Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Susan Polgar lives and works in New York City.
She sees the world in a very unusual way.
Susan has the brain of a genius-
perfectly adapted to her single, lifelong obsession.
Susan is the first female chess grandmaster.
But she wasn't born with her brilliant brain.
It was created by an extraordinary childhood.
Susan is the living proof of an amazing theory-
that any ordinary child can be turned into a genius.
Subtitles downloaded from www.OpenSubtitles.org
It's Sunday morning,
and New York's Greenwich Village is the setting for a showdown.
Playing White, Susan Polgar.
Playing Black, Paul Truong,
a former US Champion at a supercharged form of chess.
Blitz.
Each player must play the entire game in just sixty seconds.
It's a high speed demonstration of chess playing genius.
You're in total control of your own destiny.
Here it's your brain versus the opponent's.
By understanding Susan's brilliant brain,
we can unlock the potential of our own.
We can understand how people make life or death decisions,
faster than a super-computer.
Or perform miracles of memory in their every day jobs.
And how in the battle of the sexes,
the female brain can out-manoeuvre the male.
I really believe that if you put your mind to it,
and you really want it, you can achieve it,
whatever it is.
Susan's brain is an unstoppable force.
And her opponent has run out of time.
The latest in a long line of distinguished victims.
Susan has competed on equal terms with the greatest names in chess,
like Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov,
and even the great Bobby Fischer.
But Susan's genius is no accident of birth.
She was once an ordinary four year old,
whose life was transformed by a unique education.
Susan Polgar grew up a world away from New York City.
In the late 1960s,
Hungary still languished in the iron grip of the Soviet Union.
For the ordinary citizens of Budapest,
daily life was a grim struggle to make ends meet.
The future queen of the chessboard was hardly born a princess.
That is the street I was born in,
where I used to live for the first ten years of my life.
The house is still here.
The closest side that you see was my room,
and that's where I first learned to play chess.
And then a second room was where my parents were sleeping
and was kind of a living room.
It brings back a lot of memories.
If Susan's home was ever so humble,
her father was a man with a unique vision.
A trained psychologist,
Laszlo Polgar had made a deep study of the childhood origins of genius.
The archetypal example was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Already composing at the age of five,
he seemed to be the classic case of a child born with special gifts.
But Laszlo noted that Mozart's father Leopold,
himself an accomplished musician,
gave his son early and invaluable schooling in his craft.
Laszlo decided that specialised training was more important than natural talent,
and he had an astonishing plan that would put his theory to the test.
When Zsuzsa, or Susan, was born in April 1969,
the Polgar Family Experiment was underway.
Her father had already written a book called "Bringing Up Genius".
And it said that genius was not born- but made.
It reads here, a quote:
which means:
"a genius equals work and fortunate circumstances."
By 'fortunate circumstance',
Laszlo meant the happy home that he and his wife Klara would provide.
And the hard work would be guaranteed by schooling Susan himself.
My father believed that the potential of most children
is not used optimally.
He felt that there is not much I would get out of going to school daily.
Laszlo planned to train Susan in mathematics,
but she chose her own future by a happy accident.
One day unexpectedly, in a search for a new toy,
I opened a cabinet and a chess set fell out
and I asked my mum what is it?
And she said: oh, this is a chess set,
although I can't help you much with it,
because I don't know how to play with itĄ
but wait until Daddy comes home and he'll teach you with pleasure.
There was no history of brilliant chess players in the Polgar Family.
Laszlo himself was strictly an amateur.
But he was convinced he could train his daughter to be a genius at anything-
as long as she was a willing student.
My father strongly believes that it could have been any other fieldĄ
and the very same methods would have been used.
First of all it's very important for a child to love the specific field,
which in our case was chessĄ
and then the rest comes easy.
Easy, perhaps, if Susan had chosen music, or science.
But devoting her childhood to chess
made the quest for genius much harder- for one reason.
