The best female chess player of all time, Judit Polgar, won’t sit down at the Univé chess boards in Hoogeveen any more. Last August she announced that she would stop playing chess.
The announcement was a bombshell, towards the end of the Olympiad in Tromsø, Norway, where Polgar had starred ‘as usual’ for the Hungarian team with 4.5 points out of 6 games. The strongest of the legendary three Polgar sisters, who became chess stars as a result of an ‘educational experiment’ by their parents Laszlo and Klara, reached to 8th place in the world rankings, won many tournaments, defeated top players and at the same time won everybody over with her charming personality.
When in Hoogeveen the unique formula was invented of a four-player event with a former World Champion, the current junior World Champion, and the currently best Dutch and best female player, the identity of one of the participants was clear from the beginning: Judit Polgar. She was undisputedly the strongest female chess player in the world in all those years, after she had created a sensation as a thirteen-year-old at the OHRA tournament in Amsterdam, in 1989. From the first year, 1997, onwards, Polgar took part in Hoogeveen no less than ten times, although she had some less active periods due to the birth of her two children, Oliver and Hannah. Before the first event, called the VAM tournament at the time, she was invited to personally inspect the famous glass chess pieces – tournament director Jeroen van den Berg drove especially to Dortmund to show them to her.
And always she would play in that sparkling attacking style. In 1998, she won the tournament with 5 out of 6, ahead of Jan Timman and Boris Spassky. In 2003 she came first with 4 out of 6, ahead of Levon Aronian, Anatoly Karpov and Ivan Sokolov, in 2006 she shared first place with Shakhriyar Mamedyarov on 4.5 out of 6, ahead of Veselin Topalov. In total she scored 32.5 points out of 60 games here, against absolute world top players! No wonder that in the lustrum magazine of 2011 she was quoted as saying: ‘Hoogeveen feels like coming home’.
Judit Polgar, 38 years old now, was and still is one of the biggest stars in the chess world. In Hoogeveen she will remain known as ‘Mrs. Univé’. At the end of her career she felt Hou Yifan breathing down her neck; the young Chinese Women’s World Champion rose to the top almost as sensationally as Judit did in her day. Maybe the two can be persuaded to play a match someday. We would know a good place to hold it.
