Zsuzsa Polgár

Zsuzsa Polgár, also known as Susan Polgár, born in 1969, Hungarian chess player, who became an international grandmaster in 1991 and the women’s world champion in 1996. Polgár is the older sister of top female chess players Zsofia Polgár and Judit Polgár. The three sisters played on the Hungarian team that won gold medals in 1988 and 1990 at the Women’s Chess Olympiad, a team-oriented world chess championship. The 1988 Olympiad was the first won by a team other than the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Zsuzsa Polgár was born in Budapest, Hungary. She and her two sisters were educated at home, where it became apparent early that Polgár was a child prodigy in chess. She won the Budapest under-11 championship when she was four years old. In 1981, at the age of 12, she won the girl’s under-16 world championship, and then at the age of 15, she became the world’s top-ranked female player.

Polgár performed exceptionally on her route to the world championship. In tournament play between 1988 and 1990, she finished in the top three places in several major tournaments: Egilsstadir, Iceland (first); León, Spain (first); Royan, France (second); and Pamplona, Spain (third). In 1995 she defeated a former women’s world champion, Georgian Maya Chiburdanidze, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In February 1996 Polgár claimed the world championship with a victory over Xie Jun of China in Jaén, Spain. In 1999 she was stripped of her title in a dispute with the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), the ruling body of world chess. Polgár moved to the United States in the mid-1990s and eventually became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Many chess competitions are limited to either men or women, and the Polgár sisters have angered traditional chess associations because they often refuse to play in single-sex events. Their skill and understanding of the game have raised the chess world’s awareness of female competitors’ abilities and have increased the numerical ratings of women players to levels almost equal to those of their male counterparts.