Hou Yifan preparing to replace Judit Polgar as Women's #1?

Hou's best years are ahead of her. It took more than a decade for Judit to break into the Top 10, so it is highly unfair to compare the current Hou to Judit's best performances. On the other hand if Hou fails to achieve anything significant within ten years then it is a different story.

"It took more than a decade for Judit to break into the Top 10"

She was still a teen the first time she was top 10, on the January 1996 rating list.

Judit became #1 rated woman in 1989 at the age of 12. Her best performances came more than a decade later. I did not know that she was already in the top 10 in 1996, but even 1996 is seven years away from 1989. Hou is yet to become #1, so let's wait and see.

Still hard to compare anyone with Polgar, who was top 25 already before her 17th birthday. Hou has been playing lots of very strong events since she was 12 and now at 20 she seems ready to start closing in on 2700. Maybe she can reach another level higher than that, but I doubt that she ever will come close to Polgar achievement wise.

"I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

Ronald Reagan

"It took more than a decade for Judit to break into the Top 10, so it is highly unfair to compare the current Hou to Judit's best performances."

No I wasn't implying anything like that with what I said. There is more for Hou to do... and she may very well do it! And she is still very young.

different people have peaks at different ages...I have seen that in Sciences, so it might also be true for chess..let's just be excited about what's yet to come

In my language their is a saying:

"A vak is aszonta, meglássuk!"

which reads:

"Also the blind said: we'll see!"

In general the top women players tend to be younger and peak earlier than the men. Removing Polgar the top 10 would be one where Kosteniuk at 30 stands out as the veteran, and "oldies" like Stefanova, Zhukova, Krush, Arakhamia-Grant, Alexandrova, Zhaoqin Peng etc a bit lower down the list have dropped quite a lot since their 20s.

The only thing I know is that one year ago Hou and Koneru were in the same ballpark.

Now they live on a different planet.

As long as one can make such leaps, the game is not over.

A year ago Hou and Koneru had more or less the same rating, and Hou has gained many points since then. The seven years older Koneru has gone in the other direction, she was 2620+ more than six years ago and has dropped more than 40 points since then.

One year ago I warned against comparing Hou to Judit, replying to comments to a chess.com article about Hou, which were claiming ( I mean the comments, not the article ) that she had already surpassed Judit and she was already the greatest woman player of all time and all kind of similar nonsense. I honestly did not believe back then that Hou may be comparable to Judit. My opinion has changed during the last months.

Yifan entered an open tournament and got destroyed.  Her rating is mostly due to beating up on weaker players in the women's only tournaments.  She'll be lucky to stay over 2600 if she plays open tournaments only.

Yifan will never be the player Judit was.

In fact she has been playing well in many tournaments with men players, maybe too many lately as she played below par in her latest by a distance. those chauvinists are everywhere.

Which tournament is this, SilentKnighte?

Nevermind, I just looked it up, the Nakhchivan Open. She started off badly, but scored 3.5/4 against a 2300, 2500, 2400 and a 2600 player in the last four rounds. 

She finished third behind Kasimdzhanov(2715) and Bacrot(2704) despite an horrendous start. 

People have bad tournaments, even Judit Polgar.

Nonsense. She scored 6/9, which isn't exactly a destruction. In the past, Hou had great results (mostly against men) in the Gibraltar Open.

There have been some accusations of cheating in that tournament. We'll see what really happened. If that's the case, then indeed, top rated players will stop playing in open tournaments such as this one.

She finished in a 10-way tie for 3rd with a performance rating of 2581.  You can't look at her totals and say she did okay and ignore who the competition was.

Apparently though, you can ignore what others write and then attack them for what they didn't say. 

I agree, she had a horrendous start. It was her first tournament in months, and she showed her rust. Also, her opponents played really well!

2581 performance isn't that bad, but it doesn't exactly get you thinking she's crashing in at 2700 level chess yet. People say she's going to be an elite player every time she has an above average performance, but the thing is, not all of her performances will be above average. A 2675 player will sometimes play like an elite player, and other times play like a lesser player, depending on whether he or she is having a good/bad tournament. You have to consider the ups and downs, not just the ups.

It's similar to when people thought Aronian would seriously challenge Magnus for the #1 ranking a few years ago, when one time Aronian came within 30 points of Magnus or something. But that was because Aronian was playing better than his usual chess. More recently, Caruana came within 25 points or so of Magnus's rating a few months ago, but after Caruana's unusually high performance in the Sinquefield Cup, the gap gradually increased and now it's over 70 points again.