Judith Polgar, the greatest female chess player of all time, has called it a day. The child prodigy who eventually became a legend announced her retirement from competitive chess after representing her homeland Hungary at the recent Olympiad in Tromso, Norway.
At 38, Polgar ends a 23-year career that glitters with victories against the world's best, including nine men world champions. In addition, by the sheer power of her play, she greatly enhanced the revolution led by her older sister Susan which smashed the traditional and prejudicial barrier that once separated men from female players.
Indeed, Judith Polgar's legacy, together with the achievements of her two sisters, Susan and Sofia, have become part of chess lore and stand as a ready refutation against the persistent argument that women do not have what it takes to become great chess players.
This long-accepted idea of an "inherent male advantage," in fact, was dramatically exploded at the Thessaloniki Olympiad in 1988 when Hungary, with great fanfare, revamped its entire women's team with a line-up that included 12-year-old Judith and her two older sisters.
The press and other team officials laughed at the Hungarians, calling their team "Polgary." GM Edward Gufeld, coach of the Soviet women's team, poohooed the Polgars predicting that the sisters would "soon lose a good part of their quickly acquired image."
Judith, then rated 2365, played on board two and by the end of the event, as reports tell it, Gufeld and other detractors were "left trying to remove their foot from their mouths."
Not only did Hungary sweep the championship to take gold, but Judith Polgar's astonishing performance, scoring 12.5 points out of a total of 13, catapulted her FIDE rating to 2694 just below that of Kasparov and Karpov. At that tender age she also became the first female player to be ranked among the world's top 100.
Two years later, the Hungarian prodigy became the youngest player ever to earn the grandmaster title, upsetting the record set by Bobby Fischer in 1958.
Since then Judith Polgar has been ranked as the world's number one female chess player. By 14, she had so outstripped the field of women players that she stopped competing in female tournaments.
"I played against men because it was challenging, it was interesting and I felt I could improve the fastest and the best against them. It's very important to know what your aims and ambitions are," she explained. Inevitably, she became the centre of media attention which focused delightedly on the spectacle of a young girl competing against men sometimes four decades her senior.
Of the many tournaments Polgar won, her best performance, based on eminence of the competition, was the 2003 contest at Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands.
She finished second behind future world champion Viswanathan Anand and ahead of a field that included reigning champion Vladimir Kramnik of Russia and Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria, another future champion. Two years later she competed in two tournaments which lifted her to the eighth place in the world rankings.
The year before she had defeated Garry Kasparov, then the top-ranked player in the world. The defeat in 42 moves forced Kasparov to change his dismal view of women players, commending the Polgar sisters in his book, How Life Imitates Chess.
Apart from her historic achievements over the chessboard, Polgar's contribution to the celebrated mind game continues in the non-profit foundation she has founded to bring the educational benefits of the game to schoolchildren throughout the world.
Polgar's way to chess eminence was laid out by her parents Laszlo and Klara Polgar who began training her and her two sisters when they were children. The girls were home schooled as part of an educational experiment by their father who believed a child could excel at any age if given the right schooling.
If the chess exploits of Judith Polgar and her sisters can be used to answer the old question about whether genius is born or nurtured, then the answer becomes fairly obvious; it emerges from a combination of both.