Judit Polgár
Judit Polgár is a Hungarian chess grandmaster, widely regarded as the strongest female chess player of all time. She is the only woman to be ranked in the world top 10, the only woman to achieve a rating over 2700, and the only woman to compete in the final stage of a World Chess Championship. She was the top rated woman in the world from January 1989 until her retirement from competitive chess in 2014.
Polgár was a chess prodigy, and at the age of 12 became the youngest player to break into the FIDE top 100 rating list, ranked at 55 in the January 1989 rating list. In 1991 she became the youngest player at the time to achieve the title of Grandmaster, at the age of 15 years and 4 months, breaking the 33-year-old record previously held by former world champion Bobby Fischer.
Polgár won or shared first in the chess tournaments of Hastings 1993, Madrid 1994, León 1996, U.S. Open 1998, Hoogeveen 1999, Sigeman & Co 2000, Japfa 2000, and the Najdorf Memorial 2000. She is the only woman to have won a game against a reigning world number one player, and defeated eleven current or former world champions in either rapid or classical chess: Magnus Carlsen, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Boris Spassky, Vasily Smyslov, Veselin Topalov, Viswanathan Anand, Ruslan Ponomariov, Alexander Khalifman, and Rustam Kasimdzhanov.
On 13 August 2014, she announced her retirement from competitive chess. In June 2015, Polgár was elected as the new captain and head coach of the Hungarian national men's team. On 20 August 2015, she received Hungary's highest decoration, the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Stephen of Hungary. In 2021, Polgár was inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame. In September 2024, Judit Polgar was awarded the FIDE 100 Award as the best female player.
Early life
Polgár was born on 23 July 1976 in Budapest to a Jewish-Hungarian family. Polgár and her two older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father, László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age. "Geniuses are made, not born," was László's thesis. He and his wife Klára educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject. László also taught his three daughters the international language Esperanto. They received resistance from Hungarian authorities as home-schooling was not a "socialist" approach. They also received criticism at the time from some Western commentators for depriving the sisters of a normal childhood.Traditionally, chess had been a male-dominated activity, and women were often seen as weaker players, thus advancing the idea of a Women's World Champion. However, from the beginning, László was against the idea that his daughters had to participate in female-only events. "Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men," he wrote. "Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect." This put the Polgárs in conflict with the Hungarian Chess Federation of the day, whose policy was for women to play in women-only tournaments.
Career
Polgár rarely played in women-specific tournaments or divisions and has never competed for the Women's World Championship: "I always say that women should have the self-confidence that they are as good as male players, but only if they are willing to work and take it seriously as much as male players." While László Polgár has been credited with being an excellent chess coach, the Polgárs had also employed professional chessplayers to train their daughters, including Hungarian champion IM Tibor Florian, GM Pal Benko, and Russian GM Alexander Chernin. Susan Polgár, the eldest of the sisters, 5½ years older than Sofia and 7 years older than Judit, was the first of the sisters to achieve prominence in chess by winning tournaments, and by 1986, she was the world's top-rated female chess player. Initially, being the youngest, Judit was separated from her sisters while they were in training. However, this only served to increase Judit's curiosity. After she had learned the rules, they discovered Judit was able to find solutions to the problems they were studying, and she began to be invited into the group. One evening, Susan was studying an endgame with their trainer, a strong International Master. Unable to find the solution, they woke Judit, who was asleep in bed and carried her into the training room. Still half asleep, Judit showed them how to solve the problem, after which they put her back to bed. László Polgár's experiment would produce a family of one international master and two grandmasters and would strengthen the argument for nurture over nature, as well as prove women could be chess grandmasters.Child prodigy
Trained in her early years by her sister Susan, Judit Polgár was a chess prodigy from an early age. At age 5, she defeated a family friend without looking at the board. After the game, the friend joked: "You are good at chess, but I'm a good cook." Judit replied: "Do you cook without looking at the stove?" However, according to Susan, Judit was not the sister with the most talent, explaining: "Judit was a slow starter, but very hard-working." Polgár described herself at that age as "obsessive" about chess. She first defeated an International Master, Dolfi Drimer, at age 10 and a grandmaster, Lev Gutman, at age 11.Judit started playing in tournaments at 6 years old, and by age 9 her rating with the Hungarian Chess Federation was 2080. She was a member of a chess club in Budapest, where she would get experience from master level players. In 1984 in Budapest, Sofia and Judit, at the time 9 and 7 years of age, respectively, played two games of blindfold chess against two masters, which they won. At one point the girls complained that one of their opponents was playing too slowly and suggested a clock should be used.
