The Brooklyn Rail

Susan Polgar learned to play chess at the age of four. She found a board and its pieces in the closet of the home in which she lived with her parents in Budapest, Hungary, and thought they were toys. When her father came home, he taught her how to play the game and, within a few months, she began beating nearly everyone she played (including her father). Within a year, she even entered a tournament and played with children three to four times her age and—while still only four years old—beat them all. Losing was hard enough for the girls she faced, but the boys found it especially difficult. Eventually, men who lost against her did their best to make her ascent in the chess world a struggle, but she faced their resistance with the confidence, fortitude, and determination of a real winner. By the age of fifteen, she was ranked top female player in the world (and remained among the top three for the next twenty-three years!). Two years later, she qualified to take part in the Men’s World Championship but, because of her gender, she was not allowed to play. While that was unquestionably disappointing, it did nothing to harm her increasing strength as a player. At age twenty-one, adhering to the same norms and ratings required in male competition, she was the first woman to win the men’s title of grandmaster.

Although Polgar has been asked many times in interviews to explain how this all happened, Rebel Queen: The Cold War, Misogyny, and the Making of a Grandmaster is her own well thought-out account of that stellar achievement. It should be read by every girl and woman who plays chess and, after they’ve finished, they should give the book to their male chess-playing friends and encourage them to read it. Men should be warned that the women of chess are coming after them, and they’re coming soon.

Men have always dominated in the world of chess, not only in numbers (some ten to one), but also in ratings: the highest ranked male player is Magnus Carlsen with a FIDE [International Chess Federation] rating of 2837, and the highest ranked female player is Hou Yifan at 2633. At her peak in October of 2005, Susan Polgar’s was 2577. At the time, there was only one woman ranked higher, and that was her younger sister Judit. Indeed, for a period of approximately ten years beginning in the late 1980s, Susan, Judit, and their middle sister Sofia—known as the Polgar sisters or, as the press dubbed them, “The Polgarians” (Polgaria in their native Hungarian)—were collectively the highest ranked female chess players in the world. This means that they were capable of beating some of the best male players of their generation and, to the astonishment of many, they did precisely that.

Some claim that the difference between male and female players in chess is neurological, that the brains of men and women are structured differently, women having better verbal abilities, whereas men are better at spatial tasks, a factor that is a great advantage when playing chess. The same argument is made for why there are more male pilots than female, but physiological differences do not account for the great disparity in numbers; the main reason for the inequity is unquestionably societal and cultural. Just as boys are encouraged from an early age to fly airplanes, they are also taught to play chess and understand the game as the competitive and combative sport that it is, while girls are rarely encouraged to follow the same path. This does not mean that the brain cannot be rewired, as it seems to have been for the Polgar sisters, who were taught to play at a very early age by their father, László Polgár, a Hungarian psychologist who believed that genius can be taught. “Geniuses are made,” he claimed, “not born.”

There is some evidence that Mr. Polgár’s theory is right, not only through the experiment he conducted with his daughters, but we have recently gained some scientific insight into how the mind of a great chess player works. In 2007, Susan Polgar was the subject of a National Geographic documentary series called My Brilliant Brain, wherein she allowed her brain to be scanned by an MRI machine when looking at chess positions. As it turns out, she uses the same part of her brain to register these patterns as those used for facial recognition, and she can recognize a given position as quickly as most of us recognize the face of anyone we have met. In another experiment also done for the documentary, she easily reconstructs a chess position without any difficulty that she has viewed only fleetingly, but when she is asked to reconstruct a position that was set up completely at random, she was unable to do it. This proves that her memory of these positions is stored in what neuroscientists call “chunks,” that is, groupings that make sense in an actual chess game. These patterns are stored in her long-term memory, and, because of the early efforts and training with her father, she is able to access them effortlessly for the rest of her career. This is proven by her high proficiency in rapid and blitz games, where moves are made quickly, relying more on instinct than memory (but an instinct that depends upon seeing recognized patterns within chess positions), and, in 2005, when she played 326 chess matches simultaneously (winning 309, drawing fourteen, and losing only three).

In Rebel Queen, Polgar recounts this experience and many others as she powered through the ranks of the established chess community. She found her most formidable opponent not across a chess board, but in the Hungarian government and the powers that controlled the chess circuit there, all of whom were, inevitably, male. They did not want her playing boys, for they believed it gave her an unfair advantage over other girls. Indeed, at one point, FIDE, the governing body of chess, awarded one hundred additional points to the rating of all female chess players worldwide—all except for one: Susan Polgar. They claimed that her play against men gave her an unfair advantage, a reasoning as preposterous today as it was even then. A similar argument was made a few years earlier by Hungarian chess authorities, causing her father to submit his resignation to the Communist Party. It was a pretty risky move back then that could have caused him to lose his job, but he was not going to be a loyal member of an organization that treated his daughter so unfairly. The family even contemplated defection to Australia, but decided against it, for the move could possibly implicate relatives left behind, and none of them wanted to leave Hungary, a country they loved.

