The Polgar Sisters: Training or Genius?
Cathy Forbes
Henry Holt, New York, 1992 (Batsford, London, 1992)
FAN, 178 pp., paperback, $16.95
No task in writing is more difficult than the biographer's. To locate and assimilate all the available information on an individual, to decide what is relevant, to shape it into a coherent and objective narrative, to draw fair conclusions-all these obligations require mature judgment as well as considerable time.
Chess writers normally restrict their lives of the great players to collections of their best games, usually annotated, and sometimes accompanied by a brief biographical introduction, a chronology, or a list of results. Frequently the recounting of a player's life and career beyond the mere moves and crosstables is left to the player himself. The result can be a vain, self-justifying work, such as Capablanca's My Chess Career; or an unrevealing account that admits to a few minor mistakes but no major failings, like the recent Karpov on Karpov; or, at best, an entertaining behind-the-scenes set of anecdotes like Soltis's Confessions of a Chess Grandmaster. But it can never be considered authoritative or even-handed.
Occasionally, independent biographers have depicted great players in detail. Sometimes this amounts to simply gathering and translating primary source materials, without offering too much interpretation. Due to the paucity of simple documentation on important issues in chess history, such efforts (like Edward Winter's Capablanca) are vitally important. Only a few noteworthy attempts at full-scale biography have been made, most topically Frank Brady's two editions of Profile of a Prodigy: The Life and Games of Bobby Fischer, optioned last year for motion picture development. Characterized by careful research, informed by a variety of sources, and including a selection of game scores, it set the standard for future chess biographies.
Cathy Forbes, a British Women's International Master who has also published a book of her own games and poems, deserves credit for trying to go beyond the traditional "best games" format and include real biographical material in The Polgar Sisters: Training or Genius? In fact, she attempts to cover the lives and games of three players -- Zsuzsa, Zsofia, and Judit Polgar -- and to consider what underlies the unprecedented success these women have achieved in a male-dominated field.
The accomplishments of the Polgars are well known. Zsuzsa, the trailblazer, avoided competing in women-only events while her parents, Laszlo and Klara, resisted the Hungarian government's old-fashioned, segregationist policies. Eventually she became the third woman ever to earn the (male) grandmaster title. The second sister, Zsofia, is most famous for her score of 8.5/9 and performance rating of 2879 in Rome 1989. The youngest, Judit, in winning the Hungarian championship in December 1991, broke Fischer's record to become the youngest gm ever. Now Zsuzsa has won the candidates tournament for the women's world championship; Judit is thought to be a future opponent for Kasparov or his successor; and Zsofia continues to work on her own gm title.
Forbes starts by asserting that no book published in any language deals "comprehensively with the games and careers of the Polgar sisters," implying that her goal is to redress the situation. But she admits that "giving an insight into the lifestyle and personalities of such young people is a sensitive and delicate matter," suggesting that she will take extra care to be accurate and equitable in discussing her subjects, the oldest of whom was 23 when the book was published.
Part One of the book considers what Forbes calls "The Polgar Experiment," Laszlo's announced plan to use his daughters to demonstrate the validity of his pedagogical theories, which stress the importance of training over innate talent in developing exceptional ability in any field. Part Two gives a chronological account of the careers of the sisters, with tournament results, games, and game fragments from all three woven into a single narrative. Forbes ends with a postscript on the prospects for each sister's career. An index of openings is included -- as if this were a games collection rather than a multi-subject biography -- but no indexes are provided for names or general terms.
The clearest strength of The Polgar Sisters is the collection of data it presents: about 80 complete games and many additional fragments through 1991, including several early efforts that would otherwise be considered "rare." Thus Forbes satisfies her goal of dealing with the sisters' games, but her selection is only a start at doing a "comprehensive" job. Besides more games, it could have included a larger proportion of draws and losses. Forbes is hardly the only author to choose quick wins and flashy combinations at the expense of less familiar games that might give more insight into a player's strengths and weaknesses, but a book should delve deeper than magazines and newspapers do.
A book should also feature annotations of greater substance than this randomly chosen example, which reads more like a soap opera plot than an explanation of a chess game: "White has played far too insipidly and Black has taken full advantage of this. Showing fine technique, [Zsuzsa] now ruthlessly exploits her advantage. Lobron, meanwhile, exhausts his allotted time in a vain attempt to escape her clutches" (p. 82).
