GG Babić

Ivana Babić delivered babies in Zagreb for three decades and took the game up seriously in her fifties. She reached the top tier on nothing but refusing to be hurried and refusing to be rattled.

Faster opponents find the calm harder to play against than anything she actually does, and they tend to read it as serenity. It is not quite that. She has spent thirty years in rooms where something was genuinely going wrong, and a match, however long and however badly it is going, does not qualify. She is kind about this and does not say it out loud.