Polgár "once found Sophia in the bathroom in the middle of the night, a chessboard balanced across her knees." "Sophia, leave the pieces alone!" he told her. "Daddy, they won't leave me alone!" she replied. Polgár's daughters all became excellent chess players, but Sophia, the least successful of the three, who became the sixth-best woman player in the world, quit playing and went on to study painting and interior design and to focus on being a housewife and mother. Judit has been described as "without a doubt, the best woman chess player the world has ever seen." As of 2008, she had been "the world’s highest ranked female chess player for nearly 20 years." Susan, who became second-best woman chess player in the world, was, at age 17, the first woman ever to qualify for what was then called the 'Men's World Championship', but the world chess federation, FIDE, would not allow her to participate. Polgár said in 1992 that he now wanted "to break the racial barriers in the virtually all-white chess world" by adopting "a black infant from the Third World" whom he would train to become a chess prodigy. Susan recalled in 2005 that, about 15 years earlier, "a very nice Dutch billionaire named Joop van Oosterom" had offered to help Polgár "adopt three boys from a developing country and raise them exactly as they raised us." Polgár, according to Susan, "really wanted to do it, but my mother talked him out of it. She understood that life is not only about chess, and that all the rest would fall on her lap." Interviewed in 1993, Polgár was described by William Hartston as resembling "a disgruntled garden gnome" who replied to questions "in a musical voice, with an evangelical tone and a tendency to stare into space." Hartston said that Polgár wore "the scars of weariness after decades of battling against Hungarian chess organisers who wanted his daughters to play in women's tournaments rather than competing against men, and educational authorities who sent an armed policeman to drag Zsuzsa off to school." Polgár's "formula for happiness," wrote Hartston, "is 'work, love, freedom and luck'. But the key is hard work, because hard work creates luck; work plus luck equals genius; and a genius is more likely to be happy." Hartston noted that because Polgár had ended up fathering three daughters, he had been forced to confront issues of sexual inequality.