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| Oct-26-06 | | Chopin: <She just never played in sufficient tournaments to meet the official requirements> If she pursued chess, she might have been higher rated than Judit-- now that's a scary thought! |
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| Nov-02-06 | | Loisp: happy birthday! |
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| Dec-17-06 | | DrKurtPhart: i guess this has been posted b4 here but i only saw it first time th other day! wow..seething VK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txei... |
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| Dec-18-06 | | wkargel: Susan Polgar has mentioned a few times that Sofia and her family are moving from Israel to Canada, presumably in the Toronto area. There is no indication that Sofia is returning to professional chess. Her first love, apparently, has always been art. She is actually a talented artist as well. Susan often posts pics of Sofia's artwork on her blog. She was also the first to get married and have children, even before Susan, I believe. She has/had different priorities. Susan has mentioned before that Sofia was the "most talented" of the three, so in a parallel universe where Sofia pushed herself in chess, she could very well be with Judit in the Top Ten. Alas, it is not meant to be! Regards, Bill |
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| Dec-18-06 | | code13: Just curious as to why you say "presumably in the Toronto area"? |
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| Jan-24-07 | | Caissanist: <Asked if she would stand in the way of her son, should he one day want to become a professional chess player, she [Sofia] replies, "I would want his chess to help my son's intellectual development. I am not sure that it will go beyond that. In any event, I would not stop him. If I had invested the same effort and time in tennis as I did in chess, I would have long since been a millionaire. If I had devoted myself to medicine in the same way, maybe I would have won the Nobel Prize."> http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/... |
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| Jan-27-07 | | Dr.Lecter: <chessgames> Looking at <Uzi>'s collection of Sofia's "Sac of Rome" games, I see that names are too often wrong, mostly having Zsuzsa Polgar in the name sheet. Can you correct that? |
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| Feb-01-07 | | ianD: I wish Sofia would comment on the Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txei... |
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| Jul-02-07 | | whatthefat: The comment from the above bio: <Zsofia shocked the chess world in the Rome Open, 1989, when at the age of 14 she defeated a string of Soviet Grandmasters and achieved the highest performance rating of any chess player, male or female, in any open tournament in chess history. This performance has become known as "The Sac of Rome"> strikes me as bizarre. First, this obviously depends on which rating system is used. That issue aside (so I'll assume we're using Elo), there is the problem of how rating performance is defined when one scores 100%. The Elo system defines the fractional Expected Score (E) in terms of rating difference (d) by a sigmoidal function: E=1/[1+10^(d/400)]
You can see that as E approaches 0 and 1 (i.e., 0% and 100% scores, respectively), d approaches  ∞. By the pure definition, a perfect score thus implies a divergent performance rating, i.e., any 100% score in an open tournament (and plenty exist), would be better than Polgar's result. Typically this issue is avoided by capping d at some finite value, like 400. This choice is quite arbitrary however, and even then I'm not sure that there haven't been any 100% tournament results against 2530+ (in order to beat Polgar's 2930 performance) opposition. |
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| Jul-02-07 | | ughaibu: Whatthefat: Interesting. How does Chessmetrics work, particularly with respect to the historical 100% results? |
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| Jul-02-07 | | timhortons: <who needs a life when you got chess. i agree |
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| Jul-02-07 | | whatthefat: <ughaibu>
What chessmetrics does for performance ratings is it throws in some padding. It's described in detail at http://db.chessmetrics.com/CM2/Form..., but basically it calculates the perfomance from the games played plus a few made up draws against lower rated opposition. That way, there are no 100% scores. The idea is that if you play enough games, the padding plays only a small role, as it gets overwhelmed by the real games. So it also makes performances more conservative when they are based on a small number of games, i.e., less statistically significant. Apparently Sonas chose the amount of padding so as to give the best predictive results - it's not just arbitrary. |
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| Jul-02-07 | | ughaibu: Okay, thanks. |
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| Aug-17-07 | | Bob726: Why isn't she playing anymore? |
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| Aug-21-07 | | CapAnson: Bob726 - She is raising a family. |
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| Oct-04-07 | | pawnofdoom: Does anyone know what her performance was a the rome open in 1989? It was the highest performance ever!? I found a bunch of games where she won most, lost to her sister, and drew one person |
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Oct-04-07
 | | Benzol: <pawnofdoom> Scroll to <Uzi>'s post of September 28th last year. There are links to most of the games. She scored 8 wins and 1 draw, she didn't play either of her sisters in this event. Her rating against all 9 opponents was 2879 which included two unrated players. If you take these two out of the equation her rating performance against the 7 rated players was 2930. |
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| Oct-05-07 | | RookFile: Yeah, Fischer beating Larsen 6-0 pales in comparison. |
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| Oct-25-07 | | CapAnson: Yeah but keep in mind A) Sofia was underrated at the time and B) only 3 of her opponents were in the top 100 players in the world at the time (according to chessmetrics). Karpov at Linares 94 was a much bigger accomplishment. 11/13 against that competition is just stupid. Sofia's result might be the greatest rating/performance difference in history though. At least in international chess. |
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| Jun-30-08 | | Caissanist: <Why isn't she playing anymore?> Yes, she is raising a family, but so are Susan and Judit, and they still play. Sofia touched on this in the abovementioned interview: <I didn't stop playing chess completely," Sofia explains. "The professional retirement was an admission that there are other things that are equally important - love, family, children. "It was nice, but at a certain stage I understood that there are other things besides chess and that I will not be the world champion. I understood that the time had come to learn something more. When my husband was appointed an army physician in the north, we spent two years in Kiryat Shmona, and I started to study art, sculpting and painting at Tel Hai College." > |
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| Nov-02-08 | | karnak64: Happy birthday, Sofia! Have a special day!. |
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| Nov-02-08 | | Billy Vaughan: Happy birthday! |
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| Nov-03-08 | | Travis Bickle: [Chopin: <schnarre> <May have been simply burnout.> Or maybe she has a life.] I had the experience of having several lessons by phone with Sofia from her home in Toronto studying a mutual board on the net. She is a very nice person, and is fun to learn with. She told me she played Bobby Fischer at chess back in 1992 when he stayed at the Polgars guesthome in Hungary. Sofi told me there are other things in life besides chess, and she has married a Dr. and has two male children. She loves art and sketches and paints, and her favorite artist is Van Gogh. |
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| Nov-19-08 | | Eyal: http://www.chessninja.com/dailydirt... http://www.sofiapolgar.com/ |
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| Nov-19-08 | | Karpova: Thanks for the links, <Eyal>! I saw her at kasparovchess.com and she was very nice and always helpful! |
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