3 min readMar 26, 2026 02:24 PM IST
While 8 candidates line up in women to seal the sole spot for the World Championships to take on Ju Wenjun, the woman considered the greatest ever, Hou Yifan has gone on to leave chess behind and become an academician.
In an Ask Me Anything organised by FIDE, the lapsed World No 1 – in women – who was never overtaken, answered what was tougher – finding tenure as a professor or winning a world title, she had a hearty laugh. “If we are talking about women’s World championship, then becoming a tenured professor is tougher! But an open world title is much tougher,’ she would quip. “By the way I’m still waiting on it.”
Yifan went to Oxford after taking a break in 2018, and earned her masters in public policy at St Hilda’s. She had completed her undergrad in international relations at Peking University. She joined as the youngest prof at Shenzhen Uni at 26.
“With what I’m studying I have kept my connection with mind games, and see it as contributing back to the chess world,” she would say in December of 2025, of her PhD pursuit in neuroscience.
While fans keep requesting her to return to the competitive gold, Yifan waves it off with a”Time will tell” or “let’s see.” “I didn’t want to be limited to just one thing in life,” says the lifelong fan of Bobby Fischer, who recalls a Gibraltar tourney in 2012 as her finest, apart from her three world title cycles. “I’m not the sort of person who regrets what’s done before. I’m happy with my current situation,” she says of a choice she made much before Magnus’ Carlsen stepped away from the open world’s. “If I hadn’t quit, I must admit I might’ve improved rating. But there’s a stagnation to that too,” she would respond realistically, in line with how she plays chess. “Think of many moves in advance, work out how to get there backward, but keep mind open for things to go wrong,” she said.
While she came close to beating Magnus Carlsen and put one past Fabiano Caruana (both at the Grenke Classic in 2017), she picked Carlsen as the strongest opponent she’s faced.
Yifan was also actively involved as technical expert when the Queen’s Gambit was translated to Mandarin after a Chinese publisher won rights. She would tell the AMA, that Sicilian was her favourite opening as it was dynamic, though she adjusted to most opening lines.
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Fans remembered her iconic hair clip when she would raze down entire fields to win world titles and when someone asked her where the famous accessory was, Yifan would say, “This is definitely a friend asking this question. It’s probably at home in some boxes. I miss the clips too.”
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
