Fischer complained about seemed to be behind her. In the tiebreak where four games were played in one day, Goryachkina went offsite after every game to meet with her brain trust; you can see her getting scanned with the wand when she returns for the next game. Ju seems to be just sitting at the board, maybe she does not leave the security perimeter.
But in the tiebreak game that Ju won, the third, she had an innovation involving h4. Advancing rook pawns is the trademark of the strongest chessplayer in the world, Alpha Zero. Maybe this was an Alpha Zero idea. Nigel Short didn’t approve of h4 followed by Bh3 (he wanted to keep the B on g2 and push f4 and g4), but then black’s queen somehow couldn’t move. Short didn’t seem to notice this issue, but Goryachkina stopped having productive ideas after it.
Goryachkina got the advantage out of almost every opening. Ju saved game after game. When Ju got the rare opening advantage, she usually converted. Ju is the better tactician and better endgame player. I get the impression that Goryachkina is very well prepared and trained in “Russian school” strategy.
I must say Ju seemed distracted early in the match, in the Shanghai part of it. Maybe she prefers to play away from home. She used to be over 2600 so her latest results haven’t been the best.
Even back in the Women’s Candidates tournament six months ago, which Goryachkina won easily, interviewer Elizabeth Paehtz outright asked Goryachkina if her competitors were helping her. See here at 3:55 en.chessbase.com/post/womens-ca … 19-round-9
Remember how the Soviets did that? In the AVRO tournament, after a few rounds Botvinnik was doing well, so the other Russians were directed to lose to him. Goryachkina is said to be studying engineering just as Botvinnik was supposedly an engineer. Is she the new Botvinnik of Russian women’s chess? Since the men’s title seems to be out of reach for them, Carlsen is too tough, they seem to have gone all-out for the women’s.