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Judit Polgár (born July 23, 1976) is a Hungarian chess player. Easily the best female chess player in history, in the October 2004 FIDE rating list (including men and women) she was ranked number nine in the world with an Elo rating of 2728, the only woman on FIDE's Top 100 list.
Judit and her two older sisters (Zsuzsa (GM) and Zsófia (IM)) were reportedly part of an educational experiment carried out by their father Laszlo Polgar, 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 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.
In 2004 Judit took some time off from chess to give birth. 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. Polgar will therefore be listed in the April 2005 FIDE rating list, and will have gained a few rating points for her above-par performance at Corus.
Literature
- Tibor Károlyi: Judit Polgar, the princess of chess. London: Batsford, 2004. ISBN 0-7134-8890-5
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