Judit Polgar: The Greatest Female Chess Player Ever
The Tale of a Grandmaster who Revolutionized Chess for Women
Chess is a battle of the intellect. There’s barely any physical prowess involved in it. In that sense, this is one of the few sports where men and women should be able to compete together despite the biological differences between the two sexes. However, the path to top-level chess for women was filled with hurdles.
Many men in the scene, including several top grandmasters, were of the opinion that women are not competent enough to be playing at the highest level of chess. Bobby Fischer, when asked to reflect on women's chess in a 1963 interview, said, “They’re terrible chess players. I guess they’re just not so smart.”
This perception of female chess became destined to change when a young girl from Hungary took the chess world by storm and revolutionized chess for women in the years to come. This young girl, Judit Polgar, not only became the greatest female chess player ever but she cemented herself as one of the best ever to play the game of chess.
Judit started training chess with her elder sisters Susan and Sofia under the tutelage of their father from a very young age. Although the other sisters showed massive talent as well, Judit was the prodigal one with the potential to be the very best in the world.
She did not take much time to prove her potential. She started participating in rated tournaments in the US at the age of 9. By age 12, she secured all 3 IM norms and became the youngest ever to hold the International Master title. The most remarkable part of her rapid rise to dominance was that she reached an elo of 2555 in 1989 when she was only 13. Veteran chess grandmasters started to acknowledge that she might be the greatest chess prodigy ever.
“Hungarian girl may be next world champion”
-GM Mikhail Tal, former World Champion
The youngest of the Polgar sisters earned her Grandmaster title in 1991 when she won the Hungarian National Championship. Achieving this feat at the age of only 15 years and 5 months, she became the youngest GM in the history of chess. She did not have to look back after that. Considering her chess strength and how far above she is from other women chess players, Polgar decided not to play against her female peers.
To this day, she remains the only female chess player to break into the top 10 players ranking list, a feat she first achieved in 1996. She also became the only female in history to surpass the 2700 elo barrier in 2003, a record that is yet to be broken. Throughout her career, she kept proving the idea wrong that chess is a men’s game. For the next two decades or so, she kept competing on par with the world’s elite chess players. She won many tournaments during this time. Some of her most notable tournament performances are:
- Madrid 1994 (cat. XVI) — 7/9, 1st Place
- Japfa Classic 2000 (cat. XVI) — 6½/9, 1st Place
- 34th Chess Olympiad, 2000– 10/13
- Wijk aan Zee 2003 ( cat. XIX) — 8/13, 2nd Place
- Essent 2006 (cat. XX) — 4½/6, Tied 1st Place
- European Individual Chess Championship 2011 — 8.5/11, Tied 1st Place
Judit Polgar was an extremely aggressive player with great positional understanding. In her illustrious career, she has scored victories over 11 chess world champions. This list includes the likes of Magnus Carlsen, Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Vladimir Kramnik, Vishy Anand, etc. Very Few chess players in the history of the game can boast of such an accomplishment. Her win against Garry Kasparov in the “Russia versus the Rest of the World Match” (2002) was a historic moment as she became the first woman to beat the then-world champion.
She reached her peak rating in 2005, which was 2735. She was world number 8 in the rankings at that time. Although she never became a world champion, she is the only female player to have played in the final stages of a Candidates tournament in 2005.
The Hungarian Grandmaster kept her super GM status for most of the remainder of her career. On 13 August 2014, she announced her retirement from top-level competitive chess. However, on a rest day at this year’s candidates, chess fans around the world once again got to witness Judit’s chess masterclass as she defeated the current world champion in an unofficial blitz game in just 19 moves.
Who is the greatest male chess player of all time is a question that has no definite answer. But there is no disagreement over the greatest female player. Judit Polgar led the women’s world rankings for more than 26 years. She and her sister, Susan Polgar, had immense influence over the women in chess. She revolutionized chess and set a precedence that women can reach the highest level in the game of chess as men can. The world no longer considers chess a men’s game. Everybody in the chess scene now unanimously agrees that the match between the genders is remarkably even.
