Grandmaster ( GM ) is a title awarded to chess players by the world chess organization FIDE . Apart from World Champion , Grandmaster is the highest title a chess player can attain. Once achieved, the title is held for life, though exceptionally the title can be revoked for cheating .
128-434: Hou Yifan ( Chinese : 侯逸凡 ; pinyin : Hóu Yìfán pronunciation ; born 27 February 1994) is a Chinese chess grandmaster , four-time Women's World Chess Champion and professor at Shenzhen University . She is the second highest rated female player of all time. A chess prodigy , she was the youngest female player ever to qualify for the title of grandmaster (at the age of 14 years, 6 months, 16 days) and
256-479: A Category , based on the average rating of the contestants. For instance, it was decided that 'Category 1' status would apply to tournaments with an average Elo rating of participants falling within the range 2251–2275; similarly Category 2 would apply to the range 2276–2300 etc. The higher the tournament Category, the stronger the tournament. Another vital component involved the setting of meritorious norms for each Category of tournament. Players must meet or surpass
384-469: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where
512-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and
640-510: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and
768-541: A GM or IM does not count for the purposes of this requirement if he had not had a GM or IM result in the five years prior to the tournament. In addition, no more than 50 percent plus one of the players can be from the same country for tournaments of 10 to 12 players, or no more than 50 percent plus two for larger tournaments. Seventy-four GM titles were awarded in 1951 through 1968. During that period, ten GM titles were awarded in 1965, but only one in 1966 and in 1968. The modern system for awarding FIDE titles evolved from
896-599: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
1024-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of
1152-615: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of
1280-714: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only
1408-484: A former nurse, accompanied her to many international tournaments when Hou was young. Hou was homeschooled. As a teenager, she listed her interests as reading and studying and she listed her favorite chess player as Bobby Fischer . Hou has attempted to balance chess with life outside of it. Against the wishes of her trainer, she enrolled in Peking University in 2012, studying International Relations. She took
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#17327763570531536-469: A full course load and participated in many extracurricular activities. She was offered a Rhodes Scholarship , and studied for a Master of Public Policy at St Hilda's College, Oxford with the Blavatnik School of Government . Competitors give her credit for what she has achieved in spite of her lack of preparation, and for her life outside of chess. Vladimir Kramnik said: "If she wants to stay
1664-673: A grandmaster, and the term was also applied to a few other players. The Ostend tournament of 1907 was divided into two sections: the Championship Tournament and the Masters' Tournament. The Championship section was for players who had previously won an international tournament. Siegbert Tarrasch won the Championship section, over Carl Schlechter , Dawid Janowski , Frank Marshall , Amos Burn , and Mikhail Chigorin . These players were described as grandmasters for
1792-576: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as
1920-556: A performance rating of 2393. From 28 June–6 July at the second China-France Youth Match at Shenzhen , Guangdong , Hou Yifan scored 3/8 (+2 =2 −4, TPR 2324). The Chinese team ( Zhou Jianchao , Zhao Jun , Zhao Xue and Hou) won the match 19–13. In July, at the Festival Open International des Jeunes in Saint-Lô , France, she came second out of 75 players with 6/8(TPR 2305), behind Wen Yang . In 18–29 July at
2048-470: A performance rating of 2526 against a rating opposition of 2401, ahead of several better-known Chinese players. The sixth World Team Chess Championship was staged in Beersheva, Israel from 31 October to 11 November. China fielded two teams – the men's and women's, which was only the second time in the championship history when a women's team competed in what traditionally has been a male team event. This
2176-720: A performance rating of 2598. She scored victories over three grandmasters, including a 23-move win over former World Champion challenger Nigel Short . In February 2008, Hou gained her first Grandmaster norm (GM norm) at the Aeroflot Open in Moscow by finishing in 31st place with a score of 4½/9 (+2 =5 −2, TPR 2605). This was followed in March 2008 with a victory at the first Atatürk International Women Masters Chess Tournament (cat. IX (2461)) in Istanbul , Turkey where she finished
2304-468: A point ahead of the rest of the field on 7/9 (+5 =4 −0) with a performance rating of 2674. Her victory in this tournament earned her a GM norm conditional on FIDE ratifying then WGM Zhao Xue 's attainment of her GM title. However this GM norm was not used in her eventual official grandmaster title application. In April 2008, she competed in Mérida, Spain at the second Ruy Lopez Chess Festival tournament. In
