The late great chess player Reuben Fine wrote: “Drawn games are usually looked down upon by the chess public. The common attitude is that if anything is worthwhile it must have resulted in a clear-cut decision. This point of view compels editors t...
Domenico Ercole del Rio (c. 1718 - c. 1802) was born in Guiglia, Italy, and wasa lawyer and author. He published a legendary chess book in 1750 under thepseudonym "Anonymous Modenese” which was the basis of a work by Giambattista Lolli thirteen ye...
Vera Menchik (16 February 1906—27 June 1944) was born to Czech (father) andEnglish (mother) parents, in Moscow. She was a British chess player who gainednotoriety as the world's first women's chess champion. From 1927 until her death she was women...
Géza Maróczy (3 March 1870-29 May 1951) was a leading Hungarian chess master and also a practicing engineer. He learned to play chess at the age of fifteen, and soon acquired the skill of a master in competition with the best players in the Intern...
Milan Vidmar (22 June 1885 – 9 October 1962) was a Slovene electrical engineer,chess player, chess theorist, philosopher, and writer born in Ljubljana, Austria-Hungary (now Slovenia). He won renown especially in the field of electrical engineering...
Stahlberg, Stoltz, and Lundin, were called “The Three Swedish Musketeers"! They made their names as world players at the Olympic Games at Folkstone 1933 and Warsaw 1935 where Sweden took the third and second place respectively.The Swedish Grandmas...
Ossip Bernstein (20 September 1882, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) – 30 November 1962 in the French Pyrenees) was a chess grandmaster. Born in Imperial Russia to a family of Jewish heritage, Ossip Bernstein grew up in pre-revolutionary Russia. He ea...
Carlos Torre Repetto was born in Yucatan, Mexico, in 1904. He is considered one of the brightest geniuses of the game of all time. His games are usually measured and qualified as jewels of beauty in books and journals. The Masters of the epoch com...
Ernst Franz Grünfeld (or Gruenfeld) was born on the 23rd of November 1893 in Vienna, Austria like many other chess players. He was the seventh of eight children. His father was from Silesia and his mother from Bohemia.His childhood was very unhapp...
Friedrich (Fritz) Saemisch was born on the 20th of September 1896 in Berlin, Germany.A thoughtful opening theoretician, he has two major opening variations named after him, which are still played today at the highest levels! Nimzo-Indian, Samisch ...
Edgar Colle was born in Gent, Belgium, in 1897, best known for the eponymous Colle System: 1.d4 d5 2.Nf3 Nf6 3.e3 e6 4.Bd3 c5 5.c3. The formation c3-d4-e3 is the famous Colle triangle, a species of reversed Semi-Slav Defense. This placid-looking o...
To reach the current evolution of chess knowledge, chess like science, art and sport, has absorbed the best of the most outstanding and gifted players, as well as many other not so famous but who contributed with many ideas that after have bee...
A long time ago I read some book where the writer explained how Benjamin Blumenfeld, an excellent Russian player between the First and Second World Wars, took the idea of his gambit (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 c5 4.d5 b5!?) from the famous game Nimzow...
The chess club of the English coastal town of Hastings was founded in 1882 and in 1895 the club organized a tournament that was the strongest ever held up to that time. Taking place over the month of August, it included all the leading players of ...
Max Weiss has the immense honor to be the co-winner (tied with Chigorin) of the longest [over-the-board] tournament in chess history, a true marathon of twenty players in a double round event through 64 days! A tournament that was organized t...
William Davies Evans was born in Pembroke, Gales, January 27, 1790. Marine by profession since age fourteen, he became sea Captain in 1819 in the United Kingdom Postal Service. By 1818, he had learnt the moves of chess. During his free hours in of...
It is said that few people in chess have been so uncomplicated and frank as Miguel Najdorf, and for this reason he created around him a very good atmosphere. Maybe for that, it is not surprising that at Buenos Aires 1939 during the Chess Olympiad,...
Rudolf Charousek (September 19, 1873, Prague – April 18, 1900, Budapest) was a Hungarian chess player. He had a tragically short career, and he was once called by Reuben Fine the John Keats of chess. A brilliant player and a tremendous talent,...
Emanuel Schiffers, Russian chessmaster and chess writer, was born to German parents in St. Petersburg on May 4, 1850 and died there December 12, 1904. He was educated in his native city, studying the classical, physical, and mathematical faculties...
Isidor Gunsberg (November 2, 1854, in Budapest – May 2, 1930, in London), English merchant, future challenger for the World Chess Championship and chess journalist began his career as the hidden operator of the chess automaton Mephisto! Nowadays t...
Mikhail Chigorin (12 November 1850–25 January 1908) was born in Gatchina, near Saint Petersburg, and was the founder of the Russian chess school as well as the first grandmaster from Russia. He served as a major source of inspiration and influence...
“He was not popular with his colleagues; he was surly, arrogant, conceited, and almost paranoid. People were out to poison him. Noise bothered him. Everything bothered him. Not naturally, he was in constant controversy with other players. They obj...
Aaron Nimzowitsch (7 November 1886 – 16 March 1935), one of the most influential players and writers in chess history, was born in Riga, (the birthplace of two chess geniuses: Mihail Tal and Alexei Shirov!) Latvia, one of the Baltic states, along ...
Richard Réti (28 May 1889, Pezinok – 6 June 1929, Prague) was an ethnic Jewish, Austrian-Hungarian, later Czechoslovakian chess player, chess author, and composer of endgame studies. His older brother Rudolph Réti was a noted (musical) composer an...
