We are excited to announce a new partnership to host the Ontario qualifier for the Susan Polgar Foundation Girls Invitational (SPFGI) in February 2018. This is an all girls event aimed at encouraging more girls to play chess. The winner will qualify as the Ontario delegate and will be invited to participate in the SPFGI tournament taking place in July 2018 at the Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri with opportunities to win either a full two-year or four-year scholarship to Webster.
Details on the SPFGI Ontario qualification tournament will follow in the coming weeks.
For those not familiar with GM Susan Polgar, she is a Hungarian-American chess player, and one of the strongest female players ever, having been Women’s World Chess Champion from 1996 until 1999. She beat the odds back in 1986 when she made history by being the first ever female player to qualify to compete in the Men’s World Chess Championship
GM Susan Polgar is very active in the chess community and she has set up various foundations to promote chess education in the US and globally. The mission of the Susan Polgar Foundation is to promote chess, with all its educational, social and competitive benefits throughout the United States, for young people of all ages, especially girls. Susan dreams of making chess so popular that it competes with other sports, like tennis, baseball and football. “We hope to get many more colleges to start offering scholarships for chess,” she says. “And we are working to promote chess as a grassroots movement in some of the smaller cities.”
Learn more about Susan from her personal website at www.susanpolgar.com