László Polgár had a theory. A Hungarian educational psychologist who claimed to have read some 400 biographies of the world’s geniuses, Polgár was convinced that people weren’t born with great minds but that intellectual power could be developed through the right training. And he proposed to test his theory with his own children.
So, beginning in 1970, he and his Ukrainian foreign-language-teacher wife Klara began home-schooling their three daughters: Susan (born in 1969), Sofia (born in 1974) and Judit (born in 1976).
The main form that the training took was in the game of chess, mainly because purchasing a chess board was inexpensive. Money at that time was tight both in the Soviet Union and in Soviet satellites such as Hungary.
From early on, the girls were tutored in chess for hours every day, both from Polgár himself and, as time went on, by a number of experts. The result, as the Netflix documentary film “The Queen of Chess” shows, was impressive. Both Susan and Judit became chess grandmasters, with Sofia lagging just behind as a lesser-ranked international master.
Directed by Rory Kennedy, Queen of Chess is a title that refers to the youngest Polgár sister, Judit. She is the focus because for the 26 years before she retired from competitive chess in 2014 she was rated as the world’s No. 1 woman’s player.
Furthermore, she is the only woman ever to be ranked in the world’s top 10, regardless of gender. And she broke chess great Bobby Fischer’s record of becoming the youngest chess grandmaster by earning that status at the age of 15 years and four months. Fischer had held the record for a full 33 years.
Judit Polgár’s rise, however, wasn’t easy. For one thing, the men in charge of Hungary’s chess federation at the time ruled that women players could play only against other women. So even though Judit had been showing signs of chess brilliance since age 5, she was still not allowed to compete with men – at least not officially.
At first, she wasn’t allowed to compete outside of Hungary either. Yet when that ban ended, it was the International Chess Federation’s turn to bar women from playing men. Director Kennedy shows the attitudes of the time by quoting Fischer and others – including world great Garry Kasparov – questioning whether women were even smart enough to play chess.
But by age 10 Judit was not only playing but beating male international masters in at-large tournaments. By age 12, she was an international master herself, beating Fischer and Kasparov to that title by a full two years.
A turning point for the Polgár sisters came in 1988 when the three, along with a fourth Hungarian woman, were allowed to represent Hungary in the women’s section of the 28th Chess Olympiad in Greece. The four swept through the tournament, defeating the Soviet team with Judit earning a tournament high score. By the 1990s, she was routinely beating, men – among them a number of grandmasters.
One figure who plays a major, if antagonistic, role in Queen of Chess is Kasparov, considered by many to be the greatest chess player ever. Having long dreamed of playing, and beating Kasparov, Judit is shown competing against him some 15 times before finally coming out on top.
Kasparov consented to be interviewed for Kennedy’s documentary, and he retains a pleasant enough – if at times somewhat condescending – attitude, even when it becomes clear that, during one of his defeats of Judit, he cheated. While Kasparov said at the time that Judit “should learn some manners,” video footage shows that he did move a piece, let go of it for a second, and then moved it back – a clear violation of the rules.
The other focus, of course, is Judit’s father, who in his interviews comes across as someone who seems to resent that his experiment – which caused some observers to call him Dr. Frankenstein – isn’t more celebrated. Which is strange because the successes of his three girls, but especially Judit, would seem to be all the recognition he would ever seem to need.
“Movies 101” host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.