Viswanathan Anand

Judit Polgár is the number 1 female chess player in the world. Polgár was the first, and so far the only woman to smash chess' glass ceiling by competing for the World Chess Championship title and entering the FIDE's Top 100 Players list, even to the top 10, with 2735 rating and the number 8 position. However, not all of Polgar's records are gender related. The Hungarian Princess of Chess was also the youngest International Master, claiming the title at the age of 12 and at 15 the youngest Grandmaster in history of chess.

Polgar Sisters

The story of Judit Polgar is not complete without mentioning her father's parenting mission: to breed wunderkinds. Laszlo Polgar, an educational psychologist and a mediocre chess players who, in order to prove his point that "geniuses are made, not born", excluded his three daughters from the school system and instead put them in a homemade chess training program, which included 8 hours of chess a day and some Esperanto.

The results did not delayed for long: Susan, the older sister, won her first chess tournament, the Budapest Girl's Under-11 Championship, when she was 4 years old, and was later ranked at number 1 on FIDE's rating list for women chess players when she was only 15. Sofia, the middle sister, amazed the chess world outplaying several chess grandmasters at the Rome 1989 chess tournament that became known as the "sack of Rome" at the age of 14.

Viswanathan Anand is the current World Chess Champion (as for 2008) and the number 1 chess player in the world according to FIDE ranking list with 2798 rating points. Born in Madras, India in 1969, Anand is highly admired personality in his homeland, which happened to be the motherland of chess as well.

Viswanathan Anand Chess Opening

Like many other chess champions, Viswanathan Anand had caught the chess fever at an early age. When he was six, his mother taught him the secrets of chess play and when he was fourteen, he already won the national Under-16 and Under-19 titles and semi-finalized the Indian Championship. At fifteen, he was the youngest International Master in India and at eighteen, the youngest Grand Master in the world and the first Indian chess player to earn the title. From there, the only was up to the World Chess Championship.

World Chess Championships

Before blending in the World Chess Championship cycle (which at the beginning of the 1990s was split in two: the FIDE World Championship and the World Chess Championship, organized by the Professional Chess Association (PCA), Anand left his mark on the elite of the pro chess circuit when winning the Reggio Emilia chess tournament in 1991. Nevertheless, the path to the first World Chess Championship was not always smooth. On the World Chess Championship 1993 cycle, he lost to Anatoly Karpov at the quarter-final match and on the FIDE World Chess Championship 1996 cycle to Gata Kamsky.

At the 1995 PCA cycle, Anand bested his rivals and had eventually found himself competing against Garry Kasparov at the PCA World Chess Championship 1995 in New York. Though losing 10.5 - 7.5, Anand, who opened his World Championship match with a series of eight draws that followed with a striking win followed by five disappointing losses, had made a remarkable impression on the world of chess.

After several trials and errors, in 2000, Viswanathan Anand won his first world title in the FIDE World Chess Championship and became the first Indian to hold the most important title in chess. At the same year, a Classical World Championship took place, thus Anand had to "share" the title with Vladimir Kramnik of Russia. Yet seven years later, at the FIDE World Championship Tournament held in Mexico City summer of 2007, Anand stripped the world title from the defending champion, Kramnik again, and the became the undisputed World Chess Champion.