Born: July 23, 1976, Budapest, Hungary
The youngest of three chess-playing sisters (see Zsuzsa Polgar). She became an international master at the age of 12 and the youngest international grandmaster in history at the age of 15 years and 4 months, eclipsing Bobby Fischer’s record by a month.
Apart from her gold-medal-winning appearances for the Hungarian women’s Olympiad teams of 1988 and 1990, Polgar has spurned women-only events. She defeated former world chess champion Boris Spassky in a match in 1993. In 1994, she went undefeated in winning a chess tournament in Madrid, Spain, the first woman to win a strong grandmaster tournament open to both genders.
After the world-chess champion Garry Kasparov, Polgar became the most popular and charismatic player in chess. By far the strongest female player of all times, she also became the only woman ever to be ranked in the top 10 chess players of the world.
