As Black, she usually plays the Sicilian Defence (including the Najdorf and Dragon variations) as well as the French Defence against 1.

In the rapid event, she placed second capturing the silver medal, losing only to Valentina Gunina, the eventual event winner. We use cookies to personalize content and advertising, to offer social features and to analyze traffic on our site. From 14 July to 24 July, Hou played in the grandmaster section of the prestigious Biel chess tournament.This meant that Hou Yifan reached her third grandmaster norm on 12 September 2008 at the age of 14 years, 6 months, 16 days, making her one of the youngest grandmasters in history, as well as the youngest female.

Competitors give her credit for what she has achieved in spite of her lack of preparation, [ opinion] and for her life outside of chess. In early February, Hou played and won in a four-game match against Cristobal Henriquez Villagra in Punta Arenas. Hou Yifan played on board two in every round and scored 7½/9 (+7 =1 −1), winning the gold medal for that board. Hou started 2012 by taking equal first place at Tradewise alongside Nigel Short at the Gibraltar Chess Festival scoring 8/10 (+7 −1 =2) with a tournament performance of 2872.Necessary cookies ─ cookies necessary for the operation of the Portal, enabling the use of services available on the Portal. score before crushing her opponents the second day with five straight wins and a draw in the final game easily winning the event with a 9/12 score.