Bengaluru: After 38 moves in Game 9, Ju Wenjun checked her scoresheet for a few seconds before stopping the clock, claiming a draw through three-fold repetition, shaking her opponent’s hand, and walking away with an inscrutable expression – as if nothing had happened.
The 34-year-old Chinese Grandmaster had just become the women’s world chess champion for the fifth time. The first Chinese and only the fourth woman in history to do so – after Vera Menchik, Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze.
Though she fell behind in Game 2 against fellow Chinese Tan Zhongyi, the match eventually turned into a blowout, with Ju reeling off four consecutive wins. Heading into Wednesday’s game, Tan had the onerous task of winning four games in a row to be able to force tiebreaks. While all Ju needed was a draw. She retained her title 6.5-2.5 with three games to spare.
The title match, held across two Chinese cities—Shanghai and Chongqing, Ju and Tan’s hometowns respectively—saw both players choose starkly different chairs. While Ju opted for a large swivel chair, Tan picked a regular, upholstered wooden one. Ju towered over Tan – both visibly across the board and in her gameplay.
In 2018, it was a win over Tan that saw Ju become women’s world champion for the first time. Tan qualified for this year’s match after a spectacular win at the Candidates but as Ju put it, she “underperformed” in this encounter. The way the match unfolded after Tan took an early lead—with Ju flattening her challenger like Godzilla did Tokyo—is a testament to the now five-time women’s world champion’s class. “I was playing more and more in the zone,” she said after her win.
With her exceptional positional understanding and endgame mastery, Ju has been among the most formidable female chess players for a while now. She’s also the reigning women’s world blitz champion and a two-time women’s world rapid champion. Bringing her superb endgame technique to bear, Ju pulled off the biggest win of her career at the Tata Steel Chess tournament in January last year, defeating then-world No 6 Alireza Firouzja. It was her first-ever victory against a 2750 Elo player. She drew against both Ding Liren and Gukesh in the same tournament.
“Perhaps my playing style is connected to my upbringing in some way – I’m more solid and comparatively, not as aggressive,” she said. Ju grew up in the fast-paced city of Shanghai, a global financial hub, and is only one of six female players to cross the 2600 Elo barrier. Currently, she’s the highest-rated active female player at 2580.1 (world No 1 Hou Yifan though rated higher is largely inactive).
“An amazing trait of Ju is her mentality,” Indian GM P Harikrishna, who was part of Ju’s 2023 World Championship team, told HT, “Even when she was missing chances and trailing against Lei (Tingjie), she didn’t doubt herself. She just turned up for the games like nothing had happened.”
It wasn’t the sole instance. In the 2018 match she beat Kateryna Lagno on demand with Black to force a playoff, in the 2020 match, needing only a draw against Aleksandra Goryachkina she lost and went on to defend her title in a playoff.
This time around, Ju’s team comprised GMs Ni Hua – who was also Ding’s second for his match against Gukesh last year, and Russian, Maxim Matlakov.
“She has complete faith in her team. It gives you a lot of confidence as a second,” Harikrishna says. “We had discussed several opening ideas for one of the earlier games during the 2023 match and somehow, they didn’t happen. We rechecked the ideas for Game 12 and they seemed a bit risky especially with match scores tied. But she took a bold call and said ‘I’m going for it’.”
In the run-up to the 2023 match, Harikrishna couldn’t travel to China (he accompanied her for the match) because of the pandemic, so they did remote work online.
“I was playing an event, so I would wake up really early for sessions with Ju. She could tell it was a struggle for me and suggested I get some sleep and that we push the sessions. The whole experience —working with someone so focused, determined, mentally unshakeable, and always eager to learn left an imprint on me. Off the board, she’s fun-loving, and excellent at finding the best places to eat out. It’s one of her superpowers.”
