Resisting rigid career templates, four-time women’s world chess champion Hou Yifan balances a spontaneous lifestyle with clear-eyed purpose – from helping drive women’s competition reforms to her PhD research into the cognitive benefits of chess.

Hou, only the third woman to have placed in the world’s top 100, following Maia Chiburdanidze and Judit Polgár, has held the long-term women’s world No 1 ranking since 2015.

The 32-year-old secured her first women’s world title 16 years ago, three years after becoming the youngest female Grandmaster in history.

She won championships in subsequent match-decided tournaments (where contestants play a series of games against each other) in 2011, 2013 and 2016, but she either exited early or refused to participate in knockout-decided tournaments (in which the winner of each match advances to the next round, while the loser goes out).

She withdrew from the Women’s World Championship cycle for three consecutive years because she was dissatisfied with FIDE’s (the International Chess Federation) decision to use a knockout format for the title.

“If I had kept playing and kept winning titles at my level back then, people might not have really noticed or made this issue an absolute priority,” she said.