Vera Menchik

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Vera Menchik
Full name Věra Menčíková
Country Flag of Russia Russia
Flag of Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia
Flag of the United Kingdom United Kingdom
Born February 16, 1906(1906-02-16)
Moscow
Died June 27, 1944 (aged 38)
London
Women's World Champion 1927–1944

Vera Menchik (Czech: Věra Menčíková; Russian: Вера Францевна Менчик) (16 February 1906—27 June 1944) was a British-Czech chess player who gained renown as the world's first women's chess champion.

The daughter of a Czech father and British mother, Vera Menchik was born in Moscow but, in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, moved with her family to England in 1921. Her father taught her chess when she was nine and, in the year of her arrival in England at the age of fifteen, she won the British girls' championship. The following year, she became a pupil of Géza Maróczy, considered one of the top chess masters of the early decades of the 20th century.

She won the first Women's World Championship in 1927 and successfully defended her title 6 times in every other championship in her lifetime, and only lost one game, while winning 78 and drawing 4 games.

  • In 1927, she represented Russia in 1st WWCh in London (+10 –0 =1).
  • In 1930, she represented Czechoslovakia in 2nd WWCh in Hamburg (+6 –1 =1).
  • In 1931, she represented Czechoslovakia at 3rd WWCh in Prague (+8 –0 =0).
  • In 1933, she represented Czechoslovakia in 4th WWCh in Folkestone (+14 –0 =0).
  • In 1935, she represented Czechoslovakia in 5th WWCh in Warsaw (+9 –0 =0).
  • In 1937, she represented Czechoslovakia in 6th WWCh in Stockholm (+14 –0 =0).
  • In 1939, she represented England in 7th WWCh in Buenos Aires (+17 –0 =2).

She won two matches against Sonja Graf for the Women’s World Champion title; (+3 –1 =0) at Rotterdam 1934, and (+9 –2 =5) at Semmering 1937.

Starting in 1929, she participated in a number of Hastings Congress tournaments and when, the same year, she entered the tournament in Carlsbad, Viennese master Albert Becker ridiculed her entry by proposing that any player whom Menchik defeated in tournament play should be granted membership into the Vera Menchik club. In the aftermath of the tournament, Becker, himself, became the "club"'s first member.[1] In addition to Becker, the "Vera Menchik club" eventually included Abraham Baratz, Jacques Mieses, Frederick Yates, Friedrich Sämisch, Max Euwe, Mir Sultan Khan, Samuel Reshevsky, Frederic Lazard, George Alan Thomas, Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander, Philip Stuart Milner-Barry, Harry Golombek, Karel Opočenský, Edgar Colle, William Winter, Brian Reilly, Lajos Steiner and Eero Böök.

In 1937, at the age of 31, Vera Menchik married Rufus Henry Streatfeild Stevenson (1878–1943), twenty-eight years her senior, who was subscriptions editor of British Chess Magazine and later honorary secretary of the British Chess Federation member of west london chess club

Vera Menchik's younger sister Olga was also a tournament chess player. In 1944, as Britain was nearing its sixth year of participation in World War II, and 38-year-old Vera, who was widowed the previous year, still holding the title of women's world champion, the two sisters and their mother were killed in a V-1 rocket bombing raid which destroyed their home at 47 Gauden Road in the Clapham area of South London.

The trophy for the winning team in the Women's Chess Olympiad is known as the Vera Menchik Cup.

[edit] Notable chess games

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Chess Notes Winter, Edward, entry number 3433. Excerpt from Sunnucks, Anne (1976). Encyclopaedia of Chess

[edit] External links

Preceded by
none, first champion		 Women's World Chess Champion
1927–1944		 Succeeded by
vacant, then Lyudmila Rudenko

(no champion from 1944–1950)