Judit Polgar Quotes

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Judit Polgar

Profession : Celebrity

Birth : July 23, 1976

My father believed that the higher you put your goal, the higher you reach. That was the main reason me and my sisters were playing mostly against male competitors.

Judit Polgar

Being professional means 100% is not enough. Number one, two and three in my life was chess. The reality for women is, when a child comes into the picture, priorities change.

Judit Polgar

If you are in a tournament, you have to think of yourself - you can't think of your wife or children - only about yourself. Otherwise, you wake up, eat, prepare, do everything you can to be in good shape.

Judit Polgar

And maybe some people do it too much, are too selfish and concentrated on chess. But I think that in all professions you can find a lot of people like that.

Judit Polgar

You have to concentrate on yourself, to look at your own interests. You need fighting spirit. My parents, sisters and trainers helped, but I have fighting spirit.

Judit Polgar

My sister Susan, who was the first one, was pretty good in mathematics and then chess, and my father chose chess because it was easier to measure the results.

Judit Polgar

Competitions last about 10 days or two weeks. I was homeschooled, so in this way I could train on a daily basis for many hours. And then I was traveling all over the world.

Judit Polgar

I started to become internationally successful starting at the age of 9.

Judit Polgar

On the highest level, of course there's a lot of competitiveness and drive in the players. They really want to win. But it's normal that the players are also just friends. Even very close friends. Or rivals, but in a healthy way.

Judit Polgar

You see, in chess we have styles - like in any other field. There are also fashions in the kinds of systems that people play. So I'm trying to know my opponent as much as possible.

Judit Polgar

My style became very technical. I sacrificed a lot of things. I was always hunting for the king, for the mate. I'd forget about my other pieces. Until a point it worked, and I won games that way.

Judit Polgar

Every single person in the profession has an engine as a helper now. The engines contain six or seven million games, searchable by opening move, player, country, time control. That makes it possible to really research your opponent.

Judit Polgar

I want to show how rich chess is and what kind of history it has, through culture, literature, and education.

Judit Polgar

But at least if you are with your kid in a playground, be there mentally as well as physically, even for 20 minutes. Focus means everything to a child.

Judit Polgar

We had a happy childhood, our parents were strict but loving, and I was together with my sisters, who were my best friends.

Judit Polgar

I believe that I am as tough as other women who are very successful and have had to prove their abilities over and over again.

Judit Polgar

For me, learning chess was natural; with my sisters around me, I wanted to play.

Judit Polgar

We had to cope with the media writing things which were not true, which were insulting. At around 13 I decided I was just not going to pay attention.

Judit Polgar

I think Hungarians should be more positive; many complain, but if they go to some countries, in South America, people are so poor, yet they are happy. It starts with you.

Judit Polgar

When I was 15, I became the youngest grandmaster in the world, breaking the record set by Bobby Fischer more than three decades earlier.

Judit Polgar