Zsófia Polgár

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Zsófia Polgár ([ˈʒoːfiɒ ˈpolgaːr], born November 2, 1974) is a Hungarian-Israeli chess player. She is sometimes known by the familiar form of her name, Zsófi , and in some contexts (e.g. the FIDE rating list) by the anglicised form Sofia. She is an International Master, and is the middle sister of Grandmasters Susan and Judit Polgar.

In 1989, at the age of 14, she stunned the chess world by her performance in a tournament in Rome, which became known as the "Sack of Rome". She won the tournament, which included several strong Grandmasters, with a score of 8.5 out of 9, producing an unprecedented effective ELO rating of 2928. As of 2006, this is by far the strongest tournament result by any woman ever, and one of the few strongest tournament performances, regardless of the gender of the player. According to the chessmetrics [1], historical rating system, her performance rating was 2735. Her sister Judit's performance in Madrid in 1994 was 2778. According to chessmetrics, hundreds of players have had better performance ratings in tournaments than hers. However, these performances were from seasoned older grandmasters and not teenagers. Bobby Fischer's 2724 performance at age 16 at the 1959 Zurich Candidates Tournament, Garry Kasparov's 2748 performance at Banja Luka in 1979 at age 16, Gata Kamsky's 2724 performance at the Palma de Mallorca Open 1989 at age 15, are the only comparable performance. Other prodigies (e.g., Magnus Carlsen, ) have not produced such high historical performance ratings.

On February 7, 1999 Polgar married Georgian-Israeli Grandmaster Yona Kosashvili and moved to Israel. They now have a son, Alon. For a time, she ranked as the 6th-strongest female player in the world. She played one FIDE-rated game in July, 2005. Prior to that, her last FIDE-rated game was in September 2003.[2]

[edit] External links

• The Chess Games of Zsofia Polgar
• FIDE rating card for Zsófia Polgár
• All the right moves – a Haaretz account of the education and accomplishments of the Polgar sisters