In the early 1970s,
chess was totally dominated by men.
Some of the world's best players believed that the female brain just couldn't cope with the game.
A little girl was about to prove them wrong.
These are the gardens of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire-
home to one of the biggest hedge mazes in the world.
This type of navigation problem is a well known battleground of the sexes.
Men never ask for directions-
they think they're better than women at getting from A to B.
Professor Peter McLeod has come to find out whether, just sometimes,
they might be right.
There are many stereotypes about the differences between the way that men and women solve problems,
and although some of these stereotypes may be based on prejudices and biases,
when you find the same stereotypes appear in all cultures and all over the world,
you can't help thinking there must something in them.
Ten boys and ten girls are trying to reach the statue at the centre of the maze.
But the first objective is a wooden bridge that gives an overview of the layout.
This is where McLeod and his maze runners will gather their thoughts.
How are you doing?
It's really, really hard.
Do you recognise any of it?
WellĄ Which are the bits where you've been?
I went round that far side with the zig-zaggy bits,
and then up here.
I remember most of the turns that I have been through.
The boys seem to be looking at the big picture.
They have a strong memory of where they've been,
and where they need to go.
I'm just trying to keep going in that direction.
Or at least, they think they do.
I'm going to go right, no I'm not, I'm going left.
Oh, God! Why?
The human brain has two hemispheres,
left and right.
Most of our thinking happens in a thin outer layer of each, called the cortex.
But in males, the cortex is thicker in the right brain,
which excels at spatial thinking.
So boys are thought to use a highly spatial strategy.
They create a mental image of the whole maze to use as a map.
Then they might use a reference point like the Sun,
to figure out where they are.
And by rotating their mental maps,
they can then decide which way to turn next.
So the boys have good spatial awareness,
navigating with a strong sense of where they are in the overall maze.
Okay, let's tryĄ right.
But are the girls thinking the same way?
If you had to draw a map of the maze when you got out,
do you think you could do it?
No. No.
What could you remember when you got out, do you think?
Probably the bit with all the circles, and you go from circle to circle.
Cos you can remember what the circles looked like,
is that the idea?
The girls are less interested in the big picture.
They're picking up on specific details.
I now know where to go now,
because once I get out of these circle bitsĄ
They're using some distinctive circular hedges as landmarks.
Like the boys,
the girls also use their right brains for navigation.
But in the girls, the Corpus Callosum,
which connects the two halves of the brain, is better developed.
So girls also rely on the left brain, which excels at verbal reasoning,
rather than the whole maze,
they focus on features that they can describe in words,
like the circular hedges.
The girls' navigate by following a list of directions,
from landmark to landmark.
But with no overall map of the maze,
it's easy to lose sight of the landmarks- and get lost.
Well this is annoying!
This particular maze might favour boys
because it doesn't have many obvious visual features in it,
the hedges all look the same, there are some shapes,
but there aren't clear points that you might remember.
In this kind of maze,
scientists consistently find that boys come out ahead,
by using their mental maps.
Yes! I'm there.
In mazes with more prominent landmarks,
it's the girls who would take the honours.
But today, they have to settle for second place.
Found it!
In the early 1970s,
it was taken for granted that chess also required a typically male way of thinking.
Like the maze problem,
the game seems to depend on a spatial awareness of the board and all the pieces.
But then Susan Polgar came along.
When she was still just a tiny girl,
her father planned to prove that gender differences in the brain were not important.
I definitely would agree that there are differences in brain,
and men and women think differently, I'm not disputing that.
It doesn't mean necessarily that one is worse than the other,
and that's the beauty of it,
I think that's the beauty of life that we don't all have to be a certain way to succeed,
there can be many roads to Rome, as they say.
Just a few months after she learned the game,
Laszlo took Susan to Voros Meteor, the most formidable chess club in Budapest.
Susan was about to face male opposition in more ways than one.
