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She now helps to run a chess website and is an acclaimed painter. She married fellow chess player Yona Kosashvili and moved to Israel. It is still seen as one of the most extraordinary chess performances in history. “The odds against such an occurrence must be billions to 1,” one chess expert wrote. But she is best known for the ‘Miracle in Rome’ where she won 8 straight games against many of the greatest male players. Sofia, the middle sister, won the gold medal at the under-11 Hungarian Championship for girls, the World Under-14 championship for girls, and numerous chess Olympiads and championships. She now lives in the US where she runs a chess institute and coaches the Webster University chess team, the number 1 ranked team in the nation. In December 2006, she married her long-time business manager and friend, Paul Truong. She remains the only person in history, male or female, to win the Chess Triple Crown (the Rapid, Blitz, and Classical World Championships). By the end of her career, she had won the World Championship for women on 4 occasions and 5 chess Olympiads. At age 22, Susan was the first woman to earn the men’s Grandmaster title in the conventional way-the highest rank in chess. At age 15, despite restrictions on her freedom to play in international tournaments, she became the top-rated female chess player in the world. At age 12, she won the World Under-16 Girls Championship. And while the children were also learning all the regular subjects and spoke several languages, chess was always at the core.Īt age 4, Susan, the eldest of the Polgár sisters, won her first chess tournament, the Budapest Girls Under-11 Championship, with a 10-0 score. Once he felt sufficiently developed as a trainer, he started to introduce chess to each of his daughters. It included records of previous games and even an index of potential competitors' tournament histories. A file card system took up an entire third wall. It had a library with thousands of chess books stuffed onto shelves on one wall, with another wall lined with sketches of chess scenes. With the help of his wife, he turned their modest apartment in the heart of Budapest into a real chess temple. Polgár, an amateur chess player himself, dived into the depths of the game and learned as much as possible about chess training. But chess has an objective rating based on performance, so there is no possible argument.” In other words, if he announced upfront that his children would be chess geniuses and was able to pull it off, his theory about mastery was proven. “If my child had been trained as an artist or novelist, people could have argued about whether she was genuinely world-class or not. And then it hit me: chess.” He decided to go for chess because the measurement was objective.
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“That was the only way to convince people that their ideas about excellence were all wrong. “I needed Susan’s achievements to be so dramatic that nobody could question their authenticity,” he says. After his first daughter was born, he knew it was time to finally make a decision. It took him a long time to pick a field to focus on. He was going to raise his children to become geniuses. They seem to think that excellence is only open to others, not themselves.” It seems that people’s mindsets are programmed incorrectly.Īs nobody wanted to listen to what he had to say, the only way was to prove it. “The problem is that people, for some reason, do not want to believe it. “Children have extraordinary potential, and it’s up to society to unlock it,” Polgár says. He wrote papers on the subject and lobbied with government to change the education system. “When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius.” Polgár had always been an advocate of the practice theory as opposed to the talent theory. “A genius is not born, but is educated and trained” Polgár tells The Washington Post. Anyone could become a master in any field-the top 3 percent-if you applied the right kind of practice. László and Klára quit their jobs and devoted their lives to home schooling their 3 children.