Polgár has written many books on chess. By far the most famous of these is Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games, which "includes 5,334 different instructional situations--many taken from real matches--including 306 problems for checkmate in one move, 3,412 mates in two moves, 744 mates in three moves, 600 miniature games, 144 simple endgames, and 128 tournament game combinations, plus solutions, the basic rules of the game and an international bibliography."[14] It has been called "One of the most iconic chess books ever written."[15]

In 1992, Polgár told the Washington Post: "A genius is not born but is educated and trained….When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius."[2] He is the father of the famous Polgár sisters: Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit, whom he raised to be chess prodigies.


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Polgár studied intelligence when he was a university student. He later recalled that "when I looked at the life stories of geniuses" during his student years, "I found the same thing....They all started at a very young age and studied intensively."[3] He prepared for fatherhood prior to marriage, reported People Magazine in 1987, by studying the biographies of 400 great intellectuals, from Socrates to Einstein. He concluded that if he took the right approach to child-rearing, he could turn "any healthy newborn" into "a genius."[4]

In his letters, he outlined the pedagogical project he had in mind. In reading those biographies, he had "identified a common theme—early and intensive specialization in a particular subject." Certain that "he could turn any healthy child into a prodigy," he "needed a wife willing to jump on board."In 1965 Polgár "conducted an epistolary courtship with a Ukrainian foreign language teacher named Klara." They had three daughters together, whom Polgár home-schooled, primarily in chess but also in Esperanto, German, Russian, English, and high-level math.[4][5] Polgár and his wife considered various possible subjects in which to drill their children, "including mathematics and foreign languages," but they settled on chess. "We could do the same thing with any subject, if you start early, spend lots of time and give great love to that one subject," Klara later explained. "But we chose chess. Chess is very objective and easy to measure."[3]

Polgár "battled Hungarian authorities for permission" to home-school the girls.[4][5] "We didn’t go to school, which was very unusual at the time," Judit recalled in 2008. "People would say, ‘The parents are destroying them, they have to work all day, they have no childhood’. I became defensive, and not very sociable."[8]

Polgár began teaching his eldest daughter, Susan, to play chess when she was four years old. "Six months later, Susan toddled into Budapest's smoke-filled chess club," which was crowded with elderly men, and proceeded to beat the veteran players. "Soon thereafter, she dominated the city's girls-under-age-11 tournament with a perfect score."[5] Judit was able to defeat her father at chess when she was just five.[9]

Polgár’s daughters all became excellent chess players, but Sophia, the least successful of the three, who became the sixth-best woman player in the world, quit playing and went on to study painting and interior design and to focus on being a housewife and mother. Judit has been described as "without a doubt, the best woman chess player the world has ever seen."[5]

Polgár said in 1993: "The problems of cancer and AIDS might be more easily solved if our system were used to educate 1,000 children."[7] In the same year, looking back on Polgár’s experiment, Klara said that "everything he promised has happened."[3]