Just over six years after the Queen’s Gambit brought in a fresh wave of audience to chess, leading to never-before-seen popularity for the sport, a new documentary, Queen of Chess, released last week. Told with the help of real-life footage, and peppered with post-punk soundtracks, Queen of Chess chronicles the tale of Judit Polgar, the undisputed greatest female chess player in history.
For a generation just getting into the sport, it’s a perfect occasion to discover one of the most influential trailblazers in the sport, a woman who took a sledgehammer to the glass ceiling back in the 1990s and the early 2000s. So risky was what she stood for in her career — playing mostly in open tournaments where she would usually be the only woman in a field of men — that it’s still a path seldom travelled. Even now, we only occasionally see someone like Divya Deshmukh play in more than one open tournament a year rather than in women-only events.
Judit was born and raised in Communist Hungary, which had the highest suicide rates in Europe back in those days. Inflation was so rampant that people had to do multiple jobs just to make ends meet.
Surviving in such conditions, Laszlo Polgar decided to conduct an experiment: he wanted to see if geniuses could be shaped, rather than them being born. It was an experiment he carried out with his three daughters — Susan, Sofia and Judit —acting as test subjects. Rather than sending them to school, Laszlo home-schooled them in their run-down house in the workers’ district, teaching them chess for hours at a stretch. Instead of chalkboards, a wall held up 30 chess boards with puzzles for the girls to solve daily. Instead of teachers, there would be as many as three chess trainers coming in shifts throughout the day as father and the three daughters pursued success on the 64 squares.
23 years ago on this day in Moscow… ⚔#ChessConnectsUs #ladiesfirst pic.twitter.com/qEUGXxUUGV
— Judit Polgar (@GMJuditPolgar) September 9, 2025
Why chess, though?
“The chessboard (in those conditions) was simple to have. And cheap too,” explains Judit’s mother Klara in Queen of Chess.
Starting at the age of five, Judit rose quickly in the sport, vindicating her father’s hypothesis. “Chess has infinite possibilities,” the now 49-year-old Judit says in the documentary.
Well, almost. Back in those days, for a girl to emerge from a totalitarian nation and wanting to challenge the best players in the world was not easy.
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The government, for one, did not want her travelling abroad to play chess. The idea of homeschooling three kids and feeding them a steady diet of chess did not sit right with the administrators either. In the documentary, which is available on Netflix, Klara tells tales of how police with machine guns would drag them out of bed, threatening to jail them, pack them off to mental asylums or take away the girls. But the biggest challenge in Judit’s journey was being a girl wanting to play against men.
Breaking barriers
This forms the biggest narrative arc of Judit’s story, and understandably, the documentary. There are clips of the legendary Bobby Fischer dismissing the abilities of female players.
“Women are terrible chess players,” Fischer smirks in a clip. “I guess they’re just not so smart. They have never turned out a good woman chess player.”
Fittingly, Judit smashed Fischer’s 33-year-old record of being the youngest grandmaster in history.
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Fischer wasn’t the only one to think that women were not capable of playing at a high level. Viktor Korchnoi, one of the greatest chess players in history to never become a classical world champion, dismissed Judit as a “coffeehouse player”, a pejorative that the Soviet legends reserved for players from other countries whom they wanted to dismiss as amateurs.
TRAILER premiere! ❤
Rory Kennedy’s new documentary about my life, my way, Queen of Chess releases on @Netflix February 6th.✨
TRAILER👉 https://t.co/YzTlq4QkTj#ChessConnectsUs #QueenOfChess @Netflix #Sundance2026 #SundanceFilmFestival #SundancePremiere #Netflix… pic.twitter.com/8lc4UUm6Ub— Judit Polgar (@GMJuditPolgar) January 19, 2026
A significant part of the documentary fixates on Judit’s efforts to defeat the top player of that time, Garry Kasparov, who also has a claim at being the greatest player in the sport’s history.
Just how much spunk Judit had, even as a 17-year-old going toe-to-toe with Kasparov, becomes apparent when she confronts him in a hotel lobby after he violates the touch move rule in their first game against each other.
“What she does is quite admirable for a girl of her age, especially in her position. She walks up to Kasparov in the hotel lobby and asks, ‘How could you do this to me?’” If you’ve never seen Garry Kasparov in person, you may not fully appreciate how brave that is, because he’s a force!” points out Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam, the editor of New In Chess magazine.
Confronting Kasparov on the board, and getting him to resign, proves to be much trickier for Judit, a challenge she eventually surmounts.
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Over the course of her career, Judit ended up defeating some of the top players of that era, including Viswanathan Anand, and breaking into the world’s top 10.
In a way, the documentary, like her career, is a reminder for female players to set the bar much higher. And definitely not be afraid of confronting anyone who stands in their way.