The analysis also suffers from the annotation-by-result syndrome. For example, the last game in the book (pp. 170-171) is Tolnai--J. Polgar, a victory by Judit in the Sicilian Defense. According to the punctuation, Black makes two very good moves (!), and White makes no mistakes (?) or even dubious moves (?!). But why should White lose a game without making even a minor error? Judit's own notes in Chess Informant 53 (game 173) are more logical. She proposes that her 18th move, awarded an exclamation point by Forbes, was actually questionable, and that Tolnai's bad reaction permitted her clever winning combination. With a better 19th move he could have gained a clear advantage, and Judit might not have become Hungarian champion or broken Fischer's record. Forbes's notes to this game make it seem more or less routine.
However, she generally avoids the common pitfall of offering reductive assessments ("aggressive," "positional," "precise") of the sisters' styles and tendencies. She also points out several of the questionable career moves the family has made, especially entering Judit in the Women's Olympiad, various junior competitions, and lucrative exhibitions where she "wastes time" and dulls her game by playing weak opponents, while fellow prodigy Gata Kamsky takes his lumps (but learns his lessons) from the world's best in Linares. Forbes does not stress this issue, but it can hardly be optimal for any player, male or female, to prepare for a future world championship match without a regular coach or trainer. The Polgars have many training camps and sessions with various grandmasters, but work with none on a consistent basis.
Before The Polgar Sisters appeared, English readers could only piece together the Polgar saga from various newspaper and magazine articles, most of which were reports of tournaments rather than profiles or investigative pieces. As Forbes often reminds us, the seemingly intensive media coverage accorded the Polgars wherever they go is usually devoid of substance: "The actual chess was almost completely buried beneath a ton of hype" (p. 103) during a visit by Zsofia and Judit to England in 1988.
When the entire family came to New York for the U. S. Chess Festival in the summer of 1992 the situation was repeated. The press likes to idealize itself as a band of independent investigators who pursue and develop stories in competition with one another. In reality, however, the press often acts as a chorus of voices all singing the same song-accomplished mimics, able to effortlessly report the same facts, descriptions, even quotations as everyone else. "Would-be Chess Queen: Visiting New Brunswick, Hungarian Vows to Face Champ," said the Newark Star-Ledger. "All the Right Moves: Judit Polgar, 16, Could Be the First Woman World Chess Champion," repeated People a few weeks later, with the addition of some nice photographs. Only Bruce Weber, whose article "Growing Up with Judit Polgar: Chess Moves Are Planned, Birthdays Happen" appeared in The New York Times (5 August 1992), went beyond the gee-whiz-a-young-female-grandmaster stereotype, but he missed most of the important issues about the Polgars, and was taken in like the rest by the "surprise" 16th birthday party that Judit actually knew about well in advance.
So Forbes deserves credit for presenting in chronological order a fair amount of material, including many quotations from published articles, on the sisters' careers. Most readers will learn a lot about the Polgars from the book, simply because previous coverage has been so consistently shallow. The book's format could be improved by separating the text from the games and adding transitions to produce a single narrative, but the entertainment value is already high.
Unfortunately, Forbes gets into trouble as soon as she ventures beyond the basic facts and dates. Then she comes across as the Kitty Kelly of the chess world, as her most shocking material is based on rumors and anonymous allegations.
According to Laszlo Polgar, who responded to written questions for this review, Forbes "never spoke to us about the book, never asked us for an interview, for information." Certainly Forbes might have been turned down if she had approached the Polgars, but how could she know for sure? The Washington Post obtained an interview with Laszlo in 1991, despite his initial insistence on a $2,000 fee, which was refused. Bruce Weber wrote his profile after attending Judit's birthday party and going sightseeing with the family in New York City. Perhaps a warning from Forbes that a book would appear, interview or no, would have convinced the Polgars to allocate some of their time.
Of course, for a book-length work, what is necessary is repeated observation of the subjects over a period of months or years, at best as a "fly on the wall." But a simple interview, at least to discuss a few key incidents and allegations, would have been infinitely better than the approach Forbes apparently took, of placing almost total reliance on secondary sources and off-the-record quotations. One has to wonder about the reliability of a book that needs to report (p. 64) that Zsuzsa Polgar's favorite movie "has been rumoured" to be Dirty Dancing. Why not just ask? On page 79 we are informed of a conversation overheard in a bathroom. At least its source and subjects are fully identified, something that cannot be said for the passage (p. 173) where Forbes explains that the "impression" that Zsofia has "the least motivation or inclination" for chess
is strengthened in particular by the sensational rumour that hit the chess world in 1990: Sofia had rebelled. She had wanted to stop playing chess -- at least, for a while.