2432-603: A professor at the School of Physical Education, which includes chess in its Sports Training Program. Hou Yifan's first major tournament was on 31 August–12 September 2003 at the Chinese Team Chess Championship (Open) in Tianjin . She scored 3/7 with a 2246 performance rating . She won her first international tournament when she came first (9½/11; +8 =3 −0, TPR 2121) in the girl's under-10 section of
2560-545: A score of 4½/9 (+4 =1 −4; TPR 2278). The event was won by Wang Yu with 6½/9. In February, she competed at the fourth Aeroflot Open (Group C) in Moscow, where she scored 2/5(TPR 2111). In April, she finished fifth with a score of 7/11 (+6 =2 −3) (tied for fourth) at the Three Arrows Cup 2005 ladies tournament in Jinan , China. In that tournament, she defeated international master Almira Skripchenko and achieved
2688-709: A score of 7/11 (+5 =4 −2) and a performance rating of 2477. In July–August, she performed badly at what has been traditionally the strongest women's tournament, the North Urals Cup in Krasnoturinsk , Russia. Although seeded third, she failed to win a game scoring 3/9 (+0 =6 −3) with a performance rating of 2357. She finished eighth out of ten players. In 10–20 August, she played in the China–;Russia Summit Match in Ergun , Inner Mongolia . The tournament
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#17327763570532816-542: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate
2944-508: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin
3072-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with
3200-631: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct
3328-575: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
3456-602: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
3584-709: Is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of
3712-490: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
3840-603: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
3968-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate
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4096-613: Is sometimes called "International Grandmaster" (IGM), possibly to distinguish it from similar national titles, but the shortened form is far more common today. Titles were awarded by a resolution of the FIDE General Assembly and the Qualification Committee, with no formal written criteria. FIDE first awarded the Grandmaster title in 1950 to 27 players. These players were: Since FIDE did not award
4224-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
4352-489: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,
4480-501: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because
4608-500: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
4736-552: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it
4864-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while
4992-753: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system
5120-502: The 2010 Women's World Championship in Hatay, Turkey at age 16. She won the next three championships in which the title was decided by a match (in 2011 , 2013 and 2016 , with a total of ten wins to zero losses and fourteen draws against three different opponents), but was either eliminated early or she declined to participate in the championships in which the title was decided by a knockout tournament (in 2012 , 2015 and 2017 ). Hou
5248-650: The 37th Chess Olympiad to be held in May–June 2006 in Turin, Italy. She scored 16½/28 (TPR 2433) and gained 121 elo-points. She made the Olympiad team with the other top finishers, Wang Yu and Shen Yang . Hou reached the third round (the last 16) of the Women's World Chess Championship in March 2006. Despite being rated 2269 and seeded 56th out of 64 players, she defeated IM Nadezhda Kosintseva (rated 2480) of Russia 1½–½ in
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5376-742: The Chinese Women's Champion for the second consecutive time with 9/11 points (+7 =4 −0) in Beijing and a performance of 2599. At the July 2008 First Saturday GM Tournament in Budapest , Hou was top seed, but came in second place with 9/12, missing a GM norm by half a point. Her performance rating was 2574. In August 2008 she competed in the World Junior Chess Championship held at Gaziantep , Turkey where she competed in
5504-533: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in
5632-710: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with
5760-595: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
5888-468: The World Federation for Chess Composition (see List of grandmasters for chess composition ). The International Correspondence Chess Federation (ICCF) awards the title of International Correspondence Chess Grandmaster (ICCGM). Both of these bodies are now independent of FIDE , but work in cooperation with it. "Super grandmaster" is an informal term to refer to the world's elite players. In
