Games - Xie Jun

	Games - Xie Jun

Xie Jun (谢军/謝軍 in pinyin: Xiè Jūn) (born October 30, 1970) is a chess player from Beijing, China. Her career began with Chinese chess at the age of 6. At 10, she became the girls' Chinese chess champion. After being urged to play Western chess, she became the Chinese girls' champion of Western chess in 1984.

She was the eighth and tenth women's world chess champion, first from 1991 to 1996, and again in 1999 until 2001, and is only the second woman to hold the title twice.

In 1991, Xie Jun won the women's world championship for the first time, winning a match against Maya Chiburdanidze, who had held the title since 1978, by a score of 8.5 - 6.5. In 1993 she successfully defended her title against Nana Ioseliani (winning their match 8.5 - 2.5) before losing in 1996 to Zsuzsa Polgar 8.5 - 4.5. In 1999 she won the title back, defeating Alisa Galliamova 8.5 - 6.5 after FIDE controversially stripped Polgar of her title. In 2000, FIDE changed the format of the world championship to a knock-out system, and Xie won the title again, beating fellow Chinese player Qin Kanying 2.5 - 1.5 in the final.

Despite these achievements, Xie Jun has never been ranked number one in the world among women by FIDE. Judit Polgar, who refuses to play in women-only events, has held that place for as long as Xie has been playing at the top level.

Xie Jun proved to be the first of a number of strong Chinese women players, the others including Zhu Chen, Yuhua Xu and Lei Wang. She was an important factor in the Chinese women's team winning the gold medal at the 1998 Chess Olympiad in Elista in Kalmykia, Russia.

Around the end of the 1990s, Xie Jun was reading for a doctorate in psychology.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Xie Jun ]

Searches on eBay

xie jun