Edit: this thread is a disaster. please abandon this thread.

I haven't played titled women, so I don't know from experience, but it's been said women tend to have an aggressive style.

I don't know how much of this is due to Judit Polgar, or how well it holds true for female players in general.

I was hoping some peri-master level player would give us some insight here by now, but maybe the subject matter is too sensitive and could harm one's public reputation.

My reason for that hope is that I find the question very interesting because I realized one day years ago that I had become rather adept at determining whether certain works of art were done by a man or a woman. This is especially true of novels, where some of the best clues are the chosen subject matter and how much the author dwells on each topic, but I also found I was quite adept at detecting even if an academic or technical book were written by a man or woman. In novels I can even detect when a male ghost writer is writing under a woman's name: the difference is strikingly obvious to me. I later realized I was also fairly adept at doing the same type of determination for film scripts, online posts, and scripts for show hosts on YouTube. (I'd rather not describe how I can tell the difference, though, because it makes both men and women look bad in their own ways!)

However, so far I've never been able to tell the difference between chess games played by men in contrast to chess games played by women. Admittedly there are far fewer clues in chess, unlike the clues of subject matter in novels, but a big part of it is also probably that my chess understanding is simply not strong enough to detect stylistic differences at master level or above, so I believe we'd need someone near or above master level to give us such insights. My bet is that there are such differences, though, and I have suspicions of what they are, but I simply don't know so there's no point in my giving my own opinion. Maybe if I went through more women's games and got better at detecting individual styles among GMs I could start to see a difference.

No men are just better at every stage .

Women, having less arm muscle strength than men, will have to work so much harder to lift those wooden chessmen.

Therefore it is only logical to assume they tire faster when playing, and will be distracted by thoughts of making sandwiches to make up for the calories spent on all that heavy lifting.

Women  can start with a horse advantage and y0u still have g00d chances t0 beat them,   Men  materializes the advantage far better. 

Hah that's true. I can do that with movie scripts also. Can't describe the difference though. The woman plots tend to be more sort of twisted maybe, with more side branches and stuff going on that isn't necessary to keep the overall story going?

I have no idea for chess.

this is exactly how i thought this thread would turn out... one insightful post and 10 shit posts

Welcome to chess.com 

9% insight is very good for these forums. I'd take it if I were you.

We work so hard these days to deny that there is no difference in the abilities of men and women, but then readily admit that men and women are not alike (the Venus and Mars thing).  Watch two women having a conversation.  They frequently look directly into the eyes of their companion.  You would think they are lovers.  Watch two men talking and from the focus of their eyes you would never know they were talking to each other.

Generalities about the behavior and abilities of men and women certainly are true (refer to that Venus/Mars thing again), but never under estimate the ability of any one individual.  She just may be able to kick you in the backside on the chess board 

I saw one study where they had players of different levels solve puzzles while cameras tracked where their eyes were looking in real time. So at the end you'd see lines from one square to another. The more dense the lines, the more they were looking in that area.

Something like this between men and women, and then recording commentary as they play and study habits would be a good start.

Yes. Men don't typically have to worry about knocking over pieces with their boobs.

Well...most men.

I hope there will be a Battle of the Sexes chess match soon. The Mens Team should be composed of players with almost equal ELO of the women players for the match to be fair.

Here's my answer: No.

Are there any distinguishable differences between how men and women play chess?

I don't think this was the original title of the thread. 

This question is actually very interesting. Women have traditionally played more aggressive, attacking chess than men. In the US championships, women have played 1.e4 more often than the men, have had more decisive results, and more decisive results in under 30 moves than the men. 

So yes, there really is a difference between the way men and women play chess. It's a generalization, and there are certainly some men who are more aggressive than women and some women who are less aggressive. But the US Championships and other events do suggest there's a real difference in style. 

So CHESS-IN-ASCII was correct? Assuming there exists statistical proof of that tidbit, that's the first solid and backed-up fact we've heard, and it's quite interesting, especially since one would expect testosterone-charged humans (i.e., men) to be more aggressive.

That makes me wonder, however: is it *sound* aggression, or something akin to The Kitchen Sink Attack? If you have any paradigmatic games in mind, I'd like to see them posted here.

----------

(p. 17)

   Fedorov quickly abandoned standard opening play. If what he

played against me had a name, it might be called the Kitchen Sink At-

tack. Ignoring the rest of the board, he launched all of his available

pawns and pieces at my king right from the start. I knew that such a

wild, ill-prepared attack could only succeed if I blundered. I kept an eye

on my king and countered on the other side, or wing, and in the center of

the board, a critical area where he had completely ignored his develop-

ment, the term we use in chess to describe the deployment of your pieces

for battle. It was soon apparent that his attack was entirely superficial,

and he resigned the game after only twenty-five moves.

Kasparov, Garry, and Mig Greengard. 2007. How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, From the Board to the Boardroom. New York, NY: Bloomsbury USA.