6016-627: The World Junior Championship , or the World Senior Championship , or a Continental Chess Championship, given that the player's peak FIDE rating is at least 2300. Current regulations can be found in the FIDE Handbook. FIDE titles including the grandmaster title are valid for life, but FIDE regulations allow a title to be revoked for "use of a FIDE title or rating to subvert the ethical principles of
6144-694: The World Youth Championship in Halkidiki , Greece in October–November 2003. In November, she made her debut in the National Women's Chess Championship , held at Shanwei, Guangdong . She finished in 14th place with 3½/9 with a performance rating of 2202. On 1 January 2004, she received her first International FIDE rating of 2168, which automatically qualified her for the title of Woman FIDE Master . In April, she competed at
6272-739: The World Youth Chess Championship in Belfort, France , Hou Yifan, seeded eighth, came in fifth in the Boy's Under-12 Section with 8/11 (+5 =6, TPR 2171). In October, she qualified for the World Women's Chess Championship to be held in March 2006. Despite being rated only 2220 and ranked women's number 28 in her own country, she qualified by winning the Chinese Women's Zonal ( 3.5 ) tournament, scoring 6/9 points with
6400-478: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded
6528-596: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at
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#17327763570536656-627: The "Dorazil" proposals, presented to the 1970 Siegen Chess Olympiad FIDE Congress. The proposals were put together by Wilfried Dorazil (then FIDE Vice-President) and fellow Committee members Grandmaster Svetozar Gligorić and Professor Arpad Elo . The recommendations of the Committee report were adopted in full. In essence, the proposals built on the work done by Professor Elo in devising his Elo rating system. The establishment of an updated list of players and their Elo rating enabled significantly strong international chess tournaments to be allocated
6784-663: The "Torch Real Estate Cup Chinese Chess League Division A". She played for the Shandong Qilu Evening News Chess Team , who became the 2007 champions when they defeated the 2006 champion Beijing team, 3½ to 1½. In the January Corus 2008 chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee , Hou competed in Group B where she finished in a tie for seventh–tenth place (ninth by tiebreak) achieving 6/13 (+3 −4 =6) with
6912-666: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Grandmaster (chess) The title of Grandmaster, along with
7040-509: The 1965 Congress in Wiesbaden FIDE raised the standards required for international titles. The International Grandmaster title regulations were: To fulfill requirement 2b, the candidate must score one GM norm in a category 1a tournament or two norms within a three-year period in two Category 1b tournaments, or one Category 2a tournament and one Category 1b tournament. The categories of tournaments are: Since FIDE titles are for life,
7168-714: The 2001 European Champion , GM Emil Sutovsky of Israel (rated 2629). However, in the third round she was defeated by the Russian Championship runner-up , Dmitry Jakovenko , and only managed one draw in her next five games. She rallied in the final round with a victory against the Greek grandmaster, Vasilios Kotronias , and finished with a score of 3½/9(TPR 2540). In March, at the first Ruy Lopez International Festival (cat. XV (2607)) in Zafra , Hou performed badly to finish last with 2/7 (+1 =2 −4). Her performance rating
7296-448: The 2005 Zonal 3.5 Women's Championship, the 37th Chess Olympiad and the 2006 Chinese Championship (Women's) won her the Woman Grandmaster title, formally conferred by FIDE in late January 2007. At the Aeroflot Open in February 2007, a few weeks before Hou's thirteenth birthday, she played in the A1 group for the first time. Hou started well with two wins out of two, defeating first the Russian IM Nikita Vitiugov (rated 2604) and then
7424-506: The Chinese Team Chess Championship (Women's) in Jinan , Shandong . She scored 1½/7 (TPR 2096) having faced an average opposition rating (R c ) of 2316. In November, she finished first jointly with Yu Yangyi, Jules Moussard, and Raymond Song, but third on tiebreaks in the boy's under-ten section of the World Youth Championship , held in Heraklio , Crete (9/11; +8 =2 −1; TPR 2119). At the 11th Asian Women's Championship in Beirut , Lebanon from 4–11 December 2004, she came in eleventh with
7552-490: The FAV system, in recognition of the work done by International Judge Giovanni Ferrantes (Italy), Alexander (probably Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander ), and Giancarlo Dal Verme (Italy). Under the 1957 regulations, the title of International Grandmaster of the FIDE was automatically awarded to: The regulations also allowed titles to be awarded by a FIDE Congress on recommendation by the Qualification Committee. Recommendations were based on performance in qualifying tournaments, with
7680-421: The Grandmaster title posthumously, world-class players who died prior to 1950, including World Champions Steinitz , Lasker, Capablanca, and Alekhine, never received the title. A few strong still living players such as British India's Mir Sultan Khan , Germany's Paul Lipke and France's Eugene Znosko-Borovsky were not awarded titles. Sultan Khan was awarded the GM title posthumously in 2024. Title awards under
