Prophylaxis in women's chess

The next question is not meant to be offensive, I just want to create a constructive debate and maybe some controversy. Do you consider that prophylactic maneuvers are present with the same frequency in women's chess and in chess practiced by men? I have spent several years analyzing many games played by women, titled players, games that I frequently expose in my face-to-face and online lessons, and I have not seen many medium to long-term prophylactic maneuvers. Women seem to always look for the most active plan, without fearing the dangers that may arise in the medium to long-term future.

I hadn't thought of that, although it makes sense to me. female chess players seem not to use prophylaxis much as an essential part of their strategy.

Regarding the question of whether prophylactic maneuvers are equally present in women's and men's chess, it is not possible to provide a definitive answer due to the lack of sufficient data and research on the topic. As the population of women in chess is significantly smaller than men, we can’t generalise the absence of prophylactics observed in women's chess to the entire female population.

With respect to the notion that women tend to pursue more active plans without concern for long-term risks, it is important to note that comparing the gameplay of a 1500-rated female player to that of a 2000-rated male player would lead to the conclusion that men are superior in identifying prophylactic moves. However, if one compares players of the same rating, gender differences in prophylaxis are not evident.

@Caballode3cabezas said in #2:
> I hadn't thought of that, although it makes sense to me. female chess players seem not to use prophylaxis much as an essential part of their strategy.

Can you provide some evidence to back up your claim?

Great topic! I have also noticed a lower percentage of long-term prophylactic maneuvers in games played by female chess players. In fact, two of our greatest references on prophylaxis are Tigran Petrosian and Anatoly Karpov.

@Professor74 I have felt what you describe about the way women play chess. However, objectively, I cannot categorically state that women's chess suffers from long-term prophylactic maneuvers. In any case, this issue is controversial, which means that you have achieved your objective, that is, you have generated controversy.

"The female of the species is more deadly than the male." is a poem published by Rudyard Kipling in 1911. But I think he did not write his poem about chess players.

Let us rather say that many female chess players play attractive attacking chess.

What is prophylaxis?

Just kidding. I know what prophylaxis is in general but I didn’t know that the word is used in chess. (I’m not a strong chess player but I believe I’ve used these types of moves without knowing what they are called.)

It surprises me that @Professor74, @Caballode3cabezas, @Moro2000, and @RG2007 have observed that women do not use prophylaxis maneuvers in chess as frequently as men. Since men as a whole tend to take more risks than women in many types of activities, one would think that men would be the ones who would use prophylactic moves less frequently. In other words, given a choice between an offensive move and a more defensive move, men would, in general, be more likely to choose an offensive move than women, with women going for security over gain. (Please don’t be offended, anyone – I’m speaking in broad generalities.) I wonder if anyone has ever analyzed large numbers of games objectively to see if Professor’s observation is true.

Also, as @Luminelle suggested, it’s possible that maybe many of the women you were playing had lower ratings than you. Being less skilled, they did not recognize opportune times to apply these defensive strategies. This would likely happen if any of you were to play me in a game, for example. Strong players know when to attack and when to take preventative measures, regardless of gender, I believe.

Wow. Now that's a thread! Sounds really interesting.

I would personally say that the two factors that I would think are most likely to influence the amount of prophylaxis in chess matches are rating and whether the player in question has a positional or tactical style with positional players using more prophylaxis. Depending on how exactly you define prophylaxis it could also be determined by opening choice.

If conducting any research maybe the best way to get untainted results is to get a well known opening position where a player has two main choices of which one is prophylaxis and the other is an active. For example if someone plays 5...a6 to play into a Najdorf that could be a prophylactic move and 5...g6 to play a dragon isn't. You might want deeper positions but then sample size drops so it might be harder to get players of similar ratings.

The other approach is to do blind analysis where someone else prepares for you let's say 75 games between players of similar ratings so comparison is fair of which 25 are women vs women, 25 are men vs women and remaining 25 are men vs men. The names of the players would be hidden so you would just judge the moves and give each player a score for their prophylaxis skills so afterwards you can check if your preconception is correct or not while also adding middlegame and endgame positions to your analysis. It would be interesting to see the results but I don't think many people would want to spend dozens of hours just out of intellectual curiosity.

I can't really say if the initial assertion is correct or not as I haven't really played enough women of a similar strength to me to be able to accurately gauge it. I'd also assess moves more in terms of correct and incorrect based on the position rather than classify moves as prophylaxis etc when analysing a game. Often when teaching beginners one of the things I have to do is tell them not to use incorrect prophylaxis as many beginners play moves like a3 and h3 in the opening to prevent knights and bishops going to b4 and g4 that neglects their early piece development.