Quotes from Judit Polgar

On the highest level, of course there's a lot of competitiveness and drive in the players. They really want to win. But it's normal that the players are also just friends. Even very close friends. Or rivals, but in a healthy way.

I played against men most of my life because our goal was that I wanted to reach the highest potential to be an absolute world champion.

There are two ways to have educational chess in schools, either through after school programs or using chess as a tool in classrooms to improve children's thinking.

The biggest challenge is to fulfill your own ideas about yourself.

If you are in a tournament, you have to think of yourself - you can't think of your wife or children - only about yourself. Otherwise, you wake up, eat, prepare, do everything you can to be in good shape.

But in 2002 I had a miscarriage, at 13 weeks. And funnily enough after that I had my best-ever tournament result, in January 2003.

Being a professional chess player is not very family-friendly and I am away quite often playing tournaments, sometimes for 12 days at a time. I catch up with Gusztav every day on Skype and email but even though I miss them, I don't make a point of ringing the children every night.

Since retiring from competitive chess, my focus is on education and organising children's tournaments: I make a point of never separating girls and boys, nor awarding special prizes for girls.

You have to concentrate on yourself, to look at your own interests. You need fighting spirit. My parents, sisters and trainers helped, but I have fighting spirit.

Every single person in the profession has an engine as a helper now. The engines contain six or seven million games, searchable by opening move, player, country, time control. That makes it possible to really research your opponent.

My father believed that the higher you put your goal, the higher you reach. That was the main reason me and my sisters were playing mostly against male competitors.

For me, learning chess was natural; with my sisters around me, I wanted to play.

I do hope in Ireland children in schools can experience the richness of chess and it's positive effects.

I was very successful from a very young age... there was never a bad period.

During most of my playing career, the performance gap between men and women was slowly narrowing. Federations began providing more coaching and competitions for girls and women.

From the moment of my birth on 23 July 1976, I became involved f in an educational research project. Even before I came into the world, my parents had already decided: I would be a chess champion.

When I was 15, I became the youngest grandmaster in the world, breaking the record set by Bobby Fischer more than three decades earlier.

I was happy that at home we were a closed circle and then we went out playing chess and saw the world. It's a very difficult life and you have to be very careful, especially the parents, who need to know the limits of what you can and can't do with your child.

When the Ladies Chess Club was founded in London in 1895 and the first international women-only competition took place two years later, most clubs and competitions didn't accept women at all.

I'm convinced that if my goal hadn't been to be in the absolute best category I can, I would not have been able to be for 26 years the number one in the ladies' category.

I think Hungarians should be more positive; many complain, but if they go to some countries, in South America, people are so poor, yet they are happy. It starts with you.

I met Bobby Fischer in 1993 when he moved to Europe. I have mixed feelings about it. He was an idol, but not a healthy minded man.

I was labeled as a tricky player early on and have been regarded as tricky throughout my whole career. It was said that I was able to pull out tricks from nowhere.

My father and mother are exceptional pedagogues who can motivate and tell it from all different angles. Later, chess for me became a sport, an art, a science, everything together. I was very focused on chess, and happy with that world.