Judit Polgár

#71/100 in #100extraordinarywomen 

Judit Polgár is a Hungarian chess grandmaster and the most popular and charismatic player in chess. By far the strongest female player of all time, she also became the only woman ever to be ranked in the top 10 chess players of the world. 

Judit Polgár was born on 23 July 1976 in Budapest, to a Hungarian Jewish family. Judit 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. 

Trained in her early years by her sister Susan, who ultimately became Women's World Champion, Judit Polgár was a 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." Judit described herself at that age as "obsessive" about chess. 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, Sophia 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 Sophia, 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. She first defeated an International Master, Dolfi Drimer, at age 10, and a grandmaster, Lev Gutman, at age 11. 

In April 1988, Judit 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 had been the youngest player ever to have achieved this distinction. Both Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov were 14 when they were awarded the title; Judit Polgár was 12. It was during this time that former World Champion Mikhail Tal said Judit had the potential to win the Men's World Championship. 

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. Judit’s older sister, Susan, first fought the bureaucracy by playing in men’s tournaments and refusing to play in women’s tournaments. 

Judit Polgár has rarely played in women's-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 Sophia 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 learning 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. 

In 1991, Judit achieved the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15 years and 4 months, at the time the youngest to have done so, breaking the record previously held by former World Champion Bobby Fischer. She was the youngest ever player to break into the FIDE Top 100 players rating list, ranking No. 55 in the January 1989 rating list, at the age of 12. She is the only woman to qualify for a World Championship tournament, having done so in 2005. She is the first, and to date only, woman to have surpassed 2700 Elo, reaching a career peak rating of 2735 and peak world ranking of No. 8, both achieved in 2005. She was the No. 1 rated woman in the world from January 1989 until the March 2015 rating list, when she was overtaken by Chinese player Hou Yifan; she was the No. 1 again in the August 2015 women's rating list, in her last appearance in the FIDE World Rankings. 

She has 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. Judit is also the only woman to have won a game against a reigning world number one player, and has 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. 

In September 2002, in the Russia versus the Rest of the World Match, Judit finally defeated Garry Kasparov in a game. She won the game with exceptional positional play when a cornered Kasparov eventually resigned and immediately left by a passageway barred to journalists and photographers. Kasparov had once described her as a "circus puppet" and asserted that women chess players should stick to having children. Judit called the game "one of the most remarkable moments of [her] career". The game was historic as it was the first time in chess history that a female player beat the world's No. 1 player in competitive play. 

In August 2000, Judit had married Hungarian veterinary surgeon Gusztáv Font. In 2004, Judit took some time off from chess to give birth to her son, Olivér. She was consequently considered inactive and not listed on the January 2005 FIDE rating list. She returned to chess at the prestigious Corus chess tournament on 15 January 2005. Owing to an exceptional performance in the tournament, she was relisted in the April 2005 FIDE rating list. In September 2005, she once again made history as she became the first woman to play for the World Championship, at the FIDE World Chess Championship 2005. However, she had a rare disappointing performance, coming last out of the eight competitors. She did not play at the 2006 Linares tournament because she was pregnant again. On 6 July 2006, she gave birth to a girl, Hanna; returning to Chess again in September 2006. 

Concentrating on her two children left Judit with little time to train and play competitively and her ranking dropped from eighth in 2005 to the mid-50s in 2009. She played in the 2009 Maccabiah Games in Israel, and was named the Outstanding Female Athlete of the Games. However, as of September 2010, she remained the only woman in the top 100 and still the only woman to have ever made the top 10. Comparing motherhood to playing chess, Judit has said that a chess tournament now "feels like a vacation". When asked why she came back to chess after taking time off to care for her children, she said, "I cannot live without chess! It is an integral part of my life. I enjoy the game!" On 13 August 2014, she announced her retirement from competitive chess and has been inactive since September 2015. Before that, in June 2015, Judit 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. 

Since she has stopped playing competitive chess, she has more time for other chess related activities such as giving simultaneous exhibitions, lectures, talks on stage and writing. She has founded the Judit Polgár Chess Foundation which has supported prestigious social events and festivals over the past years. She has also authored a series of children's books on chess, “Chess Playground” for which her sister Sofia provided illustrations. Moreover, in recent years as an ambassador of Chess in School project in the European Union, she has made a lot of efforts to introduce chess as an educational tool. The best Women’s Chess Player of all time has now totally dedicated her life to Chess. 

Source: Wikipedia, Google and Judit Polgár’s own website.