Judit Polgar. Courtesy of the St. Louis Chess Club.
This past Saturday, Judit Polgar, one of the most decorated and strongest chess players of all time, was inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame during the 6th Annual Strategy Across the Board Gala hosted by the Saint Louis Chess Club and the World Chess Hall of Fame. Recognized as one of the top chess players of all time and considered the strongest female player the game has ever seen, Polgar has spent her life breaking both barriers and records.
At just 12 years old, Polgar earned her International Master title while competing in the boy’s section of the World Youth Chess and Peace Festival in Timișoara, Romania. In 1991, she eclipsed Bobby Fischer’s record by becoming the youngest-ever Grandmaster at just 15 years old. As a young girl, she was considered a prodigy by many experts in the field. But even so, Polgar never imagined being inducted in the World Chess Hall of Fame.
“I started to play chess when I was 5,” Polgar says. “By my years as a teenager, I was already very successful. But, I was never considering or aiming [to be part of] the World Chess Hall of Fame.”
The Hungarian chess superstar says she took her competitive career one step at a time. “It was the dream to become the World Champion in the open section,” Polgar says, “That was something that I always had in front of my eyes, and then everything was done in order to get as good as possible.” She racked up accomplishment after accomplishment, including cracking the top 100 players in the world when she was 12, winning three gold medals at the 1988 Olympiad in Thessaloniki, and defeating 11 current or former world champions in rapid or classical chess. In 1993, she beat Boris Spassky—the match is one of her more memorable games of her career.
“I have quite a few of course,” says Polgar. “I beat Anand in 1999 in a very beautiful game, but I had very nice games when I won against Boris Spassky back in ‘93 or I won against Kasparov.” For more than 25 years, Polgar was ranked the No. 1 woman chess player in the world. But, her impact in the sport goes beyond her playing career.
In 2012, she founded The Judit Polgar Chess Foundation (JPCF), an organization that promotes cognitive skill development for young children in school through chess. Historically, the foundation has used the Judit Polgar Method in its various programs, and the teachers are trained to become fluent in this method so they can teach it to the children. With about 60,000 kids annually involved in the programs, the JPCF hopes to demonstrate that chess can be a beneficial tool in education and lifelong learning. The JPCF is currently working on launching its mentor program, in which kids who have the desire to become better in chess can learn and have the support and resources needed to succeed.
Next year, the program will celebrate 10 years of elementary school programs, and they began teaching preschoolers five years ago. Chess is integrated into math and other courses to help the students build myriad skills. "[Chess] gives them great building [blocks] for the thinking skills, for logical thinking, the strategic, but also many different [subjects]...it improves their reading skills, writing skills.”
Polgar was inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame alongside fellow 2021 honorees Miguel Najdorf and Eugene Toree. Polgar's full induction ceremony is available on YouTube. To learn more about the hall-of-famers, visit worldchesshof.org.
