Judit Polgár (born 23 July 1976) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster, described as the strongest female chess player of all time. She is the only woman to be ranked in the world top 10, the only woman to achieve a rating over 2700, reaching a peak rating of 2735, and the only woman to compete in the final stage of a World Chess Championship. She was the top-rated woman in the world from January 1989 until her retirement from competitive chess in 2014, remaining No. 1 until the March 2015 rating list; her record of 26 consecutive years as woman's No. 1 still stands.
Polgár was a chess prodigy, and at age 12 became the youngest player to break into the FIDE top-100 rating list, ranked 55 in the January 1989 list. In 1991, she became the youngest player at the time to achieve the title of Grandmaster, at the age of 15 years and 4 months, breaking the 33-year-old record held by former world champion Bobby Fischer. With the achievement, she became only the fourth-ever female Grandmaster, achieving the title the same year her older sister Susan had become the third-ever female Grandmaster.
Polgár won or shared first in the chess tournaments of Hastings 1993, Madrid 1994, León 1996, U.S. Open 1998, Hoogeveen 1999, Sigeman & Co 2000, Japfa 2000, and the Najdorf Memorial 2000. She is the only woman to have won a game against a reigning world number one player (Garry Kasparov, in 2002), and defeated eleven current or former world champions in either rapid or classical chess: Magnus Carlsen, Anatoly Karpov, Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Boris Spassky, Vasily Smyslov, Veselin Topalov, Viswanathan Anand, Ruslan Ponomariov, Alexander Khalifman, and Rustam Kasimdzhanov.
On 13 August 2014, she announced her retirement from competitive chess. In June 2015, Polgár was elected as the new captain and head coach of the Hungarian national men's team. On 20 August 2015, she received Hungary's highest decoration, the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Stephen of Hungary. In 2021, Polgár was inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame. In September 2024, as part of FIDE's centennial celebration, Polgar was awarded the FIDE 100 Award as the best female player of the past 100 years.
On 19 July 2026, in an initiative started by the Prime Minister of Hungary, Péter Magyar and supported by a group of famous scientists, artists and athletes, Polgár was asked to serve as the next President of Hungary. She referred to this as the "greatest honor of her life", but refused the request, stating she does not feel enough strength within her to take on the historic responsibility of uniting a divided nation.
Polgár was born on 23 July 1976 in Budapest to a Jewish-Hungarian family. Polgár and her two older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father, László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age. "Geniuses are made, not born," was László's thesis. He and his wife Klára educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject. László also taught his three daughters the international language Esperanto. They also received criticism at the time from some Western commentators for depriving the sisters of a normal childhood.
Traditionally, chess had been a male-dominated activity, and women were often seen as weaker players, thus advancing the idea of a Women's World Champion. However, from the beginning, László was against the idea that his daughters had to participate in female-only events. "Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men," he wrote. "Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect." This put the Polgárs in conflict with the Hungarian Chess Federation of the day, whose policy was for women to play in women-only tournaments.
Polgár rarely played in women-only tournaments or divisions and has never competed for the Women's World Championship: "I always say that women should have the self-confidence that they are as good as male players, but only if they are willing to work and take it seriously as much as male players." While László Polgár has been credited with being an excellent chess coach, the Polgárs had also employed professional chessplayers to train their daughters, including Hungarian champion IM Tibor Florian, GM Pal Benko, and Russian GM Alexander Chernin. Susan Polgár, the eldest of the sisters, 5½ years older than Sofia and 7 years older than Judit, was the first of the sisters to achieve prominence in chess by winning tournaments, and by 1986, she was the world's top-rated female chess player. Initially, being the youngest, Judit was separated from her sisters while they were in training. However, this only served to increase Judit's curiosity. After she had learned the rules, they discovered Judit was able to find solutions to the problems they were studying, and she began to be invited into the group. One evening, Susan was studying an endgame with their trainer, a strong International Master. Unable to find the solution, they woke Judit, who was asleep in bed and carried her into the training room. Still half asleep, Judit showed them how to solve the problem, after which they put her back to bed. László Polgár's experiment would produce a family of one international master and two grandmasters and would strengthen the argument for nurture over nature, as well as prove women could be chess grandmasters.
Trained in her early years by her sister Susan, Judit Polgár was a chess prodigy from an early age. At age 5, she defeated a family friend without looking at the board. After the game, the friend joked: "You are good at chess, but I'm a good cook." Judit replied: "Do you cook without looking at the stove?" However, according to Susan, Judit's ability was borne of hard work, not an abnormally great natural ability. Explaining this, Susan said, "Judit was a slow starter, but very hard-working." Polgár described herself at that age as "obsessive" about chess. She first defeated an International Master, Dolfi Drimer, at age 10 and a grandmaster, Lev Gutman, at age 11.
Judit started playing in tournaments at 6 years old, and by age 9 her rating with the Hungarian Chess Federation was 2080. She was a member of a chess club in Budapest, where she would get experience from master level players. In 1984 in Budapest, Sofia and Judit, at the time 9 and 7 years of age, respectively, played two games of blindfold chess against two masters, which they won. At one point the girls complained that one of their opponents was playing too slowly and suggested a clock should be used.
In April 1986, 9-year-old Judit played in her first rated tournament in the U.S., finishing first in the unrated section of the New York Open, winning US$1,000. All three Polgár sisters competed. Susan, 16, competed in the grandmaster section and had a victory against GM Walter Browne, and Sofia, 11, finished second in her section, but Judit gathered most of the attention in the tournament. Grandmasters would drop by to watch the serious, quiet child playing. She won her first seven games before drawing the final game. Although the unrated section had many of the weaker players in the Open, it also had players of expert strength who were foreign to the United States and had not been rated yet. Milorad Boskovic related a conversation with Judit's sixth-round opponent, a Yugoslav player he knew to be a strong expert: "He told me he took some chances in the game because he couldn't believe she was going to attack so well." Since Judit was not yet able to speak English very well, her mother interpreted as she told a reporter her goal was to be a chess professional. When the reporter asked her if she would be world champion one day, Judit answered: "I will try."
In January 1987, 10-year-old Judit defeated Romanian International Master Dolfi Drimer in the Adsteam Lidums International Tournament in Adelaide, Australia. Edmar Mednis said he played his best game of the tournament in beating Judit: "I was careful in that game... Grandmasters don't like to lose to 10-year-old girls, because then we make the front page of all the papers."