Wow, I haven't been here in over 15 years,
and this is the first place I ever came to a chess club.
I first came here, late 1973 or very early 1974.
And well, the place so far looks exactly as it did then.
I walked in a room, it was full of smoke with elder men.
Them thinking that my father is looking for a game,
and just brought me along.
But the reality was my father wanted me to have a game
to see how I'll do against the members of the club.
The club members thought Laszlo was mad.
But if they were ready to humour a pretty little girl,
they weren't ready for what happened next.
Susan began the habit of a lifetime-
beating men at chess.
I had a whole bunch of guys after losing to me, complaining.
One said: oh I didn't sleep well.
The next one: I was sick.
The third one: I had a stomach ache,
you know, it's like, was kind of going on in a series,
and you know I jokingly said that I've never beaten a healthy man.
The only man who wasn't shocked was Laszlo Polgar.
He was building Susan's training around a mental skill
that didn't depend on either the left or right brain.
Girls could master it just as easily as boys,
and before long,
Susan was literally beating men with her eyes closed.
Susan's about to play a game of chess with a difference.
Okay, why don't you be white?
Okay, E4.
E4.
C5.
Knight to C3.
Susan's friend Ed has the chessboard in front of him,
just like in a normal game.
Knight to C6.
But Susan doesn't need it.
She's playing the game in her head.
The only board she needs is in her mind's eye.
F5. Now you've gotta be careful.
Amateur players like Ed have to see the board,
to keep track of all 32 chess men.
I'll play G5.
But Susan follows all the moves using her fundamental chess ability-
Memory.
Playing without a board helps to train the memory,
and Susan has been practising since childhood.
I'm going to sacrifice my knight now.
Knight takes G5.
You're sacrificing a Knight?
Susan can play up to five games in her head, simultaneously.
Bishop takes G5.
Rook E8.
Rook F3. Knight E5.
Rook G3. King F8.
The Queen's moving in for the kill.
Ąto G4.
Queen H8, check.
Now it's over. King E7.
Checkmate! Susan, that's not a nice way to say hello!
When it comes to chess,
Susan can perform miracles of memory.
In fact, she's doing something that should be impossible.
An ongoing task like a game of chess,
is handled by a mental function known as 'working memory',
at the very front of the brain.
The relevant brain cells, or neurons,
store any necessary information by forming a network of electrical connections.
But these connections die away within seconds,
so working memory is limited.
It's like a temporary scratchpad,
that can only store about seven items of information.
That's why the seven digits of a new phone number
are about as much as most people remember.
But just how good is Susan's working memory?
This is Thompson Street in New York,
home of the city's sidewalk chess cafes.
And we're about to give Susan a memory test.
Can she memorise all the pieces and pawns on this diagram?
That's 28 items of information.
To make things even trickier,
the diagram has been pasted to the side of a cafe's speeding van.
Susan only has time for a single, three second glance.
But watch this.
Susan's working memory is working overtime.
She's made an exact copy.
To explain her miracle of memory,
this scientist has come to a very surprising place.
The diners at this London Restaurant don't know it,
but their table is under surveillance.
He's proceeding here in a counter-clockwise order.
Psychologist Anders Ericsson,
has spent nearly 30 years studying amazing memories-
and it doesn't have to be chess grandmasters.
More and more we've been interested in every day life kind of expert performance,
somebody who can do something that is extraordinary.
He's expecting a bravura performance from Spanish waiter, Vincente Sancho.
I think have a good memory. I have the memory of my grandmum.
Good afternoon, are you ready to order? Yeah. Okay.
May I have a *** cranberry, please?
And then I'll take the baby squid risotto. Risotto.
They're giving drink orders as well as the meal.
This is going to be challenging for him.
Do you have any beer? Only Tiger.
Okay, then can I start off with the gnocchi with chestnutĄ
Like Susan, Vincente's working memory has to take in a lot of information-
but he never writes anything down.
Can I start with the sauteed baby squid please?