7808-490: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though
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#17327763570537936-444: The UK-China Match in Liverpool 3–9 September 2007, China defeated the UK team with a comfortable score of 28–20. Hou played for the men's team and scored 2½/6 (+1 =3 −2) with a performance rating of 2540. The average rating of her opponents (R c ) was 2598. In late September, she came in first at the 2007 Chinese Women's Zonal ( 3.5 ) tournament in Tianjin with a score of 8/9 (+7 =2 −0, TPR 2675). In October 2007, she competed at
8064-457: The World Youth Championship for girls under age ten. In June 2007, she became China's youngest national champion. She was admitted to the National Chess Center, an academy for young talented players from all over the country, in Beijing when she was ten, with leading Chinese grandmasters Ye Jiangchuan and Yu Shaoteng as her trainers. In order to better support her chess career, her family relocated to Beijing in 2003. Hou's mother, Wang Qian,
8192-411: The actual score that participants must achieve to attain a GM or IM result (nowadays referred to as a norm ). To qualify for the Grandmaster title, a player needed to achieve three such GM results within a rolling period of three years. Exceptionally, if a player's contributory games totalled 30 or more, then the title could be awarded on the basis of two such results. There were also circumstances where
8320-400: The best female player, she can probably do nothing. If she wants to achieve her potential, she must concentrate fully on chess." Hou is aware of this as well, but nonetheless chooses to treat chess as a hobby, not a career. She said in 2018: "I want to be the best, but you also have to have a life." In 2020, at age 26, Hou became the youngest ever professor at Shenzhen University where she is
8448-402: The category XV (2616) round-robin event she finished seventh out of eight players with 2/7 (+1, =2, −4) and a rating performance of 2467. Hou competed in the Chinese Chess League again in the 2008 season, which had eighteen rounds in six different cities from March to August. Hou's teammates were GM Bu Xiangzhi , GM Zhao Jun , GM Wen Yang , and WGM Zhang Jilin . In May–June 2008, she became
8576-415: The classic chess mixed team event with 11 match points (18½ game points out of 24). The Chinese team members were Zhao Xue , Xu Yuhua , Hou Yifan, Wang Hao , Ni Hua , and Bu Xiangzhi . Hou Yifan won an individual gold medal for her board two display with a score of 5½/6 (+5 =1 −0; 91.7%) and a performance rating of 2649. Hou participated in the 2007 season of the China Chess League , officially known as
8704-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which
8832-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of
8960-464: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
9088-452: The entire championship was 2536. Hou participated at the first World Mind Sports Games in Beijing from 3–18 October as a member of the Chinese team, winning the bronze medal in the Women's Individual Blitz event, the gold medal in the Mixed Pairs Rapid event (with Ni Hua ), the silver medal in the Women's Teams Blitz event, and the gold medal in the Women's Teams Rapid event. In mid-late October, playing board one for team Spartak Vidnoe in
9216-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable
9344-463: The first round, then the former 2000 European champion WGM Natalia Zhukova (2432) of Ukraine 2–0 in the second round. She was beaten 0–2 by IM Nino Khurtsidze (2430) of Georgia in the third round to finish with a performance rating of 2504. In May–June 2006, China came in third and won the bronze metal at the 37th Chess Olympiad in Turin , Italy. Hou Yifan scored 11/13 (+10, =2, −1), all played on
9472-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has
9600-485: The fourth board, at her Olympiad debut. For her winning percentage of 84.6%, she won a silver medal for fourth (reserve) board performance, and her performance rating of 2596 was the third highest overall. The Chinese Championships for men and women took place in Wuxi , Jiangsu , 25 June–6 July 2006. Ni Hua took the men's title and Li Ruofan the women's. Hou Yifan came fourth in the women's category V (2369) event with
9728-413: The general ("boys'") section for the first time in her career. She was the only girl in this section and was the sixteenth seed on the entrant's list. Hou finished joint third–seventh on 9/13 (+6 =6 −1), achieving a performance rating of 2661 and her second GM norm. In August–September 2008, she competed in her second Women's World Chess Championship at Nalchik , Russia. She had qualified by being one of
9856-618: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although
9984-586: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
10112-528: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
