Highest Rated 15 Year Old

Another excerpt from my upcoming autobiography (March 11, 2025)

If anything, the hostile treatment I was getting from the authorities was the best motivator I could have hoped for, because my chess improved by leaps and bounds during that period. By January of 1983, I had become among the top ten female players in the world. And even with the travel ban in place, I was able to meet the first of the three performance requirements — or “norms” as they are called in chess — for my International Master (IM) title that same year at just 14 years of age, a title I would officially earn in 1984. To put it in perspective, the World Champion at the time, Anatoly Karpov, didn’t become an IM until he was around 18. Kasparov was about 16. So the fact that I was advancing even more quickly than these great players was a very encouraging sign.

I had already satisfied the requirements for the Woman Grandmaster (WGM) title two years earlier, which would have made me the youngest person in history to do so. In fact, I would ultimately earn 11 separate WGM norms. But, in what I can only interpret as an act of spite, the Hungarian Chess Federation never submitted my paperwork to FIDE. I didn’t make a fuss about it. I needed to pick my battles. Becoming a grandmaster was my real goal, anyway, so I could not care less.

But the accomplishments that stand out to me from that period had little to do with formal titles. Nineteen-eighty-four was the year when I became the highest-rated 15-year-old chess player on the planet, male or female. That same year, I was officially recognized as the #1 ranked female player in the world (a distinction I shared with the Swedish player Pia Cramling). This flurry of achievements only raised my hopes for the future. The government had tried to derail my career, and in response I just kept getting better. I could just feel that it was only a matter of time before this terrible episode would finally be over. As it turned out, my enemies weren’t finished with me just yet.