Online Encyclopedia
Judit Polgár
Judit Polgár (born July 23, 1976) is a Hungarian chess player. Easily the best female chess player in history, in the July 2004 FIDE rating list (including men and women) she was ranked number eight in the world with an Elo rating of 2728. She is the only woman on FIDE's Top 100 list [1].
Judit and her two older sisters (Zsuzsa (GM) and Zsófia (IM)) were reportedly part of a educational experiment carried out by their father in an effort to prove that women could achieve high mental aptitude when trained from a very early age. He set out to educate his daughters in many fields, not merely chess, but all three latched on to the game at a young age, and have achieved heights in chess few men ever achieve.
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 January 2004 FIDE rating list. 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.
Literature
- Tibor Károlyi: Judit Polgar, the princess of chess. London: Batsford, 2004. ISBN 0-7134-8890-5