Читать книгу Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice - Matthew Syed, Matthew Syed - Страница 21

After a succession of record-breaking victories in her early teens, Judit won the world under-twelve championships in Romania in 1988. It was the first time in history a girl had won an overall (open to both men and women) world championship.

Three years later in 1991, at the age of fifteen years and four months, she became the youngest-ever grandmaster – male or female – in history. In the same year she also won the Hungarian championships, defeating grandmaster Tibor Tolnai in the final.

She has now been the number-one female chess player in the world for well over a decade, excluding a brief period when she was taken off the list due to inactivity when she gave birth to her first son in 2004 (to be replaced at the top of the list by her older sister Susan).

Over the course of her career, she has had victories over almost every top player in the world, including Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, and Viswanathan Anand.

She is universally considered to be the greatest female player of all time.

The tale of the Polgar sisters provides scintillating evidence for the practice theory of excellence. Polgar had publicly declared that his yet-to-be-born children would become world-beaters – setting himself up for a fall in the time-honoured tradition of science – and had been proved right. His girls had lived up to the pre-birth hype and then some.

Note, also, the public reaction to the girls’ success. When Susan stormed to victory in a local competition at the age of five, everyone present was convinced that this was the consequence of unique talent. She was described by the local newspaper as a prodigy, and Polgar remembers being congratulated by another parent on having a daughter with such amazing talent. ‘That is not something my little Olga could do,’ the parent said.

But this is the iceberg illusion: onlookers took the performance to be the consequence of special abilities because they had witnessed only a tiny percentage of the activity that had gone into its making. As Polgar puts it: ‘If they had seen the painfully slow progress, the inch-by-inch improvements, they would not have been so quick to call Susan a prodigy.’