10240-523: The lesser FIDE titles of International Master (IM) , FIDE Master (FM) , and Candidate Master (CM) , is open to all players regardless of gender. The great majority of grandmasters are men, but 42 women have been awarded the GM title as of 2024, out of a total of about 2000 grandmasters. There is also a Woman Grandmaster title with lower requirements awarded only to women. There are also Grandmaster titles for composers and solvers of chess problems , awarded by
10368-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including
10496-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with
10624-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in
10752-436: The number 1 board in the Chinese women's team. Although her team did not win a prize, she still placed third in the individual board prize. She played in every round with a final result of 7½/11 (+5, =5, −1, TPR 2563). Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
10880-420: The number of registered players rated over 2200 had increased even faster. Since that FIDE congress, discussion of the value of the grandmaster title has occasionally continued. Starting from 1977, FIDE awarded honorary Grandmaster titles to 32 players based on their past performances or other contributions to chess. The following players have been awarded honorary Grandmaster titles. Marić and Honfi were awarded
11008-574: The old regulations, although a provision was maintained that allowed older masters who had been overlooked to be awarded titles. The new regulations awarded the title of International Grandmaster of the FIDE to players meeting any of the following criteria: After FIDE issued the 1953 title regulations, it was recognized that they were somewhat haphazard, and work began to revise the regulations. The FIDE Congress in Vienna in 1957 adopted new regulations, called
11136-591: The original regulations were subject to political concerns. Efim Bogoljubow , who had emigrated from the Soviet Union to Germany, was not entered in the first class of Grandmasters, even though he had played two matches for the World Championship with Alekhine. He received the title in 1951, by a vote of thirteen to eight with five abstentions. Yugoslavia supported his application, but all other Communist countries opposed it. In 1953, FIDE abolished
11264-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
11392-412: The past this would refer to players with an Elo rating of over 2600, but as the average Elo rating of the top players has increased, it has typically come to refer to players with an Elo rating of over 2700. Super GMs, the number of whom has grown considerably over the years, have some name recognition in the world of sport and are typically the highest earners in chess. FIDE titles are only awarded at
11520-469: The purposes of the tournament. The San Sebastián 1912 tournament won by Akiba Rubinstein was a designated grandmaster event. Rubinstein won with 12½ points out of 19. Tied for second with 12 points were Aron Nimzowitsch and Rudolf Spielmann . By some accounts, in the St. Petersburg 1914 chess tournament , the title Grandmaster was formally conferred by Russian Tsar Nicholas II , who had partially funded
11648-537: The quarterfinals she defeated Armenian IM Lilit Mkrtchian 1½–½, followed by Indian GM Humpy Koneru , the second seed, in the semifinals (4–2 overall, 1–1, 1–1, 2–0). She lost the final to Alexandra Kosteniuk of Russia, 2½–1½. Nonetheless, she became the youngest ever finalist for the Women's World Championship title, earning an automatic International Master (IM) title and a "runner-up 9-game grandmaster norm", her third official GM norm overall. Her performance rating for
11776-508: The quarterly FIDE Council meetings. Players who have qualified for the GM title but have not yet been awarded it are informally referred to as "GM-elect". Usage of grandmaster for an expert in some field is recorded from 1590. The first known use of the term grandmaster in connection with chess was in the 18 February 1838 issue of Bell's Life , in which a correspondent referred to William Lewis as "our past grandmaster". Subsequently, George Walker and others referred to Philidor as
11904-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
12032-431: The regulations. The subcommittee recommended that the automatic award of titles be abolished, criticized the methods used for awarding titles based on qualifying performances, and called for a change in the makeup of the Qualification Committee. Several delegates supported the subcommittee recommendations, including GM Miguel Najdorf who felt that existing regulations were leading to an inflation of international titles. At
12160-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for
12288-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without
12416-438: The relevant score to demonstrate that they had performed at Grandmaster (GM) or International Master (IM) level. Scores were expressed as percentages of a perfect maximum score and decreased as the tournament Category increased, thereby reflecting the strength of a player's opposition and the relative difficulty of the task. Tournament organisers could then apply the percentages to their own tournament format and declare in advance