And this is going to be a tall order.
OkayĄ Caponata. CaponataĄ yeah.
Ą medium rare. Medium rare.
The Nero Risotto. Nero Risotto. And then I'll have the GnocchiĄ
The question is- how many orders can he handling working memory?
So, *** cranberry, Nero risotto and the skate, Tiger beer,
with the gnocchi and the beef rare,
the Nero risotto, the monkfish and gin and tonicĄ
It seems Vincente can remember far more than seven orders.
Pinot Grigio, Pede Quadra, and your Beef medium are.
The glasses of Sauvignon, the Buldra, and the Neo risotto and the monkfish.
For the lady the glass of Pinot Grigio,
gnocchi, John Dory and a couple of bottles of water for the table.
There it is. Thank you very much.
Twenty-three orders in all.
That's impressive.
Like Susan,
Vincente seems to exceed the normal limits of working memory.
And the beef medium rare.
But how is he doing it?
Vincent, that was really impressive.
Really want to understand here how you were doing this.
Now you're coming in,
do you know who you're going to ask to give you the first order?
Yes, it's always the best to start from my leftĄ
Okay. So to try to keep in order.
The first one, brunete, she has a white top and thin jeans.
The second one blonde, blonde almost white hair.
I thought she's not sureĄ about what to drink, about what to order.
It seems that Vincente doesn't remember all 23 orders individually.
Instead, he packs the information down,
to make it manageable using the normal seven items of working memory.
I associate the person, the dates, and the number,
it's like all together, I don't know how to explain, but it comes altogether.
He forms a strong mental image of each customer
and then attaches that customer's orders to the image.
This seems to be a common technique used by experts in all fields
- it's called chunking.
It is a little like phone numbers.
One of my best phone numbers was 492 1492.
And given that 1492 was when Columbus discovered America,
you don't have to keep track of the individual digits any longer,
all the four digits will be retrieved as a symbol group from memory.
Susan handles the information on a chessboard in exactly the same way.
She doesn't remember all the pieces individually-
instead, she breaks everything down into chunks.
The menacing formation of Whites, Queen and Bishops is one chunk.
The heavily protected Black King is another.
Susan only has to remember five chunks-
easily manageable in normal working memory.
But without chunking,
her memory is no better than anyone else's.
And here's the proof.
In the chess diagram on the other side of the van,
the pieces have been placed at random by a non-chess player.
So this time, there are no recognisable chunks.
Now Susan's trying to remember 24 individual pieces-
and she can't do it.
All the pieces are in random position.
It's jus so much harder to remember, especially under a very short time.
But how does Susan identify chess chunks?
To her they're lifelong friends.
Memories that were implanted in her brain
during her extraordinary childhood.
Susan Polgar's second childhood home was in this Budapest tower block.
We're almost there.
The tiny family apartment was a production factory,
where Susan's brain was engineered for the game of chess.
The current tenants have no idea that a genius formed her earliest memories within these walls.
Wow. Still the same. My phone used to be here.
When we finally got a phone for the first time we used to keep it there.
Wow, and this used to be the living room.
This is where Susan did some of the hardest work of her life,
for up to six hours a day.
I used to have a wall of chess books here, a library of chess books.
A collection of four to 5,000 of different titles.
And actually I even had a catalogue of chess games.
A collection of 200,000 games,
manually been cut from various chess magazines and newspapers,
and sorted by various openings and various players.
This massive effort was required throughout Susa's childhood
to commit the complex secrets of chess to memory.
The number of possible games is vastly greater than the number of atoms in the Universe.
But chess chunks are the order in the chaos.
These small but typical formations appear again and again in different games.
They are the basic words in the language of chess.
Most ten year olds know only 10,000 words.
At the same age,
Susan was devoting her childhood to learning 100,000 chess chunks.
This process would physically transform her brain.
With constant repetition,
information moves from working memory into long term memory.
