[imagesource: Phil Bray / Netflix]

The Queen’s Gambit was one of Netflix’s biggest smash hits of 2020.

Anya Taylor-Joy played Beth Harmon, the show’s protagonist and a fictional character.

Harmon may not be real but that’s not to say her character isn’t based on anybody.

In fact, the similarities between Harmon and Hungarian chess star Judit Polgár are so striking that when the show came out she was inundated with phone calls and messages of congratulations.

CNN points out that Polgár’s upbringing played a large role in her success, especially her father’s input:

László Polgár is an educational psychologist who believes a child can excel at anything if pushed.

He home schooled his three daughters as an experiment to prove this, pushing them to play chess intensely from an early age. They would practice for hours on end with each other as they chased perfection on the board.

Despite being the youngest of the children Judit’s talent shone through, and she first beat her chess teacher father when she was just five.

In her first international tournament, Polgar finished first in the unrated section of the New York Open, aged nine.

By the time she turned 12, she was the world’s top-ranked female player.

That tale is quite different from Harmon, who learnt to play in an orphanage, but other similarities are there for all to see:

[She] achieved the title of grandmaster — the highest title a player can attain — by the age of 15, becoming the youngest person at the time to do so.

No wonder Polgár is regarded as the real Beth Harmon.

When she became the youngest grandmaster she beat American Bobby Fischer’s record by a single month.

In 2002 she beat Garry Kasparov, which was the first time that a female chess player had defeated the world number one.

That victory was especially sweet given that Kasparov had said in a 1989 Playboy interview that “there is real chess and women’s chess”.

Polgár eventually retired in 2014 but forged a new path as a female chess prodigy in a male-dominated sphere.

That remains the case, with no women ranked among the world’s top 100 players, and Polgár is the only woman in history to have ever achieved a top 10 ranking. Her highest ever rank was eighth.

She says she owes a great deal to her father’s belief that women were just as capable as men:

“My father believed from the very beginning that every healthy child is a potential genius. He wanted to prove it, he wanted to create the environment as if we were boys and then he believed that we can reach the maximum, at least, the same way as if we would be boys,” says Polgár.

It’s safe to say he was proven correct as Polgár’s sister Susan went on to become Grandmaster and Sofia an International Master.

Not content with her own success, Polgár has now started the Judit Polgár Chess Foundation which encourages girls to take up the sport.

She may never be as much of a household name as Beth Harmon but she has her own unique story to tell.

[source:cnn]