Career
Polgár is Jewish, and from Budapest. She and her two sisters were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt 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. They also taught their daughters the international language Esperanto.
In 1989, at the age of 14, she stunned the chess world by her performance in a tournament in Rome, which became known as the "Sack of Rome". She won the tournament, which included several strong grandmasters, with a score of 8½ out of 9. According to the Chessmetrics rating system, her performance rating was 2735; one of the strongest performances in history by a 14-year-old.
On February 7, 1999 Polgar married Georgian-born Israeli Grandmaster Dr. Yona Kosashvili and made aliyah by moving to Israel. They have two children, Alon and Yoav, and they were later joined by her parents. Later, the whole family emigrated to Toronto, Canada (see yerida). Around 2012 she moved back to Israel, and now lives in Tel Aviv.
For a time, she ranked as the 6th-strongest female player in the world. She played one FIDE-rated game in July 2005. Prior to that, her last FIDE-rated game was in September 2003. At one point she beat Viktor Korchnoi at a game of fast chess. However, Korchnoi said that this was "the very first and the very last game had ever won against ."
Read more about this topic: Sofia Polgar
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)