Susan Polgar

Grandmaster Susan Polgar (born April 19, 1969, as Polgár Zsuzsanna) is a Hungarian-born American chess player. She is a member of the Executive Board of the United States Chess Federation, having been elected on July 26, 2007. She is also a chess writer and promoter.

On the July 1984 FIDE Rating List, at age 15, she was the top-ranked female player in the world. She was the first woman to earn the title of International Grandmaster in regular competition. She was the Women's World Chess Champion Elo rating of 2577, making her the second-ranked female player in the world at the time, after her sister Judit Polgar. She has been inactive and has not played in official competition since 2004. from 1996 until 1999. In October 2005 Polgar had an

She was born and brought up in Budapest, and now lives in Lubbock, Texas, having recently moved from Forest Hills, Queens, New York, where she ran the Polgar Chess Center and the Susan Polgar Foundation, which gives chess training to children, especially girls.

Chess career

Polgar and her two younger sisters, Grandmaster Judit and International MasterZsófia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, who sought to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age. "Geniuses are made, not born," was László's thesis. He and his wife Klara educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject. The father also taught his three daughters Esperanto. Most of her family eventually emigrated to Israel, but Susan Polgar moved to New York after marrying an American in 1994. Members of the Polgar family, which is Jewish, perished in the Holocaust, and her grandmother was a survivor of Auschwitz.

At age 4, Polgar won her first chess tournament, the Budapest Girl's Under-11 Championship, with a 10-0 score. In 1982, at the age of 12, she won the World Under 16 (Girls) Championship. Despite restrictions on her freedom to play in international tournaments, by 1984 at age 15 Polgar had become the top-rated female chess player in the world.^[2]

In November 1986, FIDE decided to grant 100 bonus ELO rating points to all active female players except Polgar, which knocked her from the top spot in the January, 1987 FIDE ratings list. The rationale was that the FIDE ratings of women were not commensurate with the ratings of the men because the women tended to play in women-only tournaments, Polgar being an exception because up to that point she had played mainly against men. The statistical evidence supporting this decision was disputed because the data on which it was based was a small subset of the available data, and Polgar and others alleged that the move was politically motivated and had been contrived to displace her from the top spot.

In January 1991, Polgar became the first woman to earn the Grandmaster title in the conventional way — that is, by achieving three GM norms and a rating over 2500. (Nona Gaprindashvili was awarded the Grandmaster title in 1978 as a result of winning Lone Pine 1977 but she did not make the normally required three GM norms. Maia Chiburdanidze was awarded the GM title in 1984 for beating Nona Gaprindashvili and two others in matches for the Women's World Chess Championship). Zsuzsa's younger sister Judit earned the title of Grandmaster later, in December 1991. In 1992, she won the Women's World Blitz as well as the Women's World Rapid Championship, ahead of her sisters, Chiburdanidze, Galliamova, Maric and many other top female players.

Composer

Susan Polgar composed her first chess problem (see diagram) at the age of four. She is considered the youngest chess composer of a published problem. Formerly, the record was held by Elliot Franklin Eichholtz.

more info on Susan on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Polgar