This month’s featured photo on my main blog, Enhanced Chess Art (March 2025), won over another photo on the short list that I also wanted to use. Luckily, the second photo is equally appropriate for this current blog.

I play my enemies like a game of chess… © Flickr user Dunk under Creative Commons.

The description copied the first paragraph of Wikipedia’s page on Hou Yifan (wikipedia.org), …

Hou Yifan (born 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 the youngest ever to win the Women’s World Chess Championship (at age 16).

… then added,

Portrait of Hou Yifan at the 2016 Chess Olympiad by Andreas Kontokanis via Wikimedia Commons [plus a link].

The Flickr title, ‘I play my enemies…’, is a line from the 1996 Fugees hit ‘Ready or Not’. For a look at Hou Yifan’s path to the Women’s World Championship, see 2010 FIDE Knockout Matches (m-w.com; ‘Antakya (Turkey), XII, 2010’).
World Chess Championship Blog