Susan Polgar

Hungarian-American Chess Grandmaster Susan Polgar has had an illustrious career, which includes winning 4 Women’s World Championships, and is the first player to win the triple-crown (Blitz, Rapid, and Classical World Championships). She became the #1 ranked female at the age of 15, and remained in the top 3 for nearly 25 straight years. In 1991, she broke the gender barrier by becoming the first woman in history to earn the Grandmaster title through traditional FIDE requirement. She is also a five-time Women’s Olympiad Champion, earning 10 overall medals – 5 Gold, 4 Silver, and 1 Bronze. In 2014 at the Tromsø Chess Olympiad, she became the first woman to receive the Furman Symeon medal as the best trainer in the world. She has promoted the game in various roles away from the board: an award-winning chess journalist; best-selling chess author; heading the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence (SPICE) at Webster University; and leading the Susan Polgar Foundation, a non-profit organization supported by charitable donations that aims to promote chess and its educational benefits to youngsters, especially girls. In 2009, Susan became the first woman to coach a men’s division I collegiate chess team to the Final Four. Her teams have won 4 consecutive national championships. Today, Susan continues to coach, do commentary at major events (such as World Championship and Olympiad) and also to write. She has developed her chess curriculum, which is being used in over 80 countries around the world, published best-sellers such as “A World Champion’s Guide to Chess” and “Chess Tactics for Champions”, and recently has coauthored "Rich as a King" (www.RichAsAKing.com), a book on how chess strategies can be applied to investments, with CFP Douglas Goldstein.