‘The Queen’s Gambit’: The Accelerated Polgár Variation Joe Dolce
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/01/the-queens-gambit-the-accelerated-polgar-variation/
EXCERPTS
When Walter Tevis’s novel The Queen’s Gambit came out in 1983, it slipped past the mainstream media, but everyone I knew in the Melbourne chess world was familiar with it. Little did anyone at the time suspect that Tevis’s fantasy about a female chess prodigy would be incarnated in the true story of the three Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters, who emerged in the mid-1980s, the eldest, Susan, becoming in 1986 the first woman to qualify for the World Championship.
The closest the world of chess has come to the tale in The Queen’s Gambit is in the true story of the Hungarian-Jewish Polgár sisters, Susan, Sofia and Judit, who were raised from birth as chess prodigies by their father, Laszlo Polgár. Polgár’s father survived Auschwitz but his father’s first wife and five children were murdered there. Laszlo Polgár believed that geniuses were made, not born, and that if children were taught a single intellectual activity from early childhood, they would master it. He used his three daughters, and chess, as his grand experiment in child-rearing psychology.
Polgár and his wife Klára were both teachers. They home-schooled the girls, developing a regime of early morning sports, including high-velocity ping-pong, for the girls’ physical stamina, before six to eight hours a day of chess training, lasting until well after dark.
Polgár created a card catalogue system, assembled from chess magazine clippings, with over 200,000 games cut and pasted onto index cards, the “cartotech”, for the girls to use during their study. This was the biggest chess archive outside the USSR.
There is a fine Israeli-made documentary on the Polgár family, as yet unavailable to the public, co-produced by cinematographer Eli Laszlo Berger and directed by Yossi Aviram, called The Polgár Variant. Aviram played a game against the youngest daughter, Judit, and remarked:
She’s sweet in life, but she’s a different person when she plays. You can see it in her eyes. When you play against her, it’s like being in the tentacles of an octopus squeezing you from different angles. She played against me without her queen and still beat me in ten minutes. And she was speaking on the phone with someone the whole time.
Berger said, “They became globally successful from behind the Iron Curtain all on their own. What they did was groundbreaking.”
Laszlo Polgár was attacked by the Hungarian authorities, who accused him of abusing his daughters and depriving them of the ordinary childhood of their peers. Tibor Krausz wrote in the Jerusalem Post:
To his critics in communist Hungary, the Jewish pedagogue was a misguided, domineering and monomaniacal drill sergeant of a father who exploited his daughters in the service of a psychological experiment. To his admirers, he was a trailblazing educator who showed that brilliance and ingenuity could be learned traits.
Laszlo Polgár shrugged off the negative criticism: “I developed a pedagogical theory. Every healthy child is a potential genius.”
The girls were barred for several years by the Hungarian government from competing at international tournaments, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Sofia Polgár remembers it, when she was fifteen: “It was a huge relief and gave big hope for everyone in the ‘Eastern Bloc’. For us it also meant easier access to chess tournaments in Western countries.”
Krausz said, “Laszlo was a feminist back when most men weren’t—certainly not in communist Hungary.” Garry Kasparov remarked of Judit Polgár’s style, “If to ‘play like a girl’ meant anything in chess, it would mean relentless aggression.”
There are different kinds of geniuses; the main distinctions being between monomaths and polymaths. Bobby Fischer and Vincent van Gogh are examples of the former; Da Vinci and Michelangelo, of the latter. (I wrote about monomaths and polymaths in the July-August 2016 Quadrant.)
Laszlo Polgár’s idea was to make monomath masters of his three daughters. He told the British chess champion and author William Hartson, of the Independent, “any child has the innate capacity to become a genius in any chosen field, as long as education starts before their third birthday and they begin to specialise at six”.
Prodigies, or wunderkind, are peppered throughout history. Physicist and mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote his first treatise at nine, a proof at eleven and a theorem at sixteen. Sumire Nakamura became the youngest professional Go player in history at ten. Edmund Clint, from India, created 25,000 paintings before dying at the age of six. Nadia Comaneci won three Olympic gold medals and was the first female gymnast to achieve a perfect score of ten at fourteen. In music, Mozart was accomplished at four, Saint-Saens at five, Chopin and Paganini at seven, and Liszt and Prokofiev at nine.