Laszlo, so ran the story, had responded with displeasure. Under pressure, Sofia, despite clearly desiring greater freedom from what must have felt sometimes like a stifling, chess-dominated regime, gave in and continued to play chess. She had, however, discussed with a leading Grandmaster and his wife the possibility of staying with them for a time, presumably to remove herself from an overheated domestic situation, for a "cooling-off" period. In the end this did not happen, but the fact that Sofia was known to have contemplated it is highly significant. It is not that this episode indicates a lack of love for chess per se (any chess player's feelings towards the game can stray towards ambivalence), but what does come across clearly is a child needing a break from a circus in full swing.
Laszlo Polgar's reaction to this passage was an absolute denial: "Zsofia did not rebel in 1990, nor at any other time did she want to stop playing. We do not know from where Forbes got this." Probably the truth is somewhere in between the two accounts. Zsofia is certainly lower-rated than her sisters, and compared with their gm titles she has only one possible norm, from her phenomenal Rome performance. Nowadays, at 18, she seems to express a bit less excitement and fascination with the game. But to say she "rebelled" and wanted to cease playing entirely, especially to attach great importance to the idea, is irresponsible unless you present the proof, or at least also acknowledge that her family denies that the episode ever occurred. And without information on sources, or even the identity of the "leading grandmaster," the reader has no way to assess Forbes's credibility on the matter.
Of the many similar examples, this may be the most ominous (p. 49):
... from the mid-eighties unofficial whisperings and rumours began to sound a more disturbing note.
It was claimed, for instance, by players who had observed the children playing in competitive situations that their consistently high performance rate owed much to a cruder "pedagogical" motivant than those didactically expounded by Laszlo Polgar: namely, fear. "Fear of losing," said one Hungarian player, "is a great motivator. I myself always play my best when I am terrified of losing."
So far, only the usual rumors and anonymous comments. But Forbes continues:
Significantly, the young Maya Chiburdanidze was beaten by her elder sister when she lost a game, thereby instilling into the girl a well-founded aversion to defeat on the chessboard.
Their father, it is said, is angry when the girls do not do well. And when you consider that in a sense his entire life's work, in the final analysis, stands or falls on the achievements of his daughters, this is not such a surprising thought.
As before, Forbes claims "significance" for rumors she does not support, and here cannot even plainly state. She insinuates that Laszlo Polgar physically punishes his daughters for poor results, and implies that they are motivated to play so well by fear of losing rather than the thrill of victory, or plain love of the game. To leave less room for future reporting-by-rumor, perhaps the Polgars will become more friendly with the media as the sisters continue their remarkable progress. But one wonders what happened here to Forbes's professed sensitivity and delicacy.
If The Polgar Sisters offers a good first try at collecting the interesting games of its subjects, and an entertaining if unreliable account of their lives, it fails completely to live up to its lofty subtitle, Training or Genius?
Forbes spends 18 rambling pages on Laszlo Polgar's self-described "experiment" to test his "theory." She begins by describing Laszlo's Hungarian book Bring Up Genius! as "authoritative," and explains that his theory is that "there is no such thing as innate genius, and that the extent of a child's achievement is determined largely by educational methods (i.e., environmental factors)." This is not a theory, merely an opinion on a controversial psychological issue. Surely there is more to Laszlo's ideas, but hardly anything of substance is ever said about them. Forbes quickly moves on to dismiss Laszlo's critics in the following obtuse section (p. 15; note the skeptical quotation marks around "flaws" and the question mark after the title):
'Flaws' in the Theory?
Those claiming that the Polgar sisters do not prove anything of universal relevance might say things along the following lines:
a) Laszlo and Klara Polgar, both being teachers of clearly above average abilities, have produced three children genetically far above the average as their 'raw material' i.e. their methods would not work as well, or at all, with children inherently less bright. Or perhaps:
b) They are merely accelerating the rate of their children's development; the girls might well have a ceiling on their potential which will simply be reached earlier than if they had been traditionally educated.
She leaves out the most basic objection, that any study of human subjects with sample size three (or one), is unlikely to "prove" anything of any relevance. It can only illuminate the truth, suggest avenues of further investigation, and perhaps disprove the most absolutist positions, which are neither true nor widely held in most cases. In a section called "The Jewish Inheritance" she concludes that "of course" cultural factors, not genetic ones, explain the historical success of Jews in chess. In reality, conclusive evidence is not available for either position.
