The ceremony took place at a gala hosted by the Saint Louis Chess Club and World Chess Hall of Fame on December 3 in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Judit Polgár, the first Hungarian to be inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame, said: “It is a great honour to be recognized for my decade-long contributions to the sport that I love as both a chess player and my work promoting chess, its benefits as an educational tool, and encouraging women’s orientation towards chess”, chessbase.com reported.

World Chess Hall of Fame has 40 members

Inductees of the World Chess Hall of Fame are nominated by the International Chess Federation and are chosen for their impact on the sport. Thus, in addition to chess players, authors, journalists, scholars, organizers and supporters of the game and tournament organisers have been included into the Hall of Fame. Each player is commemorated at the Hall of Fame in Saint Louis with a plaque bearing their image and biography.

Judit Polgár, the first Hungarian to be inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame (Photo: Judit Polgar Foundation)

Judit Polgár is described as “the strongest female chess player of all time” by the website of the World Chess Hall of Fame. The international grandmaster, who retired in 2014, achieved this with the following results:

• she is the first girl in chess history to have won the boy’s junior world championship (U12 in 1988 and U14 in 1990),
• at the age of 15 became the youngest grandmaster of all times breaking the record of the legendary Bobby Fischer,
• she is the only woman to have been rated over 2700, reaching a peak of 2735 in 2005,
• she is the first woman who made it among the top 10 in the absolute world ranking of chess players (2005),
• she is the first woman to participate in a men’s world championship final (2005),
• she is the first woman to win a medal in the absolute category at the European Championships (2011),
• during her career, she defeated eleven current or former world champions (including Boris Spassky, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Viswanathan Anand, Magnus Carlsen) in rapid or classical chess,
• she led the women’s world rankings for 26 years (a Guinness World Record) from the age of 12 in 1988 until the end of her career in 2014,
• she competed exclusively in men’s or open competitions, with the exception of three tournaments,
• in her last two women’s tournaments (at the age of 12 and 14), she won the first and second Women’s Olympic Champion’s titles in Hungarian chess history (both times she was member of the Hungarian team with her two sisters Susan and Sofia and Ildiko Madl),
• she won two silver medals as a member of the Hungarian men’s team at the Chess Olympiad.

Chess in education

It was not by chance that Judit Polgár emphasised at the Hall of Fame ceremony that her induction into the World Chess Hall of Fame was due not only to her contributions to the sport but her work promoting chess as an educational tool.

Under the auspices of the Judit Polgar Chess Foundation established in 2012, she has developed with the involvement of experts and teachers, as she puts it on her website, a new and unique educational methodology for preschool and elementary school children.

“From the year 2013, in the lower grades of primary schools in Hungary, “Skill Development Chess” can be chosen as an independent subject. Chess Playground for preschoolers, as well as the Chess Palace Program for schoolchildren have received attention abroad: in China, several educational institutions apply this methodology” – she outlines the educational successes of her foundation.

We recently reported, that the European Patent Office illustrated its report on women inventors with Katalin Karikó, another Hungarian woman who has achieved world fame in her professional field.