Judit Polgár

Judit Polgár (born 23 July 1976) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster, widely regarded as the strongest female chess player of all time. She is the only woman to be ranked in the world top 10 (and one of only three to make the top 100, together with Maia Chiburdanidze and Hou Yifan), the only woman to achieve a rating over 2700, reaching a peak rating of 2735, and the only woman to compete in the final stage of a World Chess Championship. She was the top-rated woman in the world from January 1989 until her retirement from competitive chess in 2014.

Polgár was a chess prodigy, and at the age of 12 became the youngest player to break into the FIDE top 100 rating list, ranked at 55 in the January 1989 rating list. In 1991 she became the youngest player at the time to achieve the title of Grandmaster, at the age of 15 years and 4 months, breaking the 33-year-old record previously held by former world champion Bobby Fischer.

Polgár won or shared first in the chess tournaments of Hastings 1993, Madrid 1994, León 1996, U.S. Open 1998, Hoogeveen 1999, Sigeman & Co 2000, Japfa 2000, and the Najdorf Memorial 2000. She is the only woman to have won a game against a reigning world number one player, and defeated eleven current or former world champions in either rapid or classical chess: Magnus Carlsen, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Boris Spassky, Vasily Smyslov, Veselin Topalov, Viswanathan Anand, Ruslan Ponomariov, Alexander Khalifman, and Rustam Kasimdzhanov.