Judit Polgar

◇The experiment

Judit was born in Budapest in 1976, the youngest of three sisters at the centre of one of the most famous experiments in the history of education. Her father, László Polgár, believed that geniuses are made, not born, and set out to prove it by raising his daughters — Susan, Sofia and Judit — as chess specialists from the cradle. He rejected the gender prejudice of the chess world outright: "Women are able to achieve results similar to that of men. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination." In How I Beat Fischer's Record (2012), the first volume of her own account of her career, Judit called her family environment “the most important factor” in her early success; both her parents were teachers. Under her father's guidance she spent “many hours each day solving studies, problems and tactical positions”, a wall of the family flat held 30 small chess boards set with homework positions, and at times she played blindfold games against Sofia “at least ten times a day!”

The youngest turned out to be the most gifted. At five she beat a family friend blindfolded. At nine she won the unrated section of the 1986 New York Open, her first international tournament win, which put her on the front page of the New York Times. At eleven she beat her first grandmaster, Lev Gutman, at Brussels in 1987. She wrote that the widely repeated story naming Vlado Kovacevic as her first grandmaster victim is wrong: Kovacevic confirmed to her that he had never played in the San Bernardino event where that game is usually placed. In January 1989, at twelve, she entered the world's top 100, already the highest-rated woman in the world, thirty-five points ahead of the Women's World Champion. The British Chess Magazine wrote that her results made "the performances of Fischer and Kasparov at a similar age pale by comparison."

◇Breaking Fischer's record

Her first grandmaster norm came at the 1989 OHRA tournament in Amsterdam, which she recounts as a tournament diary in How I Beat Fischer's Record. At her father's request she played in the Reserve group rather than the elite Crown group. Her mother, who “barely knows the rules”, sat in the audience knitting or reading. Spectators queued outside with pocket sets, and after the fifth round the organizers gave her game the main stage and moved the Crown group, with Korchnoi, Speelman, Beliavsky and Gulko, to the penthouse. Gert Ligterink wrote in De Volkskrant: “From now on a 13-year-old girl is responsible for all public relations of the OHRA tournament!” She finished shared third, and her win over Krunoslav Hulak took the best-game prize of the whole event.

In December 1991, by winning the Hungarian Super-Championship in Budapest, a round robin of the country's strongest players, Judit Polgár earned the grandmaster title at fifteen years, four months and twenty-eight days, breaking Bobby Fischer's thirty-three-year-old record for the youngest grandmaster in history by roughly a month. Before the last round she shared the lead with András Adorján; a draw would have given her the final norm, but she played for the title and beat Tibor Tolnai with Black to finish clear first on 6/9, half a point ahead of Gyula Sax and Adorján. “Looking back, I believe that when things go your way, there is nothing better than playing in your hometown,” she wrote.

It was the first of the records that would define her. She was the fourth woman ever to earn the title, and the youngest GM the game had yet seen. But where other prodigies were measured against children, Polgár would spend the rest of her career measured against the very best adults alive — exactly as her father had intended.

◇Among the men, on her own terms

Polgár helped Hungary win the Women's Olympiad in 1988 and 1990. At Thessaloniki in 1988, aged twelve, she scored 12½ out of 13 on second board. At Novi Sad two years later Hungary and the Soviet Union finished level on points, and the team sat with the spectators waiting for the tiebreak, which went Hungary's way. “It was during that endless wait that I took the decision not to play in any more women’s competitions,” she wrote. After 1990 she competed exclusively in open events, choosing to face the strongest players rather than pursue the Women's World Championship, and in 1994 she played top board for Hungary's men's team at the Moscow Olympiad. "Women should have the self-confidence that they are as good as male players," she said — "but only if they are willing to work and take it seriously as much as male players."

She backed the principle with results no woman had ever approached. In 1996 she became the only woman ever ranked in the world's top ten. Her rating peaked at 2735 in 2005; her ranking peaked at world No. 8 in 2004. And from January 1989 until her retirement she held the No. 1 woman's spot for twenty-six consecutive years — a record that still stands, untouched.

In A Game of Queens (2014), the third volume, she describes the years at the top. Wijk aan Zee 2003 gave her the best tournament result of her career. Later that year, after a tense rapid match against Anand at Mainz, she and her husband Gusztáv decided to put classical tournaments “on hold” and start a family. Her son Oliver was born on 10 August 2004, and she returned at Wijk aan Zee 2005 after a break of fourteen months. Her daughter Hanna was born in 2006; three and a half months later, at Hoogeveen, she beat Veselin Topalov twice, just after he had lost the world title to Kramnik in Elista.

◇The day she beat the world No. 1

Over her career Polgár defeated eleven players who held, or would hold, the world title — Spassky, Smyslov, Karpov, Kasparov, Anand, Kramnik, Topalov, Ponomariov, Khalifman, Kasimdzhanov, and Magnus Carlsen. No name on that list matters more than one.

On 9 September 2002, at the Russia versus the Rest of the World match in Moscow, Polgár faced Garry Kasparov — the world No. 1, who a dozen years earlier had sneered that "no woman can sustain a prolonged battle." Playing White in a rapid game, she outplayed him positionally and forced his resignation. It was the first time in history a woman had beaten the reigning world No. 1 in competition. In A Game of Queens she called it “my only official win against Garry! True, it was just a rapid game, but the occasion was special.” Afterwards, she wrote, “Kasparov shook my hand but then rushed away from the playing hall, obviously angry with himself.” Kasparov, who had been crushed, later recanted in full: the Polgárs, he wrote, "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."

◇The tiger at the board

Polgár's style was pure aggression. She opened 1.e4, reached for the Sicilian and the King's Indian with Black, and hunted the initiative from the first move. "She is a tiger at the chessboard," said the American champion Joel Benjamin after one five-hour war. "She absolutely has a killer instinct. You make one mistake and she goes right for the throat." Kasparov himself observed that if "playing like a girl" meant anything in chess, in her case it meant relentless aggression. Former world champions disagreed about her style. “I felt deeply honoured when Vassily Smyslov called me ‘Tal in a skirt’,” she wrote, but “I was less pleased when Korchnoi described me as a ‘coffee house player’!”

In My Great Predecessors, Part III, Kasparov recalls their final-round game at Wijk aan Zee in 2000. He needed only a draw with White to win the tournament and felt reluctant to play, until her opening choice roused him: "Polgar is playing the Najdorf!" He chose an attacking continuation and won the game.

In 2005 she became the first woman to play in the final stage of the FIDE World Championship, at San Luis, a qualification she called “clearly the highest point of my career”. She won Olympiad gold and a brilliancy prize for Hungary's women in 1988 and later anchored the country's open team. In 2011 she tied for first at the European Individual Championship and took the bronze medal on tiebreak. She retired from competitive play in 2014, at 38, after more than 3,000 tournament games, announcing the decision during the Tromsø Olympiad, where Hungary won the silver medals. “Playing chess was an important, even essential, part of my life, and I feel happy to have embraced this career, but now is a good moment to look for other priorities,” she wrote. She was the strongest female player the game had ever produced, and she continued her educational work through the chess foundation she had established in 2012, whose programmes have reached children across Hungary and beyond; chess entered the Hungarian national curriculum in 2013.