Locked Behind the Iron Curtain

Another unedited excerpt from my upcoming autobiography (expected to be out on March 11, 2025):

For the next few years, I became a prisoner of sorts, locked behind the Iron Curtain, not sure if I would ever be allowed to leave again to compete. At first, it seemed inconceivable to me that my own government would go to such lengths to keep a young girl who was barely a teenager from playing the game she loves.

The authority might be able to keep me away from top tournaments for a little while, I thought, but they couldn’t keep me from getting better. That part was entirely up to me. And so, I did what I always did when faced with a bad position. I went to work finding ways to improve it, however incrementally.

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. 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 title in 1983 at just 14 years of age, a title I would officially earn the following year.

International Master, or IM, is the last step on the way to grandmaster, chess’ highest designation. And to get there at such a young age was incredibly rare. 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 would also earn 11 separate norms for the title of Woman Grandmaster (WGM). In fact, I fulfilled all my norms and rating at age 12, which would be the youngest ever at that time. But, in what I can only interpret as an act of spite, the Hungarian Chess Federation never submitted my paperwork to FIDE. I honestly did not care because my sight was set on the IM and GM titles.

1984 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).