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CCA "respects" Hou's protest against FIDE

Xinhua, May 26, 2016 Adjust font size:

After reigning world champion Hou Yifan announced her protest against World Chess Federation (FIDE), Chinese Chess Association said on Thursday it "respects" Hou's right.

"We totally respect Hou' s reasonable right as a chess player," said Ye Jiangchuan, the Secretary-General of Chinese Chess Association (CCA).

CCA also proposed three suggestions in its letter to FIDE this month: first, change Women's World Chess Championship to World Cup; second, the champion of World Cup will be the challenger who will challenge the reigning world champion. Then (third), the winner will be the new world champion.

Hou dropped out of the curent Women's World Championship cycle right after she claimed her fourth world champion.

She threw away the crown. The one that marks her name in history as the youngest Women's World Champion at sixteen in 2010.

"I didn' t think this (format) was actually reasonable (at first), but it was the only option I had. Now the situation is different." Hou explained her reasons in a Chessbase interview.

Hou mainly objected to the format wherein the Women's World Champion is decided alternately by a knockout tournament and then a match each year.

"The general point is that the overall system is not logical: the winner of the knockout tournament will be called 'World Champion' and the previous World Champion loses her title. "

To Hou and other former world champion like Russian GM Alexandra Kosteniuk, the crown was stripped by the system, not the opponent that sit on the other side of the table.

"After winning those matches (since 2010), and with FIDE still rejecting all my proposals, I did not see any point to continue playing in an illogical and unfair system."

She also expressed her willingness to participate in the cycle if the format were amended to miraror that of the Men' s World Chess Championship: qualification tournaments, a Candidates tournament, and the winner plays the reigning World Champion.

According to Hou, if FIDE believed it was too complicated or too difficult to find sponsors, she has a very simple solution: keep the current system, exactly as it is, or even extend it, as in the men' s Grand Prix, so that more women players can participate. But there should be one important difference: the lucky winner, at the end of the cycle, is not the new Women' s World Champion but the Challenger. She gets the right to play the reigning Women' s World Champion in a ten-game match.

FIDE had a similar system for the Men' s World Championship in the past, with 128 players starting a knockout tournament. But this was abandoned since the title was won by players who were not top ten or twenty in the world. Endit