Russian-born US Grandmaster Irina Crush, a COVID-19 survivor, while suffering from long-term effects of the illness, won the US Women’s Championship in 2020, the eighth time she has taken first place. She was fourteen when she won it for the first time.
Prodigies are practically non-existent in the worlds of philosophy and the intuitive and improvisational arts. Philosophy requires wisdom; improvisation and art, experience. Prodigies also never occur in literature. Gifted children often have difficulty communicating with peers. Rick Kamal, of EduNova, said:
The spoken word can be difficult for some gifted children because they have the added task of translating the complex ideas in their heads into language that others of similar age can understand. This process can lead to abnormal hesitation when speaking, stuttering, and frustration on the part of the child.
I was fortunate to interview the youngest Polgár daughter, Judit (now aged forty-four), via Zoom, in Budapest. I also exchanged emails with the middle daughter, Sofia, who lives in Tel Aviv with her husband, Israeli Grandmaster Yona Kosashvili, a leading orthopaedic surgeon, and their two teenage boys.
Sofia has International Master and Women’s Grandmaster titles and won the World Under-14 Girls Championship at eleven in 1986, and three years later, at fourteen, won an Open tournament in Italy, defeating several grandmasters, with a score of 8.5 out of 9, giving her a performance rating of 2879, one of the strongest performances in history, which became known as the “Sack of Rome”. She was the 1986 World Junior Rapid Chess Champion and won individual and team gold medals at the 1990 Olympiad, in Novi Sad, Serbia.
Judit has been called the greatest female chess player of all time (a title she is not particularly fond of) and she became a Grandmaster at fifteen, two months younger than chess prodigy Bobby Fischer’s previous record. She was the highest-rated woman chess player in the world for twenty years until her retirement in 2014, and has defeated eleven World Champions. She is married to a Hungarian veterinary surgeon, Gusztáv Font, and they have two children.
Both sisters loved The Queen’s Gambit series but neither has read the original novel. Sofia says, “I feel I should.” Judit said she heard about the book when she was a kid.
Judit felt the series had a slow start but picked up momentum and “got richer” after a few episodes, but she rejected the trope of chess players portrayed as lunatics or substance abusers. Sofia added:
Professional chess players are not drug addicts. I don’t think playing top-level chess is even possible on drugs. Some grandmasters had drinking issues, but that too is really rare. You need a sober mind to play good chess.
Sofia was the first of the sisters to leave a chess career behind in preference to family. In The Polgár Variant, she said, “Our parents gave up their lives for our education. We don’t take it that far.” Sofia’s husband Yona commented, “We never brought up the possibility of a focused spartan education.” She said:
In our education, the emphasis was on chess and we were home-schooled, taking exams only at the end of the year. We learned several languages (I speak Hungarian, English, Hebrew, Russian and a little German) and we got a great gift by travelling to chess tournaments: seeing the world and the different cultures that most kids in Communist Hungary only got to learn about in the textbooks. After I stopped playing competitively, I studied arts, graphic and interior design. So I don’t think concentrating on chess in my early years stopped me from doing other things later.
Judit and her husband Gusztáv have also chosen not to raise their children as the sisters were raised. She said:
Both of my parents [were] teachers—they were living in very modest conditions and they simply believed that with this attitude, this way of upbringing, they could have the best for their children financially, emotionally, from every aspect. I started with my husband from a completely different standpoint, having a very nice apartment, we were travelling, we were both [already] successful in our professions. So we thought that the main focus in our [kids’] education [would be] that [they] should be learning languages from a very early age. When they were born, they started to learn and speak Spanish, very shortly after that they were in the international kindergarten learning languages and travelling the world.