Working memory lasts only seconds,
until the electrical connections between neurons die away.
But in long term memory,
the repetition of these currents stimulates the neurons
to form new and permanent connections.
The memorised information is now hard-wired,
and can last a lifetime.
Like anyone else,
Susan's long term memory is a storehouse of family faces and lifetime experiences.
But now chess chunks were also indelibly imprinted on her brain.
By the early 1980s,
the Polgar Chess Factory had stepped up its output.
Susan's two younger sisters, Sofia and Judith,
were next on the genius assembly line.
And within a few years,
the family would be ready to take the world of chess by storm.
At 15, Susan was already the top ranked female payer in the world.
At the 1985 New York Open,
she caused a sensation by beating a grandmaster for the first time.
By 1989,
12 year old Judith had a winning streak of eight competitions in a row.
At 14, Sofia annihilated four grandmasters
for one of the greatest tournament results of all time.
Just watching them seated at chessboards
I immediately had a sense that I had never seen with women players elsewhere.
Susan is still a powerful presence at the board.
Like all the Polgar sisters,
she seems to make a move as easily as taking a breath.
There seemed to be a line direct from their brain
to the end of the finger and the piece moved and that was it.
But it should be beyond the power of a human brain to pick the best move.
There are roughly four billion possibilities for the next three moves alone.
That's a calculation only a supercomputer could perform.
So how can Susan move at this incredible speed?
For Hartston, the only explanation
is that her human brain is using a very human skill.
We seem to heap a lot of praise on people's calculating ability,
but take for grantedĄ all sorts of mental abilities that are absolutely intuitive.
Intuition sounds more like magic than science.
But Hartston believes it is a specific skill displayed by experts in all fields-
and it can be explained.
By training, William Hartston is a psychologist
and a former United Kingdom Chess Champion.
It's not as bad as I feared.
But today, he's going back to square one-
as a trainee fire fighter.
Hartston plans to compare his novice skills with those of expert fire fighter, Leigh Corke.
If you want to take a quick look at the smoke that's coming out there at the moment.
I'm going into that? You're going into there, yeah.
They're up against a terrifying opponent.
This is flashover- a major killer of fire fighters.
My wife always said I'd go to hell!
He has no previous experience,
but he thinks he as a logical plan of attack.
He aims to control one side of the fire, then quickly switch to the other.
Okay, left, left.
Where's it going now? Right? Missed.
But logic isn't working.
The fire's making moves he can't predict.
It keeps coming back- at me!
Lift upwardsĄ
What I was doing was trying to apply rules and sopping and thinking,
I always had to stop and see what the effect of what I was doing was.
Too much water.
Hartston's achieved nothing but a cloud of scalding steam.
It's getting smoky.
He's still trying to think his way out of trouble,
and now he's suffering from paralysis by analysis.
Well we've lost our visibility altogether, havenĄŻt we?
Stay down, stay down.
For Hartston, it's been a harsh lesson in the wrong way to make decisions.
Fire fighter Corke shows him how it's done.
Ą nice and high gas cooling.
For an expert,
flame in the overhead smoke is a typical danger sign.
He reacts instantly by cooling the flames- and he doesn't have to think about it.
When you've done something often enough,
you donĄŻt have to think about how to do it.
But even more important when you've done it often enough,
you know, you sense what the result of it is going to be
and you're ready with the next move.
Intuition turns out to be a learned skill.
It means trusting your experience-
and the ability to recognise and react to familiar patterns.
And surprising as it may seem,
chess players rely more heavily on intuition than calculation.
You don't calculate from where you are,
you don't look at a list of possibilitiesĄ
you sense what's the right move and you donĄŻt have to think about how to do it.
An amateur wastes precious time thinking through his possible moves.
But a grandmaster can make the best move without thinking.
I have to trust my instincts, my intuitionĄ
and it's basically pattern recognition, it's each and every position,
what's my first instinct, what's the best move.
