My favourite fact about chess ever is how Garry Kasparov, a Russian grandmaster and former world chess champion, once said during an interview:
“Well, in the past, I have said that there is real chess and women’s chess. Some people don’t like to hear this, but chess does not fit women properly. It’s a fight, you know? A big fight. It’s not for women.”
Only for Kasparov to get absolutely obliterated by Judit Polgar, a Hungarian woman, a few years later.
Another fun fact: Judit Polgar, at the time of receiving her grandmaster title in 1991, was the youngest player to EVER receive the title at only age 15. Judit Polgar is straight up a chess legend. She was also the youngest player to ever be inducted into the FIDE top 100, ranking 55 at only age 12.
Judit has defeated numerous other chess legends, such as Anatoly Karpov, Viswanathan Anand, and Boris Spassky, all former world chess champions. She has even won a match against Magnus Carlsen, who is the current world chess champion as of 2021. When I tell you this woman is a beast I mean she is RUTHLESS.
Famously, in 1994, during a match with Judit Polgar, Garry Kasparovcheated, taking back a move after realising it was losing, even though this is very much against the rules of chess. At the time, Judit was only 17. Imagine being so good at age 17 that you make the world champion cheat!
Anyways. Stan chess legend Judit Polgar because she is a beast!!!!!
Yet another fun fact: her sister, Susan Polgar, is ALSO a chess grandmaster and was women’s world champion in 1996!
And, their sister Sofia Polgar, is ALSO a chess international master! Meaning that all three Polgar sisters are chess masters!
also, she’s Jewish! Bobby Fischer refused to play her because of this. She played in the men’s league, and at the height of her career was 7th in the world
Note, the reason for this is that their father, a researcher, decided to perform an experiment with the goal of proving that innate talent is not as much a factor as work - that ‘genius’ can be taught, essentially.
He literally looked for a wife who would help him with this. He found a woman who was interested by the idea and agreed to marry him and have his kids so they could be his experiment.
He decided on chess as the medium for the experiment because it has clear goals and rankings. He himself was not especially good at chess, nor was his wife. He taught his daughters chess from a very young age - at age five, his first daughter, Susan, won a local competition against people more than twice her age.
I’m not saying their accomplishments aren’t their own - they absolutely are! These are three phenomenal ladies who have brilliant skill. But their unusual upbringing is the root of why all three of them are chess champions.
What I would like to know is how he encouraged them to love chess, rather than making it feel like a chore to them. Because that is the most important key, I feel. It won’t help if you start a kid on something young but go about it in a way that leads to them resenting it! And he very easily could have raised three daughters who wanted nothing more than to hurl a chessboard at his head. Somehow, he didn’t, and *that’s* the interesting part to me.
Yeah, I see a lot of people in the notes and tags saying stuff like “imagine how much IQ that family has” or “they must have some crazy chest genetics”. Which is funny since they were actually born with the purpose of disproving the idea that talent is a genetic trait and that things like IQ are racist, abelist, and sexist ideas made up to inflate the egos of white cis men.