12544-533: The required score depending on the percentage of Grandmasters and International Masters in the tournament. Concerns were raised that the 1957 regulations were too lax. At the FIDE Congress in 1961, GM Milan Vidmar said that the regulations "made it possible to award international titles to players without sufficient merit". At the 1964 Congress in Tel Aviv , a subcommittee was formed to propose changes to
12672-463: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by
12800-459: The six highest rated players from the average of the July 2006–January 2007 period. In this knockout tournament , she was seeded third out of 64 players. She defeated WGM Mona Khaled (Egypt) 2–0 in the first round and WGM Batkhuyagiin Möngöntuul (Mongolia), 2–0 in the second. In third round, she had to go to rapid playoffs to eventually beat IM Elena Sedina (Italy) 3–1 (1–1, 2–0). In
12928-561: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language
13056-471: The system could be adapted to fit team events and other competitions. The full proposals included many other rules and regulations, covering such topics as: To become a grandmaster, a player must achieve both of the following: The Grandmaster title is also automatically conferred, without needing to fulfill the above criteria, when reaching the final 16 in the World Cup , winning the Women's World Cup ,
13184-533: The teams. France edged out China 20–16 in the men's event. The women's section was a complete mismatch in terms of Elo ratings in favour of the Chinese and they confirmed this over the board winning 12½–5½. The overall result was China 28½ France 25½. Hou Yifan was again the highest scoring female player with 5/6 and a performance rating of 2498. In October in Yerevan , Armenia at the World Junior Chess Championship (Girl's section) despite being only 12 years old, Hou
13312-582: The term grandmaster was sometimes informally applied to world class players. The Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE, or International Chess Federation) was formed in Paris in 1924, but at that time did not award formal titles. In 1927, the Soviet Union's Chess Federation established the title of Grandmaster of the Soviet Union, in the form of the German loan word "Großmeister". At the time Soviet players were not competing outside their own country. This title
13440-630: The thirteenth European Club Cup held in Kallithea, Greece she scored 2/4 (+1 −1 =2, TPR 2448) helping her team to a second-place finish. Very shortly thereafter she played in the Cap d'Agde Rapid tournament from 24 October to 1 November, losing to former world champion Anatoly Karpov in a tiebreaker match at the end of the qualifying stage, despite winning the second tiebreak game. At the 38th Chess Olympiad in Dresden from 12 to 25 November, she played at
13568-641: The title or rating system" or if a player is found to have violated the anti-cheating regulations in a tournament on which the title application was based. Exact regulations can be found in the FIDE Handbook . A report prepared by Bartłomiej Macieja for the Association of Chess Professionals mentions discussion at the FIDE congress of 2008 regarding a perceived decrease in value of the grandmaster title. The number of grandmasters had increased greatly between 1972 and 2008, but according to Macieja,
13696-623: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
13824-518: The tournament. The Tsar reportedly awarded the title to the five finalists: Emanuel Lasker , José Raúl Capablanca , Alexander Alekhine , Siegbert Tarrasch , and Frank Marshall . Chess historian Edward Winter has questioned this, stating that the earliest known sources that support this story are an article by Robert Lewis Taylor in the June 15, 1940, issue of The New Yorker and Marshall's autobiography My 50 Years of Chess (1942). Before 1950,
13952-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in
14080-538: The twelfth European Club Cup in Kemer , Turkey for team Southern Ural Cheliabinsk . Hou played on board two for the team, which finished fourth in the women's tournament. In the individual women's standings, Hou came in fifth with a score of 5/7 (+3 =4 −0) and a performance rating of 2556. From 26 October to 3 November, she competed for Team China at the second Asian Indoor Games in Macau . The national team won team gold in
14208-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese
14336-436: The window. He later bought his daughter her first chess set and she was able to beat her father and grandmother after a few weeks, at the age of three. In 1999, her father engaged a chess mentor, IM Tong Yuanming , for his five-year-old daughter. Tong later said that Hou was an unusual talent, showing "strong confidence, distinguished memory, calculating ability and fast reaction". Hou has said that she took up chess because she
14464-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until
14592-517: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with
14720-479: The youngest champion (she was fourteen years old when winning the title in 1988). Hou scored 9/11 (+7 =4 -0, TPR 2585). Second and third place went to Zhao Xue and Shen Yang , respectively. In July, she improved on her previous year's performance at the North Urals Cup in Krasnoturinsk, finishing in seventh place out of ten players. She scored 4/9 (+3 =2 −4) with a performance rating of 2436. The tournament