It's almost like guessingĄ
but it's like guessing intelligently kind of,
basing it on prior games and experiences.
Susan guesses her opponent's moves before he makes them.
For Preston Lasker, it feels like she's reading his mind.
It was amazing,
like playing against like Michael Jordan or some big sports star.
She definitely has all the pattern recognition down to where
she doesn't haveĄ I thinkĄ I have to think a lot more than she does.
You know, she just, she pretty muchĄ it's all instinct.
It's pattern recognition that separates the best from the rest.
Susan is so good at it,
that it's possible her brain has a dedicated pattern processor.
With modern scanning techniques,
it might even be possible to identify it.
But there's a problem.
The brain is so complex
that to find and identify any specific structure is a daunting task.
But scientists are sometimes given clues,
telling them where to look for specific functions.
And it happens when the brain goes wrong.
As an Assistant Editor at The Times,
Mary Ann Sighart is at the top of British journalism.
And yet she can't recognise some of the most familiar patterns of all.
Every week I write a column for Times 2,
and there's a whole bank of people who sub-edit.
And the sub will come in withĄ one of these,
which is a proof of the column
and I'll say: oh thanks very much,
and I'll read it through and I'll look for mistakes
and then I'll take the proof back to the sub's desk
and I'll think: well who was it who gave it to me?
I don't remember!
Mary Ann suffers from prosopagnosia, commonly known as face blindness.
Even finding a close colleague can be next to impossible.
You're sort of tiptoeing round surreptitiously looking at everybody's screen
to see if they've got my column up on the screen.
Mary Ann knows she's looking at a face-
she jus doesn't recognise it as someone she knows.
I wish I knew how people recognised other people
because it would make it so much easier for me.
But it's as hard for me to understand
as it would be for a colour blind person
to, you know, if somebody said to them
well, can't you see the difference between red and green?
You know, that's red and that's green.
As many as one in 50 people have some degree of face blindness.
But Mary Ann was unaware of her condition for years,
because she has learned to identify people in other ways.
Psychologist David Wilkinson wants to know more.
So what coping strategies do you use?
Oh goodness. I rely a lot on hair,
but that can go horribly wrong when people have a haircut or dye their hairĄ
Or no hair. or no hair, exactly.
Voice, gait, - you know the way people stands or walk,
I think I use.
Glasses, or any sort of facial hair I find very useful.
Yeah, you seem very more keen to focus in on local detail, on parts of the face,
and so you're using a different strategy.
Well that's what I use to compensate for the fact that I can't recognise the face.
So I think, right, there must be some feature on the face
that I can compare, to see which is alike.
I mean I've now worked out you've got a bump here on your nose.
So that would help me next time I see you maybe.
To test Mary Ann's strategy,
we've asked her to take her daughter skating,
and to look out for any familiar faces.
Now you see, I wouldn't have a clue,
if I were looking at the sea of faces.
But what Mary Ann doesn't know,
is that one of these faces belongs to Doctor David Wilkinson,
with whom she's just spent the whole afternoon.
And with him is Laura,
a secretary from Mary Ann's office whom she sees every day.
At a distance, Mary Ann can't pick up on any useful details.
Maybe if they go a bit closerĄ
It's not mother and daughters, is it?
No.
Wilkinson tries taking his hat off.
Finally, he resorts to a bit of slapstick psychology.
Oh, God. Are you all right?
I don't believe it!
Who is it? This is a guy called Dave,
who I spent most of the afternoon with.
And this is Evie.
The funny thing is I did say if I sawĄ who's this?
It's not Laura!
And even then, it was only when your face was right up against mine
that I spotted your sort of, you know bobble on the nose.
Brain scans of people like Mary Ann
have revealed damage to the specific structure that's responsible for face recognition.
The so-called 'fusiform face area' is at the back of the brain,
where first processing of information from the eyes takes place.
