Moving Forward with the Susan Polgar Foundation

As the founder of the Susan Polgar Foundation (SPF), one of my goals is to support good chess activities. In the last few years, the SPF has been heavily involved in promoting the benefits of chess to young people across the country.

The SPF created countless major scholastic events and we worked with UTD, Texas Tech and others to award nearly $500,000 in scholarships, prizes and stipends in the past few years alone!

This year, the SPF started to help train teachers with a chess curriculum that I developed using my 30+ years of chess experience (in Europe and the US). The idea is to have these teachers teach proper chess in their own schools or districts.

The SPF also reached out to promote chess in the mainstream with events such as the Mayor’s Cup (with support from the office of NY City Mayor Bloomberg and NY City Sports Commissioner Ken Podziba), Chess for Peace (a program that was created by Mikhail Korenman with support from former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev and 7-time World Champion Anatoly Karpov) and the upcoming Tri-State Chess Challenge (with support from the office of Governor Pataki).

I am proud to say that the SPF has just reached out to two additional areas: College Chess and Military Chess.

The SPF will sponsor the top All-Female College Team and top Mixed-Doubles Team at the upcoming Intercollegiate and Scholastic Pan-Am Championships. The SPF will also sponsor 12 prizes for the upcoming 47th Annual Armed Forces Open Chess Championship.

The SPF has no paid employees. Everyone involved are volunteers. Our fundings come from charitable contributions. Outside of paying for basic expenses such as rent, travel costs and minor operating expenses, etc., the SPF uses most of the funds available to help chess.

Our key for success is we do what make sense to help chess with no political or personal interests. Thank you for your support!