At a private home in Park City, Utah, Alec Baldwin sat across a chess board from Judit Polgár – he sighted, she blindfolded. Despite the visual disadvantage, it didn’t take long for Polgár to checkmate the actor, but he shouldn’t feel bad – that exhibition at the Sundance Film Festival ended as most matches against Polgár do, with her victory.
The Hungarian phenom, considered the GOAT among women chess players, is the focus of Rory Kennedy’s new documentary, Queen of Chess, which just premiered at Sundance.
“I was approached by a producer friend, Steve Nemeth, to see if I might be interested in doing a documentary about Polgár. And I said, who is Judit Polgár?” Kennedy said as she and the chess champ stopped by Deadline’s Sundance Studio. “So, I did some research and I was stunned to find out that Judit Polgár was the greatest female chess player of all time, hands down. She was in the number one position of the top women chess players for 26 years. She had broken Bobby Fischer’s record as the youngest Grandmaster ever, and she was the only woman ever to have broken into the top 10 [among all chess players, male and female].”
Kennedy continued, “I was kind of just amazed that I didn’t know her name. And then I did some more research into her backstory and coming out of Hungary and during the Communist regime and all of the challenges and struggle that she faced to get to the place that she was, and I was hooked.”
A young Judit Polgár at the chess board
Netflix
Polgár first started playing chess at age five. Within a few years she could defeat male players of enormous skill and distinction, but they typically didn’t respond well.
“When I won against the first Grandmaster in my life, I was 11. The guy couldn’t really take it,” Polgár recalled. “I heard that when he was going around the elevator pressing it after that [loss], he was hitting his head [against] the elevator. So, people were handling it pretty badly sometimes, but mostly they were just thinking, okay, I had a bad day, she was lucky, and I just made a bad move. So, there were excuses in different ways, and they were not taking me so seriously. And I felt it that if I would have been a boy performing those results, they would just much faster acknowledged my performance. So, it took time and I understood that I have to show it and perform and show it on the board that I’m really good. And then at one point they said, well, she’s one of us. This was one of the biggest compliments I got from the chess community.”
Polgár’s success may remind some of the storyline of The Queen’s Gambit, the 2020 Netflix series that launched actress Anya Taylor-Joy to fame. “That was an amazing series,” Polgár said. “I enjoyed it a lot.”
Netflix
Netflix, in fact, will be the home for Kennedy’s documentary, and it won’t take long for people everywhere to get to see it.
“Obviously, because of the success of The Queen’s Gambit, when I decided to make this film, [Netflix] was the first call I made and they got on board right away,” the director said. “I think we were all aligned with the vision of the film and making it kind of an exciting sports film. So, it’s been a wonderful partnership and it’s great to be here with their support. And we’re really thrilled that it’s going straight to streaming after Sundance on February 6th.”
Watch the full conversation in the video above, where Polgár addresses her rivalry with champion Gary Kasparov, and Kennedy speaks to the “experiment” in parenting by Polgár’s father that turned Judit and her older sisters into genius players.
Deadline Studio at Sundance presented by Casamigos.