There is an eternal argument over whether Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen is the all-time No 1 in men’s chess, but there is no debate about the No 1 woman. Judit Polgar, whose peak career rating was 2735 and who for more than a decade was ranked among or close to the world top 10 grandmasters, was and is in a league of her own, 49 points ahead of her nearest challenger, Hou Yifan, who is herself clearly the all-time No 2.
Although Polgar is now a mother of two and no longer plays competitively, she has forged a new reputation as a high class commentator on major events, noted especially for her sharp and rapid spotting of hidden tactical resources. This week she has been online, along with England’s Jovanka Houska, reporting on the all-Chinese €500,000 world title match in Chongqing where Ju Wenjun is defending her crown against Lei Tingjie in a 12-game series.
The match itself has been slowly building up to its conclusion, with a win apiece and nine draws. Lei’s victory in game five has been the best performance so far. Now they are in crunch territory, 5.5-5.5 with one classical game left on Saturday (8am BST start) before the potential climax of rapid and blitz tiebreaks on Sunday at accelerating time rates, which could end up with a single three-minute game deciding the world championship.
Polgar’s superiority over her rivals for a quarter of a century can be viewed in the form of a graph showing the top female players all the way from 1970, when the Elo rating system was adopted by the global body, Fide, right up to the present.
The open grandmaster title (GM) is assessed as 200 rating points higher than the women’s version (WGM), 2500 against 2300, while international master (IM) is 2400 against 2200 for WIM.
There is a longstanding and continuing debate about why men perform better, without any clear conclusion, whereas the 200 points difference has stood the test of time. Its effect is most dramatic at the 2700 level of elite GMs, a standard currently achieved by 34 men but which only Polgar has ever surpassed consistently among women.
Other women have reached 2700+ in single tournaments. The most remarkable of these was by Sofia Polgar, the middle of the three Polgar sisters, at age 14 in the “sack of Rome” tournament of 1989, which she won with 8.5/9 and a performance of 2879, one of the highest in history. Her main rivals, the Soviet GMs Sergey Dolmatov and Yuri Razuvaev, were so ashamed that they tried to suppress publication of the result when they returned to Moscow.
For male grandmasters, 2800 has been the ceiling, a level which only Kasparov and Carlsen have managed to surpass consistently throughout their careers. Kasparov and Fabiano Caruana peaked around 2850, while Carlsen, aiming for the Everest of 2900, reached the 2880s on three occasions before dropping back. Taking 2700 as the female Everest, Judit Polgar ascended it on multiple occasions.
What made Judit so exceptional? The answer is a stellar combination of favourable factors. Her father believed high talent could be created by home tuition, and chess was his chosen vehicle. Her oldest sister Susan (Zsuzsa) was the pioneer who was the world’s No 1 woman at age 15, and later became the women’s world champion. From her early years Judit had coaching by top Hungarian GMs including the world title candidate Pal Benko, and by age eight she could already defeat masters while playing blindfold. Her creative talent was allied to a classic attacking style and a fearless competitive instinct.
Women’s chess in 2023 could wish for a new Polgar. Fide has been making serious efforts to raise the status of its female events. The 206-player open knockout World Cup, which starts in Baku, Azerbaijan, on 30 July, with Carlsen as No 1 seed, will for the first time be played alongside the 106-player Women’s World Cup.
The biennial chess team Olympiad has already had open and women’s competitions together for several decades, and in 2024 this will be extended to the eight-player Candidates tournaments which decide the challenger for the world crown. The objective is increased publicity for the women’s events, which are often under-reported when separate.
Major international tournaments are following suit. The Sinquefield Cup at St Louis, the top event in the US for elite GMs, now has its female equivalent in the Cairns Cup for women. Norway Chess at Stavanger, Carlsen’s home elite tournament, has announced that its 2024 version will also include an event for top women, if possible with equal prize money.
The basic problem, of unequal numbers of participants, still remains. Up to the 1930s, women players probably comprised less than 5% of the chess playing population. There was a jump to around 10-15% in the later 20th century when Russians, then Georgians, dominated women’s chess, but numbers in Western Europe remain below 10%.
In recent years English chess has launched several initiatives to improve gender equality. They include new women’s national championships in rapid and blitz chess, a mandatory women’s board in the 4NCL national league, and support for She Plays to Win, which offers free weekly online coaching for girls as well as events such as the recent Mixed Pairs, where teams of grandmasters and female players made alternate moves.
Women’s chess still awaits a new Judit Polgar, or a real life Beth Harmon, who could be a focus and a role model for ambitious girl players. The Fide list for the world’s top women is dominated by established players in their 20s and 30s with no fast rising teenagers, unlike the corresponding men’s list where Dommaraju Gukesh, Nodirbek Abdusattorov and others are making a strong advance towards the global top. America’s Alice Lee, 13, is just outside the top 50. Lee is a potential candidate, but it is also possible that Polgar was simply a unique phenomenon. Maybe chess will never have another Judit.
3877: 1...Rxg2+ 2 Kf1 Rg1+! and White resigned because of 3 Kxg1 Qh3! However, this isn’t quite the end of the story because White could have escaped immediate mate by 4 Qg4 Qxg4+ 5 Kf1. Black is still winning by 5....Kxf8 6 Rd8+ Kg7 7 Nd1 Qh5 and Qxh2 followed by the advance of the h pawn.