In a normal brain,
it rapidly assesses any new face for its distinctive proportions of eyes, nose, and mouth.
Then it looks for a match among all the familiar faces stored in long term memory.
The whole process is lightning fast.
We can recognise people we have met before in approximately 100 milliseconds.
It's about pattern recognition.
You can see the analogy with a chessboard,
where again one must identify the individual piecesĄ
but what's really important when you play chess
is being able to apprehend the spatial relationships between those pieces.
Every brain has a face processor,
to help us make sense of the daily sea of faces.
But there are many complex patterns in the world around us.
Does the brain have processors for those?
Few of us see patterns better than Susan Polgar.
So we are going to submit this chess grandmaster to a scan-
to find out exactly what makes her brilliant brain so unique.
Grandmaster Susan Polgar is about to find out
how her brain is perfectly adapted for the game of chess.
She has come to meet Professor Joy Hirsch of Colombia University,
a leading expert in brain imaging techniques.
And one thing these two women can agree on, is that size doesn't matter.
The female brain is quite a bit smaller than the male brain in general,
and we know that there's no difference in our intelligence.
Absolutely! I agree on that one!
Hirsch intends to scan Susan's brain using MRI,
or Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
Inside the scanner,
Susan can see projected images of some of the world's most famous chess players.
And so far, her brain is responding exactly as expected.
The fusiform face area,
her brain's dedicated face processor, is powerfully activated.
But does Susan's brain have another processor that's dedicated to chess patterns?
She's now looking at diagrams from her own chess games-
some dating back to her distant childhood in Budapest.
She's been asked to think about each diagram
as if it's a game in progress, calculating her next move.
These are the first scans of a world champion's brain playing chess.
But a comparison with the face recognition scan
leads to a remarkable discovery.
We're looking at the bottom of the brain, four slices,
and these two areas; this is the fusiform face area.
Susan is using exactly the same area of her brain for both faces and chess.
For you, we can't discriminate a face area from a chess area,
they are identical.
Astonishingly, Susan's brain has hijacked the fusiform face area and adapted it to chess.
Instead of faces, it's comparing incoming chess positions
with the vast library of games in her long term memory.
Susan can recognise a familiar game in just 0.8 seconds-
almost as fast as the face of an old friend.
Years of intense childhood training literally molded Susan's brain for the game.
It's solid evidence for her father's theory-
that genius can be created.
I definitely agree with my father that the work art,
the diligence part is the most important
and I think that being trained properly,
anybody can achieve practically anything.
At the age of 21,
the quality and number of Susan's victories against top opposition
earned her the official title of grandmaster.
The first woman among nearly 600 men.
Youngest sister Judith quickly followed suit.
Ranked in the top fifteen male players,
she is now a leading contender for the world title.
And there's one more twist in the Polgar family story.
This Florida holiday resort is the unlikely setting
for the United States Championships for school children.
Inspired by the Polgar sisters,
girls now compete on equal terms with boys.
But Susan's attention is riveted on the tense deciding match
for the seven year olds of the Second Grade.
Yash Pershad battles for the title against Susan's son, Tommy.
He's a fighter and he's used to playing long games.
So I have my fingers crossed, and hoping things will end well.
Six year old Leeam will be next in line.
Susan sands at a discreet distance,
getting used to a new kind of tension-
as a Chess mum.
I won! I got first place.
He played well until the end,
and then he messed up a lot.
He stepped into a one move checkmate,
and now I'm the US Champion.
The National Champion who, with 6.5 points is- Tom Polgar!
If they want to be grandmasters,
Tommy and Leeam won't have to look too far for the best possible training.
But they better be ready to work hard.
Tomorrow we'll go to Disney and have lots of fun.
And thenĄ after the tournament is over
that's when we go into in depth analysis of the games
and where mistakes were made and how to improve on them.
Are these two more geniuses in the making?
Subtitles synchronized by hattie for MVGroup.org
Best watched using Open Subtitles MKV Player