Polgar, Judit
Hungarian chess player
born July 23, 1976, Budapest, Hungary
the youngest of three chess-playing sisters (see Zsuzsa Polgar (Polgar, Zsuzsa)). She became an international master at the age of 12 and the youngest international grandmaster in history at the age of 15 years and 4 months, eclipsing Bobby Fischer (Fischer, Bobby)'s record by a month.Apart from her gold-medal-winning appearances for the Hungarian women's Olympiad teams of 1988 and 1990, Polgar has spurned women-only events. She defeated former world chess champion Boris Spassky (Spassky, Boris Vasilyevich) in a match in 1993. In 1994 she went undefeated in winning a chess tournament in Madrid, Spain, the first woman to win a strong grandmaster tournament open to both genders.
After world chess champion Garry Kasparov (Kasparov, Garry), Polgar became the most popular and charismatic player in chess. By far the strongest female player of all time, she also became the only woman ever to be ranked in the top 10 chess players of the world.
Additional Reading
Zsuzsa Polgar and Jacob Shutzman, Queen of the Kings Game (1997), is a biography of Zsuzsa Polgar, written with her husband, Jacob, that includes information on the early chess training of the Polgar sisters.John Graham, Women in Chess: Players of the Modern Age (1987), contains short biographies of many of the best female chess players of the 20th century.