When they were children, the sisters’ mother, Klára, travelled to tournaments with them and taught them a love of family first and foremost. All three women now have chosen their new families as priorities over their former single-minded commitment to chess. Sofia said:
My mom is the most wonderful person I know and in contrast to The Queen’s Gambit script, we were brought up in a very loving family. My sisters are my best friends up to this day and having had such an example of a wonderful mom I believe helps us being better parents as well. For me chess was on top of the priority list until the moment we decided to have kids, from that point on family [was the] most important.
Judit added about their mother:
She always focused on the present to get the most and best out of the actual situation. This attitude worked for me and I think gave me a great push to succeed in chess and other parts of life. It was a great teamwork in my family as my dad was the creative brain of how to manage the training and tournaments. My mom was always taking care of the “sweet home”—food, dress, warmth of a household, etc. For her family was always the priority.
There is no hard and fast rule that professional chess and family can’t be compatible. But it appears to be tough going. Garry Kasparov, who some believe is the greatest chess player of all time, has been married three times and has three children. Russian Grandmaster Anatoly Karpov, the previous World Champion, has been married twice with two children. His first marriage was short as his wife was unable to adjust to the pressure of her husband’s international career. Another former World Champion, Russian GM Boris Spassky, allegedly said, “Which do I prefer? Sex or chess? It depends on the position.” He has been married three times and has three children. The eccentric late US World Champion Bobby Fischer never married but had a love-child with a companion from Manila. Fischer paid child support for this daughter until he died but a posthumous DNA test showed the child wasn’t his.
In contemporary times, Swedish GM Pia Cramling is married to Spanish GM Juan Bellon, who is thirteen years her senior. Lithuanian GM Viktoria Cmilyte, who was previously married to Latvian GM Alexei Shirov for six years, married Danish GM Peter Heine-Nielsen, and they have now been together for seven years. They have three sons. In 2015, Cmilyte became Leader of the Opposition in the Lithuanian parliament.
Sofia said:
Being a mother is a handicap in a way, but as Judit has proved it’s not impossible to play top class chess even when raising two little kids. It’s a challenge for every working person to balance work and family life. In the past it was always the mom who stayed home with the children, but today there are all kinds of family models. Also, I don’t see a reason why in chess a young woman couldn’t become world champion in her twenties and like in other sports, create a family after they made it to the top in their career.
In 2015 Judit Polgár received Hungary’s highest decoration, the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Stephen of Hungary. She said:
I wouldn’t like to be in the Top Ten and not have a family. I love chess very much but maybe not that much. I still [want to be the World Chess Champion] but if I don’t, that doesn’t mean that a woman cannot.
I asked Judit if she thought that any of the current women playing the game had a chance to become world champion in our lifetimes or if it would require another generation or two of prodigies. She said:
I’m not sure I’m focusing so much on who is going to become the first lady world champion. I would be much more happy to see two ladies in the top ten than to see one world champion—because to see one world champion it means people will say, “Ah, okay, it’s only one exception so it just proves the rule, right?” If you have already two ladies in the top ten at the same time, it means that it’s really not something special—that there’s [not] only one person in the universe that can do that. It’s a matter of attitude and it’s a matter of how can you break through, in breaking this way of thinking, for men, for society, for women.
The French-American painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp was a keen chess player, playing on the French team in the Chess Olympiads from 1928 to 1933. He once said, “I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” But there is a hierarchy of competition, part and parcel of sports and games, which does not exist naturally in the world of art.
No one can say who was the greatest painter, poet or musician who ever lived. In art, the present builds upon the past and, in this regard, art is similar to chess. But the rules of chess, in competitive play, require a hierarchical tier system. There is no ladder of winners and losers in painting or poetry, for example, unless, of course, you consider the rigid domain of art competitions, which is really only a commercial artifice layered over a much more profound reality: that all master artists, once they find their authentic voice, are beyond comparison, and therefore beyond competition. It is competition that creates hierarchy.
But it is not necessary to be a professional to create at genius level. In every traditional culture mothers and grandmothers consistently create more brilliant food than any celebrity chef: grandmothers are the ultimate cooking monomaths, with often sixty-plus years of preparing a small repertoire of dishes that contain nuances and subtleties, often with home-grown ingredients, that no widely diversified celebrity chef can hope to achieve.
