“It has been said that chess, like love and music, has the power to make men happy and unhappy.”

So wrote Larry Evans, who parlayed his record as one of America’s best professional chess players into a career as a writer whose syndicated chess column ran for more than two decades and reached millions of readers.

Evans, who wrote for insiders as well as for those whose passion for the game had yet to be discovered, died Nov. 15 of complications from gallbladder surgery at a hospital in Reno, Nev. He was 78.

A sparring partner of the American chess phenomenon Bobby Fischer, Evans was also a prodigy. He announced himself as a new chess talent when he was 15, winning the prestigious Marshall Chess Club championship in New York. Four years later, in 1951, he won the U.S. Chess Championship.