Polgar’s book reads almost like a novel, her life echoing that of the main fictional character in The Queen’s Gambit, a 1983 book by Walter Tevis that was turned into a very popular Netflix series in 2020. For those who know the story, it’s about a young female chess prodigy who grows up to beat the strongest male player at the time. That never happened, not with Susan Polgar nor, for that matter, with any other female player, but that does not mean it can’t happen. During the course of her career, Polgar met and played chess with some of the strongest male players who ever lived: the Russians Viktor Korchnoi and Boris Spassky; the Latvian Mikhail Tal; the Indian Viswanathan Anand; and the American Bobby Fischer. Fischer was then the most celebrated chess player who ever lived, due to his victory over Spassky in the famous 1972 World Chess Championship title match in Reykjavík, a series of games played during the Cold War that pitted the Soviet chess machine against a single American player. Fischer famously won that match, but then went into a twenty-year seclusion, emerging in 1992 to play Spassky once more in Yugoslavia, a match that he won again but that was not without controversy. The American government declared that his acceptance of funds during the time of the war in Yugoslavia was in violation of US economic sanctions and it was in this period—as a fugitive—that, upon Polgar’s invitation, he fled to Hungary, where he would remain for a year and a half.

During this period, the entire Polgar family got to know Fischer quite well, having dinner with him on a regular basis and, of course, playing chess. He had earlier proclaimed that women were not good chess players. “They’re all weak, all women,” he once said, “They’re stupid compared to men.” He claimed that he could give any woman knight odds (that is, play the game without one of his knights on the board), and still win. He took that back when face to face with Polgar, but there were other things he said that continued to reveal the dark side to his personality. He was outspokenly anti-Semitic, which Polgar found mystifying, since not only was there no foundation to the vile he spewed against Jews, but Fischer was himself Jewish, as was Polgar. Fischer claimed that she and her family were exempt from these accusations. She did her best to convince him that there was no global Jewish conspiracy, but he remained undeterred. To the extent possible, she ignored his diatribes, and they spent most of their time discussing and working out the rules for a new form of chess devised by Fischer where the pawns remained in their original position, but the other pieces—placed on the first and last ranks of a chessboard—would start off in positions that were determined arbitrarily, what became known as Fischer Random (or what is today called Chess960, as there are that many possibilities of placing your pieces on the back rank). This avoided the rote memorization of openings and allowed for a more instinctive method of play which appealed to Polgar (for hardcore chess players, in an appendix to her book, Polgar provides diagrams of two positions in her games against Fischer, which she analyzes). Eventually, she would sever all ties with Fischer, when he publicly rejoiced in the attacks of 9/11, seeing them as justified retribution against Americans and Israel for their maltreatment of Palestinians.

Polgar’s encounters with the great chess players of the past is one of the most fascinating aspects of her book, but what is most memorable are the personal stories she relates, especially one, where at the age of twelve she attended the World Table Tennis Championship in a nearby town with her father and a friend. While on her way back to their hotel room, she ran ahead to go to the bathroom and, for a brief moment, was not in the protective company of her father. A man she had seen earlier in the day followed her into the stairwell of her hotel and accosted her. She valiantly fought him off, but was nearly raped before her father and his friend showed up and scared the attacker off. Those are the sort of incidents that can potentially devastate a child, negatively impacting their relationship with men for the rest of their lives, but Polgar took it out not on the men with whom she would become romantically involved, but on her male opponents across the chess board. Eventually, she would fall in love with one of them, Julio Granda Zuniga, a handsome young Peruvian grandmaster, but he never disclosed to her the fact that he had a girlfriend back home with whom he had fathered two children (with a third on the way). Once this information became known to Polgar, she broke it off, but it was a stinging realization that not everything in life could be controlled like the moves in a chess game. In 1994, Polgar married Israel-born Jacob Shutzman, known to friends as “Cobi,” a chess player and software engineer with whom she had two children. When that marriage ended in divorce, she married another chess player, Vietnamese-born Paul Truong, who is today Polgar’s business manager and the vice president of her foundation.

There are countless parallels between the game of chess and life. When Polgar married Cobi, she was twenty-five years old but declared that by then, her life had already become routine, “like a chess opening I had played thousands of times before, the same fifteen moves resulting in the same familiar position.” She was ready for a change. When she married Paul Truong, she explained that she had “spent years maneuvering my pieces onto the right squares, but I still didn’t have a plan.” Truong did, and helped Polgar to realize hers. She went on with Truong to develop a highly successful coaching career, the first at Texas Tech University, where her team won the President’s Cup two years in a row, making her the first female chess coach to lead a men’s team to a national title, and then to Webster University in St. Louis, where her team won seven consecutive championships. In 2024, FIDE awarded her the recognition of being the most successful female coach in history.

Chess players are often asked how many moves they think ahead. “I see only one move ahead,” allegedly responded Cuban world champion José Raúl Capablanca, “but always the best move.” Despite what he said, in order to arrive at the right move, you have to anticipate what your opponent’s next move will be along with as many in advance as possible. At one point in her book, Polgar calculated that in her game with the Chinese grandmaster Xie Jun for the Women’s World Chess Championship in 1996 (which Polgar won), she had to think nine moves in advance, a remarkable feat by any standard (although today’s modern computer chess engines are said to calculate some fifteen to twenty moves ahead). In the end, chess is more an art than a science. Marcel Duchamp, for example, who was also an accomplished chess player, famously once said: “While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” Polgar is an artist.