Judit Polgr

Judit Polgr (born July 23, 1976) is a Hungarian chess player. Easily the best female chess player in history, in the April 2005 FIDE rating list (including men and women) she was ranked number eight in the world with an Elo rating of 2732, the only woman on FIDE's Top 100 list. Judit comes from a Jewish family background in Budapest. (A number of her great-grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, and her grandmother was a survivor of Auschwitz). She and her two older sisters (Zsuzsa (GM) and Zsfia (IM)) were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father Laszlo Polgr, in an effort to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age. He and his wife educated their children at home, with chess as a specialist subject, and have achieved heights few men ever achieve. The Polgr sisters were not quite the first women to take chess seriously, Georgia already had a strong tradition of women's chess. Judit could almost certainly have won the title of Women's World Champion of Chess several times over. No other woman was even in the top 100 of the FIDE Elo rating list, while Judit entered the Top 10 in 2003. However, she has refused to participate in women-only chess events, stating that she wants to be the true World Champion of Chess. Amongst her achievements are earning the men's Grandmaster title at the then-record age of 15 years and 4 months, one month earlier than Bobby Fischer's previous record. Her climb up the ranks once seemed to put her on target for the world championship, but although she has played many winning games against some of the world's best players, she has yet to win a major tournament. She has also been unable to beat former champion Garry Kasparov in any of their encounters in standard time control games. In 2002, she finally beat Kasparov in a rapid game of the "Russia vs The Rest of the World 2002" tournament. The rest of her family eventually emigrated, Zsfia and her parents to Israel, Zsuzsa to the US, but she remained in Hungary and married a veterinary surgeon from Budapest. In 2004 Judit took some time off from chess to give birth to her son, Olivr. She was consequently considered inactive and not listed on the January 2005 FIDE rating list, meaning that her sister Zsuzsa temporarily became the world number one woman player. Judit returned to chess at the prestigious Corus chess tournament on January 15th 2005, scoring 7/13. She was therefore relisted in the April 2005 FIDE rating list, gaining a few rating points for her above-par performance at Corus.

Literature

  • Tibor Krolyi: Judit Polgar, the princess of chess. London: Batsford, 2004. ISBN 0-7134-8890-5
  • Forbes, Cathy: The Polgar Sisters: Training or Genius?

External links

Polgr, Judit Polgr, Judit Polgr, Judit Polgr, Judit

 

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