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Watching the hit Netflix present “The Queen’s Gambit” sparked deja-vu for Hungarian chess nice Judit Polgar, considered the sport’s best-ever feminine participant. Like the present’s fictional heroine Beth, an orphaned chess prodigy, Polgar tackled not simply opponents throughout the board however gender stereotypes within the male-dominated sport.
“I played all my life with male competitors, sometimes I was the only female player at a tournament,” she informed AFP in an interview.
Now 44, Polgar turned the youngest-ever worldwide grandmaster aged 15, breaking US legend Bobby Fischer’s report, and went on to beat a string of male world champions.
“The first grandmaster I beat was hitting his head in the elevator after the game, another defeated opponent refused to shake hands and stormed away from the board,” stated Polgar.
Similar to “The Queen’s Gambit” finale through which Beth overcomes Russian powerhouse Vasily Borgov, Polgar had her personal tussle with Russia’s Garry Kasparov, broadly thought-about the best participant in historical past.
At the 1988 Chess Olympiad, Judit, then aged 12, and her older sisters Susan and Sofia helped Hungary win the ladies’s gold, impressing the onlooking Kasparov, who was world champion on the time.
But Kasparov, who had beforehand referred to as Polgar a “circus puppet” and stated ladies chess gamers ought to follow having kids, dismissed the thought of a girl ever beating the world’s primary.
“Women are not capable of handling that kind of pressure, so I’m almost sure it’s impossible,” he informed Hungarian journalists then, in keeping with Polgar.
Fourteen years later, nevertheless, the Hungarian bought her revenge, beating Kasparov in Moscow in what she referred to as a “historic moment”.
“I had a deja-vu feeling when watching Beth sitting opposite Borgov, tense and afraid, thinking that perhaps she could not handle it, this is what I felt against Kasparov,” she informed AFP.
– ‘Nasty appears to be like’ –
Long since reconciled with Kasparov — who was a technical adviser on “The Queen’s Gambit” — Polgar stated she notably loved the present’s “attention to detail” though she thought-about some elements of it “unrealistic”.
Beth’s struggles with addictions to tablets and alcohol, “would make it near impossible to reach the top in modern chess,” whereas sexism is extra rife in chess than was depicted on display, stated Polgar.
“Girls for sure are going to be handling many more gender-based comments and nasty looks than Beth received,” she stated.
“Usually I didn’t have very ugly situations, but there were times when they said: ‘OK, she was just lucky,’ so I had to prove myself more than if I were a boy,” she added.
Polgar remembers her crowning achievement as ending second in a prestigious match within the Netherlands in 2002, forward of then world champion Vladimir Kramnik of Russia.
“That was the tournament of my life, to prove how good I can be,” she stated.
By the time Polgar retired from competitors in 2014 to deal with elevating her household, the Hungarian had reigned for 25 years on the prime of the ladies’s rankings and reached a peak of eighth within the total ranking.
But she says her goal was by no means to turn into the perfect feminine participant on the planet.
“If I had wanted just that I probably would not have stayed at number one as long as I did, my goal was going further, and being top female player was just a milestone on the way,” she stated.
– ‘More ladies studying’ –
Now concentrating on chess promotion and training, she has developed studying instruments to equip kids with chess’s artistic, strategic, logical considering and problem-solving instruments.
According to Polgar, some 40,000 Hungarian youngsters in some 500 faculties are concerned in her Chess Palace programme yearly — which she stated lays no stress on gender.
“I fight for the girls by not making differences between the boys and girls,” she stated.
Promoted
And Polgar already sees that buzz round “The Queen’s Gambit” is creating larger feminine involvement within the sport.
“Parents will be influenced for sure, I hear it everywhere from bookstores to toy stores to playing sites that there are many more girls learning the game now”.
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