Judit Polgar
To become a professional, you have to train a lot, which I did from a very early age. Of course, it helps if your character is very competitive and you have patience and perseverance.Collection: Patience
The biggest challenge is to fulfill your own ideas about yourself.
Chess demolishes differences. It's a language of different generations.
I met Bobby Fischer in 1993 when he moved to Europe. I have mixed feelings about it. He was an idol, but not a healthy minded man.
I played against men most of my life because our goal was that I wanted to reach the highest potential to be an absolute world champion.
I have no problem with other women, but if I had played against ladies there would be a huge gap between the two of us.
Without work, talent is lost.
How you lose matters. Don't be afraid of losing - it paralyzes you.
It's very important where you put your goals.
But at least if you are with your kid in a playground, be there mentally as well as physically, even for 20 minutes. Focus means everything to a child.
I believe that I am as tough as other women who are very successful and have had to prove their abilities over and over again.
There are two ways to have educational chess in schools, either through after school programs or using chess as a tool in classrooms to improve children's thinking.
I believe that for the audience the best way to give the commentating is to avoid going into the deep, deep details.
My life story is very special. I was raised with a special family as both my parents are teachers. They decided before I was born that I was going to be a chess champion.
I had a gold medal in olympics at 12. At 14 or 15 I had my career set before me. Because I started so early, I had this daily training. It developed a focus. It became so natural that it was like a native language for me to play chess. That's why I didn't feel pressure.
I love chess very much. I love the game, the challenges. I could motivate myself as I was curious about how to improve every game. In chess, it's very clear that if you make a mistake you are punished. If you play well, you win.
Whenever I speak to parents or to kids, I always encourage them that if they believe, if they do the work, if they are really dedicated, then they can do it. No matter whether they are a boy or a girl.
I started when I was five, and grew up playing against adults and against men most of the time.
My father and mother are exceptional pedagogues who can motivate and tell it from all different angles. Later, chess for me became a sport, an art, a science, everything together. I was very focused on chess, and happy with that world.
I was happy that at home we were a closed circle and then we went out playing chess and saw the world. It's a very difficult life and you have to be very careful, especially the parents, who need to know the limits of what you can and can't do with your child.
I don't think I could ever say that I will never play again, because even if I felt I could never play in top-class tournaments again because I don't have time for the preparation, after a while you might one day think: 'maybe, maybe, maybe... why not?'
My father believed that the higher you put your goal, the higher you reach. That was the main reason me and my sisters were playing mostly against male competitors.
Being professional means 100% is not enough. Number one, two and three in my life was chess. The reality for women is, when a child comes into the picture, priorities change.
If you are in a tournament, you have to think of yourself - you can't think of your wife or children - only about yourself. Otherwise, you wake up, eat, prepare, do everything you can to be in good shape.
And maybe some people do it too much, are too selfish and concentrated on chess. But I think that in all professions you can find a lot of people like that.
You have to concentrate on yourself, to look at your own interests. You need fighting spirit. My parents, sisters and trainers helped, but I have fighting spirit.
My sister Susan, who was the first one, was pretty good in mathematics and then chess, and my father chose chess because it was easier to measure the results.
Competitions last about 10 days or two weeks. I was homeschooled, so in this way I could train on a daily basis for many hours. And then I was traveling all over the world.
I started to become internationally successful starting at the age of 9.
On the highest level, of course there's a lot of competitiveness and drive in the players. They really want to win. But it's normal that the players are also just friends. Even very close friends. Or rivals, but in a healthy way.
You see, in chess we have styles - like in any other field. There are also fashions in the kinds of systems that people play. So I'm trying to know my opponent as much as possible.
I had some superstitions when I was little. And a winning pen is always a good thing to have.
My style became very technical. I sacrificed a lot of things. I was always hunting for the king, for the mate. I'd forget about my other pieces. Until a point it worked, and I won games that way.
Every single person in the profession has an engine as a helper now. The engines contain six or seven million games, searchable by opening move, player, country, time control. That makes it possible to really research your opponent.
Chess can open up a kid's brain, and develop it in a playful creative way. They can learn playfully about creative, strategic, and logical thinking, and quick problem-solving.
I want to show how rich chess is and what kind of history it has, through culture, literature, and education.
We had a happy childhood, our parents were strict but loving, and I was together with my sisters, who were my best friends.
For me, learning chess was natural; with my sisters around me, I wanted to play.
We had to cope with the media writing things which were not true, which were insulting. At around 13 I decided I was just not going to pay attention.
I think Hungarians should be more positive; many complain, but if they go to some countries, in South America, people are so poor, yet they are happy. It starts with you.
When I was 15, I became the youngest grandmaster in the world, breaking the record set by Bobby Fischer more than three decades earlier.
When the Ladies Chess Club was founded in London in 1895 and the first international women-only competition took place two years later, most clubs and competitions didn't accept women at all.
During most of my playing career, the performance gap between men and women was slowly narrowing. Federations began providing more coaching and competitions for girls and women.
Since retiring from competitive chess, my focus is on education and organising children's tournaments: I make a point of never separating girls and boys, nor awarding special prizes for girls.
From the moment of my birth on 23 July 1976, I became involved f in an educational research project. Even before I came into the world, my parents had already decided: I would be a chess champion.
But in 2002 I had a miscarriage, at 13 weeks. And funnily enough after that I had my best-ever tournament result, in January 2003.
My husband supports me a lot - he would probably go higher in his field if he didn't.
Of course I got angry when I lost and maybe would cry in my hotel room afterwards. But I would never show it. I didn't want the men's pity. I didn't want to share my pain with them.
There is no better training for chess than swimming. On a Friday evening I like to put in a good long session of breaststroke at the pool near where I live in Budapest with my husband, Gusztav, and my two children.
I started playing chess in the Eighties, but it is only recently that people have begun to appreciate the importance of physical exercise for chess players. You really need to be in good condition to be able to sit for four to six hours and still maintain your concentration.