Susan Polgar - Chess Career

Chess Career

Polgar and her two younger sisters, Grandmaster Judit and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, who sought to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age. "Geniuses are made, not born," was László's thesis. He and his wife Klara educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject. The father also taught his three daughters Esperanto. Most of her family eventually emigrated to Israel, but Susan Polgar moved to New York after marrying an American in 1994. Members of the Polgar family, who are Jewish, perished in the Holocaust, and her grandmother was a survivor of Auschwitz.

At age 4, Polgar won her first chess tournament, the Budapest Girls' Under-11 Championship, with a 10–0 score. In 1982, at the age of 12, she won the World Under 16 (Girls) Championship. Despite restrictions on her freedom to play in international tournaments, by 1984 at age 15 Polgar had become the top-rated female chess player in the world.

In November 1986, FIDE decided to grant 100 bonus Elo rating points to all active female players except Polgar, which knocked her from the top spot in the January 1987 FIDE ratings list. The rationale was that the FIDE ratings of women were not commensurate with the ratings of the men because the women tended to play in women-only tournaments, Polgar being an exception because up to that point she had played mainly against men. The statistical evidence supporting this decision was disputed because the data on which it was based was a small subset of the available data, and Polgar and others alleged that the move was politically motivated and had been contrived to displace her from the top spot.

In January 1991, Polgar became the first woman to earn the Grandmaster title in the conventional way of achieving three GM norms and a rating over 2500, though Nona Gaprindashvili was awarded the title earlier by special judgment of FIDE. In 1992, Polgar won both the Women's World Blitz and the Women's World Rapid Championship. She is the only world champion, male or female, to win all three forms of world chess championships.

Polgar had tended to avoid women-only tournaments, but she abandoned this when she entered the 1993 cycle for the Women's World Championship. She was eliminated at the candidates' final match with Nana Ioseliani; after the match was drawn she lost on the drawing of lots. She became the Women's World Champion at her second attempt in 1996. Two years later, her title defense against Xie Jun of China was scheduled to take place in November 1998. However, Polgar requested a postponement because she was pregnant and FIDE had been unable to find a satisfactory sponsor. Ultimately, in 1999, a match was arranged, but under conditions to which Polgar objected – firstly because she had recently had a child, Tom, and had not had sufficient time to recuperate, and secondly because the match was to be held entirely in China, the home country of her challenger. She also wanted a significantly larger prize fund.

When Polgar refused to play under these conditions, FIDE declared that she had forfeited the title, and instead organized a match between Xie Jun and Alisa Galliamova for the Women's World Chess Championship, which was won by Xie Jun. Polgar sued in the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland for monetary damages and the restoration of her title. In March 2001, the case was settled, with Polgar withdrawing her claims and FIDE agreeing to pay Polgar's attorney's fees in the amount of $25,000. Since Xie Jun had already been crowned Women's World Champion, FIDE could not restore the title to Polgar. Polgar has not participated in subsequent Women's World Championship cycles.