14848-640: The youngest ever to win the Women's World Chess Championship (at age 16). At the age of 12, Hou became the youngest player ever to participate in the Women's World Championship ( Yekaterinburg 2006 ) and the Chess Olympiad (Torino 2006 ). In June 2007, she became the youngest Chinese Women's Champion ever. She achieved the titles of Woman FIDE Master in January 2004, Woman Grandmaster in January 2007, and Grandmaster in August 2008. In 2010, she won
14976-774: Was 2462. In April, she came in second at the China Women Selective Tournament in Ningbo for the 2007 Asian Indoor Games to be held in October. She scored 8/14 (+6 =4 −4, TPR 2434). From 1–11 May 2007, at the eighth Russian Team Chess Championship (Women's) in Dagomys , Hou played for Southern Ural Chelyabinsk on board one and scored 6½/10 (+5 =3 −2, TPR 2523). At the 1st World Women's Team Chess Championship in Ekaterinburg later that month, Hou
15104-440: Was Hou Yifan's first major team tournament and she was the youngest participant there, at eleven years of age. She played as second reserve and finished with 0/3. The Chinese women's team drew one match and lost all of their others (+0 =1 −7), finishing last. The tournament was won by Russia, with China (men's) coming in second and Armenia third. In December, Hou came in second at the China Women Selective Tournament in Beijing for
15232-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
15360-574: Was a two double-round-robin Scheveningen, one for men and one for women (category VIII (2444)). Russia won the men's event 26½–23½ but China won the women's section 28–22, winning the match 51½–48½. Hou Yifan was the highest scoring female player on tiebreak with 6½/10 (+5 =3 −2, TPR 2563). China and France played for the Trophée MULTICOMS in Paris 4–9 September 2006. This was also a Scheveningen team match with six men and three women in
15488-513: Was abolished in 1931, after having been awarded to Boris Verlinsky , who won the 1929 Soviet Championship . The title was brought back in 1935, and awarded to Mikhail Botvinnik , who thus became the first "official" Grandmaster of the USSR. Verlinsky did not get his title back. In 1950 FIDE created the titles of Grandmaster (GM), International Master (IM) and Woman Master (WM, later known as Woman International Master or WIM). The grandmaster title
15616-406: Was fascinated by the pieces. In 2003, Hou played against the chief coach of the Chinese national men's and women's chess teams, Ye Jiangchuan , for the first time. The chess master was surprised that the nine-year-old could identify almost all of his weak moves. "Then I knew she was an exceptional genius", Ye said. That year, Hou became the youngest member of the national team and won first place at
15744-485: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half
15872-534: Was named in the BBC 's 100 Women programme in 2017. Hou has been semi-retired from competitive chess since 2018. In 2020, she became the youngest professor at Shenzhen University , at the age of 26. Hou started playing chess regularly at the age of five, but already was fascinated by the game when she was three years old. Hou's father, Hou Xuejian, a magistrate, often took her to a bookstore after dinner and noticed that she liked to stare at glass chess pieces behind
16000-541: Was part of the winning China national team that also included Zhao Xue , Ruan Lufei , Shen Yang , and Huang Qian . Hou Yifan played on board two in every round and scored 7½/9 (+7 =1 −1), winning the gold medal for that board. Her performance rating was 2559. In June 2007, she won her first Chinese Women's Chess Championship in Chongqing . Hou was thirteen years old at the time, breaking WGM Qin Kanying 's record as
16128-496: Was the third woman ever to be rated among the world's top 100 players (2014–16 and 2017–22), after Maia Chiburdanidze and Judit Polgár . She is widely regarded as the best active female chess player, "leaps and bounds" ahead of her competitors. As of May 2024, she has been the No. 1 ranked woman in the world since September 2015 and is 73 points ahead of the No. 2 ranked Ju Wenjun . She
16256-526: Was the top rated girl with a 2481 FIDE Rating and went on to take second place on tiebreak with a score of 9/12 (+6 =4 −2), tied for first on points behind her compatriot Shen Yang . Her rating performance was 2469. In January 2007, Hou achieved a respectable fifth place in Group C (Cat. 10, 2486) of the Corus Chess Tournament with a score of 7/13 (+4 =6 −3) and a 2513 performance rating. This result, together with WGM norms she had earned at
16384-515: Was won by Zhu Chen and with Zhao Xue in second place. In 4–15 August, she competed in what was then her strongest closed tournament – the fifth Győrgy Marx Memorial (Cat. 14, 2582) in Paks , Hungary. Being the lowest rated player and the only non-Grandmaster (out of Pentala Harikrishna , Péter Ács , Csaba Balogh , Ferenc Berkes , and Viktor Korchnoi ), she finished in last place in the double round-robin event with 3/10 (+1 =4 −5; TPR 2444). At
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