| Sofia Polgar | |
|---|---|
Photo by Gennadiy Titkov |
|
| Full name | Polgár Zsófia |
| Country | Hungary |
| Born | November 2, 1974 Budapest, Hungary |
| Title | International Master Woman Grandmaster |
| FIDE rating | 2459 |
| Peak rating | 2505 (July 1998) at age 24 |
Sofia Polgar (born November 2, 1974 as Polgár Zsófia (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈpolɡaːr ˈʒoːfiɒ]) is a Hungarian-born International Master of chess and former chess prodigy.[1] She is an International Master and Woman Grandmaster, and is the middle sister of Grandmasters Susan and Judit Polgár. Since 2006, she has lived in Canada, working as a chess teacher and artist.
Polgár is Jewish, and from Budapest. She and her two sisters were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt 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.[2] They also taught their daughters the international language Esperanto.
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. According to the Chessmetrics rating system, her performance rating was 2735;[3] one of the strongest performances in history by a 14-year-old.
On February 7, 1999 Polgar married Georgian-born Israeli Grandmaster Dr. Yona Kosashvili and made an aliyah to Israel with her parents. They have two children, Alon and Yoav. Later, they emigrated to Toronto, Canada. 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. At one point she beat Viktor Korchnoi at a game of fast chess. However, Korchnoi said that this was "the very first and the very last game [she] had ever won against [him]."[4]