THE Queen may be the most versatile piece on the board but it’s the king that holds the true power.

UK chess grandmaster Nigel Short may have taken this chess board analogy a bit too far by claiming that women lack the brain power to succeed in the sport. In comments that have sparked outrage from the female chess community, he claimed the lack of women in the game was due to the fact that they are “hardwired” differently and are not suited to competing at a high level.

The incendiary comments were made in an interview with New in Chess Magazine and Mr Short has since appeared on Sky News to defend his comments.

“One is not better than the other, we just have different skills. It would be wonderful to see more girls playing chess, and at a higher level, but rather than fretting about inequality, perhaps we should just gracefully accept it as a fact,” he reportedly told the magazine.

Nigel Short is not the only Chess master to make such remarks and his words reflect the view of Russian chess grand master, Garry Kasparov, who Short lost to for the world title in 1993. Kasparov has said in the past that “women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.”

Speaking to Sky News, Short said his comments were “quite uncontroversial” and simply spoke to physiological reality. He says men’s brains are “10 per cent larger” than women’s and have considerably more grey matter.

“Women have better verbal skills, women have all sorts of skills that are better than men. But the gap (in chess) is quite large and I believe that’s down to sex differences,” he said.

If his comments sound familiar, it’s probably because you remember this classic line from Ron Burgundy in the film Anchorman:“I’m a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That’s what kind of man I am. You’re just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It’s science.”

In the original interview, Short said that men and women simply have different cognitive and physical abilities.

“I don’t have the slightest problem in acknowledging that my wife possesses a much higher degree of emotional intelligence than I do,” he told the magazine. “Likewise, she doesn’t feel embarrassed in asking me to manoeuvre the car out of our narrow garage.”

Unsurprisingly, Short received backlash for his comments telling Sky News that “an amazing number of people have criticised” him.

Sky News interviewer, Sarah-Jane Mee brought up the fact that the women’s number one player, Judit Polgar had recently defeated Short and asked him if she had brought her “man’s brain” on that occasion.

Short praised Ms Polgar but said the loss “against one individual woman does not prove anything on the gender point.”

Amanda Ross, the head of London’s Casual Chess Club told The Telegraph that it was “incredibly damaging when someone so respected basically endorses sexism.”

@nigelshortchess @NewInChess Incredibly damaging/harmful when someone so respected basically endorses sexism in #chess in important magazine — CasualChess.Org (@CasualChess) April 18, 2015

Short fired back on Twitter, telling Ross that “you seem to suffer from incomprehension. Men and women do have different brains. This is a biological fact”.

“Furthermore, I never said women have inferior brains. That is your crude and false attempt to caricature me,” he said.

@CasualChess @NewInChess Indeed, I have a poor score against the best female chess player in history. And what does that prove exactly? — Nigel Short (@nigelshortchess) April 18, 2015