Susan Polgar
Summary
- 1969-
- International grandmaster
- In 1984, at age 15, she became the top-ranked female chess player in the world
Details
- Her father Laszlo Polgar conducted an educational experiment on her and her 2 sisters to prove that children could excel if trained from a very early age.
- By age 4, she won her first tournament, an under-11 girls championship with the score 10-0
- In 1988, at age 18 with her sisters Judit (12) and Sofia (14) they were part of a 4 woman Hungarian team that won the women's chess olympiad, beating a soviet team that had won 11 of the past 12 Olympiads.
- Her sister Judit, at age 15 became the youngest grandmaster ever, male or female.
References
Quotes
Laszlo was patient, and meticulous. He started Susan with “pawn wars.” Pawns only, and the first person to advance to the back row wins. Soon, Susan was studying endgames and opening traps. She enjoyed the game and caught on quickly. After eight months of study, Laszlo took her to a smoky chess club in Budapest and challenged grown men to play his four-year-old daughter, whose legs dangled from her chair. Susan won her first game, and the man she beat stormed off. She entered the Budapest girls’ championship and won the under-eleven title. At age four she had not lost a game
When Laszlo reached the limit of his expertise, he hired coaches for his three geniuses in training. He spent his extra time cutting two hundred thousand records of game sequences from chess journals—many offering a preview of potential opponents—and filing them in a custom card catalog, the “cartotech.” Before computer chess programs, it gave the Polgars the largest chess database in the world to study outside of—maybe—the Soviet Union’s secret archives.
Two years later, in 1988, when Sofia was fourteen and Judit twelve, the girls comprised three of the four Hungarian team members for the women’s Chess Olympiad. They won, and beat the Soviet Union, which had won eleven of the twelve Olympiads since the event began. The Polgar sisters became “national treasures,” as Susan put it.
In January 1991, at the age of twenty-one, Susan became the first woman to achieve grandmaster status through tournament play against men. In December, Judit, at fifteen years and five months, became the youngest grandmaster ever, male or female. When Susan was asked on television if she wanted to win the world championship in the men’s or women’s category, she cleverly responded that she wanted to win the “absolute category.”