In April 1986, 9-year-old Judit played in her first rated tournament in the U.S., finishing first in the unrated section of the New York Open, winning US$1,000. All three Polgár sisters competed. Susan, 16, competed in the grandmaster section and had a victory against GM Walter Browne, and Sofia, 11, finished second in her section, but Judit gathered most of the attention in the tournament. Grandmasters would drop by to watch the serious, quiet child playing. She won her first seven games before drawing the final game. Although the unrated section had many of the weaker players in the Open, it also had players of expert strength who were foreign to the United States and had not been rated yet. Milorad Boskovic related a conversation with Judit's sixth-round opponent, a Yugoslav player he knew to be a strong expert: "He told me he took some chances in the game because he couldn't believe she was going to attack so well." Not able to speak English, her mother interpreted as she told a reporter her goal was to be a chess professional. When the reporter asked her if she would be world champion one day, Judit answered: "I will try."
In January 1987, 10-year-old Judit defeated Romanian International Master Dolfi Drimer in the Adsteam Lidums International Tournament in Adelaide, Australia. Edmar Mednis said he played his best game of the tournament in beating Judit: "I was careful in that game... Grandmasters don't like to lose to 10-year-old girls, because then we make the front page of all the papers."
In April 1988, Polgár made her first International Master norm in the International B section of the New York Open. In August 1988, she won the under-12 "Boys" section of the World Youth Chess and Peace Festival in Timișoara, Romania. In October 1988, she finished first in a 10-player round-robin tournament in London, scoring 7–2, for a half point lead over Israeli GM Yair Kraidman. With these three results, she completed the requirements for the International Master title; at the time, she was the youngest player ever to have achieved this distinction. Both Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov were 14 when they were awarded the title; Polgár was 12. It was during this time that former world champion Mikhail Tal said Polgár had the potential to win the World Championship.
File:Judit und Sofia Polgar 1988 Thessaloniki.jpg|thumb|upright|left|Judit with sister Sofia at Thessaloniki, 1988
Judit was asked about playing against boys instead of in the girls' section of tournaments: "These other girls are not serious about chess... I practice five or six hours a day, but they get distracted by cooking and work around the house."
In November 1988, Judit and her sisters, along with Ildikó Mádl, represented Hungary in the Women's section of the 28th Chess Olympiad in Thessaloniki. The International Chess Federation would not permit the Polgárs to play against men in team competitions. Prior to the tournament, Eduard Gufeld, Soviet GM and team coach for the Soviet women's team, dismissed the Polgárs: "I believe that these girls are going to lose a good part of their quickly acquired image in the 28th Olympiad... Afterward we are going to know if the Hungarian sisters are geniuses or just women!" However, the Hungarian women's team won the championship, which marked the first time it was not won by the Soviet Union. Judit played board 2 and finished the tournament with the highest score of 12½–½ to win the individual gold medal. She also won the brilliancy prize for her game against Pavlina Angelova.
In the January 1989 Elo rating list, at the age of 12, she was rated 2555, which was number 55 in the world, the top woman in the world, 35 rating points ahead of the Women's World Champion Maia Chiburdanidze, and 45 points ahead of her sister Susan. In the six months since the previous list, she had gained a remarkable 190 rating points. The British Chess Magazine declared: "Judit Polgár's recent results make the performances of Fischer and Kasparov at a similar age pale by comparison."
Judit's quiet and modest demeanour at the board contrasted with the intensity of her playing style. British GM David Norwood, in recalling Judit beating him when he was an established player and she was just a child, described her as "this cute little auburn-haired monster who crushed you." British journalist Dominic Lawson wrote about 12-year-old Judit's "killer" eyes and how she would stare at her opponent: "The irises are so grey, so dark they are almost indistinguishable from the pupils. Set against her long red hair, the effect is striking."
In 1990, British GM Nigel Short called Judit "one of the three or four greatest chess prodigies in history". However, Kasparov expressed early doubts: "She has fantastic chess talent, but she is, after all, a woman. It all comes down to the imperfections of the feminine psyche. No woman can sustain a prolonged battle." Later in life, however, after he had lost a rapid game against Polgár himself in 2002, Kasparov revised his opinion: "The Polgárs showed that there are no inherent limitations to their aptitude—an idea that many male players refused to accept until they had unceremoniously been crushed by a twelve-year-old with a ponytail."
In 1989, Polgár tied with Boris Gelfand for third in the OHRA Open in Amsterdam, earning her first Grandmaster norm.
By now, numerous books and articles had been written about the Polgár sisters, making them famous even outside of the world of chess. In 1989, American President George H. W. Bush and his wife Barbara met with the Polgárs during their visit to Hungary. Although not released until 1996, in 1990 a documentary about children playing chess, Chess Kids, featuring Polgár, was filmed. The documentary did not include an interview with Polgár as her father required payment.
In 1990, Judit won the Boys section of the under-14 in the World Youth Chess Festival in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Also in 1990, Judit and her sisters represented Hungary in the Women's Olympiad, winning the gold medal. It was the last women-only tournament in which Judit would participate.
In October 1991, Judit finished with 5½–3½, tied for third for fifth position with Zoltán Ribli and John Nunn, at a tournament in Vienna.