‘Queen of Chess’ Review: How Judit Polgár Rewrote the Rules of the Game (Netflix)

Chess is notoriously difficult to film, explain, or compress into a documentary. Over the years, filmmakers have tried various approaches, and none has proven entirely successful—either because of a narrow focus or because of obvious gaps and inconsistencies. In Queen of Chess, Rory Kennedy makes a deliberate choice to limit her biographical portrait of Judit Polgár—widely regarded as the greatest female chess player in history—to two central aspects of her life and career. On one hand, there is her highly unusual family background; on the other, her long and charged rivalry with Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest chess player of all time, regardless of gender. Largely left aside are Polgár’s broader competitive career, her matches against countless other players, her victories and defeats, and even detailed discussions of her ranking, which are mentioned only in passing.

From a dramatic standpoint, the decision is understandable, though it does narrow the film’s scope. Still, it proves sufficient to create an engaging documentary that both revisits and celebrates Polgár’s extraordinary trajectory. The most compelling dramatic material comes from her family history. Born in 1976, Judit was the middle of three Hungarian sisters raised in a very modest household. Her father, László Polgár, had embarked on what can only be described as a social and educational experiment. Determined to lift his family out of poverty, he studied the lives of history’s great geniuses and concluded that exceptional talent was cultivated, not innate. His solution was to educate his daughters at home, with extreme discipline, and to have them specialize in a single field. From a very young age, that field was chess—twenty-four hours a day. Schooling and everything else became secondary concerns.

Despite all the red flags such a decision raises, Mr. Polgár’s experiment worked. All three daughters quickly became chess champions, winning tournaments against older female players. After persuading the authorities of then-communist Hungary to allow them to travel abroad, they went on to represent the country in international competitions and even at the Chess Olympiads. It soon became evident that Judit was the standout talent. In remarkably little time—before she even turned twelve—she had reached the number one spot among women and earned the title of Master, a level comparable to that of Faustino Oro, the young Argentine prodigy currently drawing global attention.

With that foundation established, the documentary turns to Polgár’s ambition to compete for the number one ranking overall, not just among women—an idea that was virtually unthinkable at the time. This was an era when many male chess players openly claimed that women lacked the intelligence or mental stability to compete at the highest level. Polgár ignored those assumptions and entered open tournaments around the world, facing male opponents head-on.

From there, Queen of Chess focuses primarily on her many attempts, over the course of several years, to defeat Garry Kasparov. During the 1990s and early 2000s—when most of the film is set—Kasparov was the undisputed world number one, as well as an aggressive, swaggering, and famously arrogant competitor. Polgár’s ongoing struggle against him becomes the organizing backbone of the documentary: a compelling narrative thread, though one that inevitably skews the portrait of her broader, and truly remarkable, career.

Thanks to its extensive archival footage, the film also captures a period when chess enjoyed far greater media prominence than it would in later years, while allowing viewers to observe technological and aesthetic shifts over time. That said, the documentary can be somewhat confusing for viewers unfamiliar with the game’s intricacies, particularly when it reconstructs specific moments from Polgár’s tense matches with Kasparov. Some of these sequences are difficult to follow, though the most dramatic—and easily grasped—incident occurs during their first encounter, when Kasparov violated an ethical rule of the game (the “touch-move” rule) and then feigned ignorance.

The film also attempts to explore the potential psychological consequences of the intense upbringing imposed by the Polgár patriarch. As adults, the three sisters acknowledge that the demands placed on them were likely brutal, though this realization came only later in life, when they began making their own choices. It is difficult to determine where the truth lies, or whether that training left lasting psychological damage. The sisters do not entirely deny the possibility, yet they also recognize that nothing they achieved—especially Judit—would have been possible without that level of pressure. Their father, who appears in interviews, believes he actually did not push hard enough, and his frustration is evident in the fact that Judit never became the undisputed world number one, surpassing all male competitors. For him, it seems, even his daughter’s historic accomplishments were not quite enough.