In the real world of chess, Walter Tevis’s vision in The Queen’s Gambit has already been transcended in one way—but still remains unrealised in another. In both the book and series, Beth Harmon beats the Russian World Champion, Vasily Borgov at the Moscow Invitational. This was not a match for the World Championship title. Tevis writes, at the end of the book, “In two years she could be playing Borgov for the World Championship.”
Judit Polgár became the first woman to compete for a world title, at the 2005 FIDE World Chess Championship. No woman, to date, has yet beaten a standing World Champion. Judit defeated Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, but they were ex-champions at the time. She won games over Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen before they became World Champions.
Albert Silver, of Chess News, said, “The Queen’s Gambit is exceptional on all levels. Simply put: this is easily the best chess movie or series to ever grace the screens.” Back in the 1980s, I had brief coaching from two Melbourne chess wunderkinds, Grand Master Darryl Johansen, who won the Australian Chess Championship a record six times and represented Australia at fourteen Chess Olympiads, and the late International Master Greg Hjorth, who later became Professor of Mathematics at UCLA and the University of Melbourne.
I decided early on, like Duchamp, that to master chess required a lifetime of focused commitment, involving thousands of hours of research, practice, competing and studying theory, so I was happy to remain an enthusiastic amateur.
As with cooking, you don’t have to be a career professional to get an extraordinary amount of pleasure out of doing something. Playing the game has stuck with me for over forty years and I play live games whenever I can but I hate playing computers, as part of the magic of chess is dealing with mistakes—your opponents’ and your own. Computers hardly make any. The great World Chess Champion of the nineteenth century Emanuel Lasker believed that mistakes could lead to quite brilliant games. I believe this theory exists at even the highest levels of professional play.
The 1972 World Chess Champion, Bobby Fischer, after defeating Boris Spassky, in what became symbolic of the Cold War confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union, refused to defend his title and walked away from the game for twenty years. He re-emerged in 1992 to win an informal match with Spassky, before going off the rails with anti-Semitic ranting, even though his mother was Jewish. Fischer died in 2008, at sixty-four, of kidney failure.
I asked Judit Polgár if there was any possibility that she might make a comeback bid for the world title after her children were grown. She is currently forty-four years old, but many chess players have become champions at her age or older: Anderssen and Steinitz at fifty, Lasker, from twenty-six to fifty-three, Alekhine, from forty-five to fifty-four, Botvinnik at forty-seven and again at fifty. Petrosian was on the candidates list for the World Chess Championship at forty-five, forty-eight and fifty-one as was Smyslov at forty-four, sixty-two and sixty-four.
She said:
Well, it’s very difficult. It’s a different time. I mean in chess obviously you will not be able to be on the top at the age of sixty-four. Simply, the sport itself unfolding the way [that it has] you need so many more things to be able to [compete]: physically, mentally, by attitude, by knowing technology, catching up with information, networking opportunities, whatever, I mean, everything’s changed.
Personally, I think both Judit and Sofia could do it. They have spartan chess training in their DNA, unlike no others. Let’s hope I planted some seeds.
Today Sofia is an illustrator, painter and educator. She and Judit, no doubt inspired by the innovative teaching of their parents, have created an award-winning educational chess program, the Judit Polgár Chess Palace, which is used by hundreds of pre-schools and elementary schools in Hungary.
The Queen’s Gambit has become a television phenomenon all over the world and is being discussed as a potential multiple Academy Award winner. The question on everyone’s lips now is: will there be a Season Two? In a logical world, the answer would be no, as the series was based on the novel and has remained faithful to it. The executive producer William Horberg told Town and Country, “The last scene feels like a beautiful note to end the show on. Maybe we can just let the audience imagine what comes next.” But Hollywood managed to extract five entire seasons out of Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho, under the title Bates Motel (2013 to 2017), which also was a masterpiece in its own right, so anything is possible.
I’m game.
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