Although she marshals no serious arguments, Forbes makes it clear that she endorses Laszlo's side of the debate over environmental versus innate influences on ability. In fact she must, since she next sets out to explain why women's chess ability is equal to men's. She refers for support to "unabashedly feminist arguments" and such experts as Simone de Beauvoir. But while these arguments and experts may be useful and authoritative in public policy or the social sciences, they have no significance in addressing real scientific questions-in this case, about general cognitive and neurological differences between men and women.
Nevertheless, Forbes quickly sets up a straw man (p. 18):
Many 'learned' articles, such as David Spanier's "Women are Checkmated" (The Times, 7th August 1984) have been devoted to the investigation of pseudo-scientific reasons for women's supposed inferior ability at chess. The so-called 'visual-spatial' theory, in particular, has received a great deal of attention.
... women perform worse than men in tests measuring 'visual-spatial' skills. Spanier then goes on to classify chess as a 'visual-spatial' game, and to infer that women are thus doomed to be weaker.
Of course, your rhetorical task is easier when you call newspaper articles "learned," reduce decades of psychological research to "so-called" theories with simplistic names, and fail to address any of the real scientific studies of the mental abilities of men and women. Forbes tries to "pick a few specific holes" in such "sexist theories," citing Laszlo, who supposedly cites Bela Bartok (why?) for his support: "Apply equal standards, please. Women ought to be free to do the same things as men ..." Does Forbes actually not understand that proposing a biological or psychological difference has nothing to do with altering standards or rights? If the clear consensus of psychology researchers is that men are relatively better at spatial tasks, and women relatively better at linguistic tasks, will she accuse them of advocating discrimination, and then cavalierly dismiss them with an exhortation to read Betty Friedan and correct their wrong thinking? When Forbes does reach the topic of male attitudes towards female players, she strives to be fair-minded (p. 21): "Now I'm not suggesting that all male chess players are woman-haters and/or repressed homosexuals." Thanks for clarifying that.
Forbes is simply out of her depth throughout the first three chapters. Besides misunderstanding the nature of an experiment and how much can be generalized from a single example, she thinks that the existence of blind chessplayers disproves the "visual-spatial" theory, and she describes chess as more a "language" than a spatial task. Ignoring scientific evidence to the contrary, she bases this last claim partly on her belief that chess is a "sister science" of computing, which has "programming languages" -- overlooking the game's much closer affinities with mathematics and music, which both have significant spatial aspects.
The final verdict on the lessons of the Polgars' success awaits the progress of their careers. All we can say now is that their achievements so far refute the ridiculous claim that all women are incapable of playing chess against men at high levels, but it would be just as unwise to generalize from their example that any woman can do so. No one would claim that the mere existence of Nabokov, Cheever, and Updike disproves the idea that women generally have better verbal abilities than men. The Polgars' extensive training and practice could actually make them the exceptions that prove the rules; without such a regime, the average woman might not be as skilled as the average man, and a player born without "genius" might never acquire surpassing talent for the game.
The Polgars, especially Judit, have rapidly become some of the top draws in the chess world, surpassing Karpov and rivaling Kasparov as the most sought-after players (after Bobby Fischer, of course) for tournaments, exhibitions, product endorsements, and media interviews. Commenting on his newfound competition, Kasparov said (apparently in 1990, p. 149), "they are spoiling the professional chess world with their conditions. If the organizers provide such great conditions for potential talent this is very bad for professional chess ..." Naturally, Laszlo disagrees, claiming not that the sisters fully deserve as much as Kasparov, but that in reality they earn only "one or two percent" of what he receives. This sounds a bit low, but the whole dispute is silly. If chess is to become a truly professional sport, it will need to become more and more media-driven, and the players who are the biggest media attractions will earn the most money. There is nothing wrong with that.
But there is something wrong with a book that relies as extensively on hearsay and innuendo as The Polgar Sisters: Training or Genius? does, and an author who so thoroughly misunderstands and condescends to a field as Forbes does to cognitive psychology.
Even though Forbes's book may not meet the standard set by Brady, I cannot agree with Laszlo Polgar's final assessment-that it "strives to portray us in a negative light." Forbes has produced an adequate selection of games, supplemented by an entertaining account of the sisters' careers, that is slipshod in its reporting and reasoning but probably not malicious. Read it for the game scores, crosstables, and amusing first-hand anecdotes, but don't take the rest seriously.
Forbes concludes by noting the undeniable charm of the Polgar sisters, and wonders what it is like for them to "wake, every day ... to the experience of genius." It has to be better than the experience of training.
This page last modified on
28 April 2018.
Copyright (c) 1995-2018 Christopher F. Chabris. All rights
reserved.