Move over, Beth Harmon: New documentary on Judit Polgar details the gambits that shaped a queen | Chess News
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 …
