The Mirthful Miguel Najdorf

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out until too late that he's been playing with two queens all along.

— Terry Pratchett

In the years following the Second World War, Soviet chess was a runaway train, pulling the gap between it and every other country further apart by the month. With a new generation consisting of players like Botvinnik and Bronstein, tournament results filled with the hammer and sickle. Even the Candidates and World Championships, tournaments that were designed to adjudicate who was the best player in the world, became a game of "Which Soviet Player Shoved Into The Candidates Can Win?"

Results table of the 1950 Budapest Candidates; 7/10 participants played for the USSR and the top four were all Soviet ©Wikipedia.org

However, this was still during an era when the red juggernaut was still in embryo, so there was still room for others to challenge it. One such challenger was Miguel Najdorf, a name any serious player would recognise, thanks to the most popular Sicilian variation bearing his name. For years, he was not only one of the greatest players in the world but also one of the most active and colourful. His life, both on and away from the chessboard, was rich in experience, both joyful and agonising. This is the story of Miguel Najdorf — the man who led Argentine chess to glory.

Life in Poland (1910-1939)

Mojsze Mendel Najdorf was born the oldest of five children to Jewish parents Gedali and Rojza on the 15th of April, 1910, in the small Polish town of Grodzisk Mazowiecki. At the budding age of nine, the young Najdorf learnt to play chess from a friend of his father, and after falling in love with the game, he studied with the respected master Dawid Przepiorka before he went to Savielly Tartakower, whom he called "my teacher" for the rest of his life. His childhood sensibility was barely affected by the Great War, finishing his studies in mathematics and winning his first international tournament at age eighteen. A year later, Najdorf played what probably remained his most memorable game: a five-piece sacrifice sensation that would be published in many newspapers and dubbed the "Polish Immortal" by Tartakower.

Throughout the next decade, he would trail not far behind Tartakower in every Polish Championship he participated in, even winning the 1936 Hungarian and 1937 Yugoslav Championships. In those times, the Polish team was one of the world's strongest, regularly fighting for gold medals at Olympiads. In 1930, the Poles, led by Akiba Rubinstein, won the tournament, ahead of Hungary (led by Geza Maroczy) and Czechoslovakia (led by Salo Flohr). The subsequent year, they came second, and third again two years later. Their bronze medal in 1937 and silver medals in 1936 and 1939 were both won with Najdorf as the second board and Tartakower as the first. Unfortunately, this was the last real victory of our protagonist, for his life would not remain a fairy tale forever. 

The Polish team at the 1935 Olympiad with Najdorf second from the right ©Chessbase.com

Settling in Argentina

I was born twice, without having ever died.

— Miguel Najdorf

His second life began in the late winter of 1939 when he arrived in Buenos Aires as the second board of the Polish Olympiad team, and only a week later, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Like many other participants, Najdorf did not return home, thus avoiding the Holocaust, but his wife, mother, four brothers and three-year-old daughter were all killed. The unsettling thoughts of his family back in Poland caused the nervous Najdorf to make too many mistakes and resign his game against the Dutch team. However, the Poles finished the tournament brilliantly, winning the silver medal with Najdorf achieving the best second-board result.

Results of the 1939 Buenos Aires Olympiad with one flag removed for obvious reason ©Wikipedia.org

By then it was 1940. Najdorf had nowhere to go and nothing to go to, as he spent part of his money in a casino when he didn't know that war was about to break out. During the days, he walked the streets of Buenos Aires as a peddler, and in the evenings he hustled chess for money. He did not have any major problems with Spanish, since he learnt Latin in high school and showed an extraordinary talent for languages. His friend, Argentine chess player Carlos Guimard, encouraged him to enter the insurance industry, providing with him enough money to survive the next few years.

Post-War Optimism

For the remainder of his life, Najdorf returned to Warsaw many times. He knew about the death of his wife and child before 1945, but in an attempt to contact family and friends after the war, he decided to play a blindfold exhibition against an astonishing 45 opponents in Sao Paulo in the hope that news of this exhibition would spread to his remaining family in Germany, Poland or Russia. Najdorf won 39 games, drew four and only lost two, but he did not hear from his family again.

In 1944, Najdorf became an Argentine citizen and between 1949 and 1975, he won the national championship seven times. According to Chessmetrics, from 1946 to 1948, Najdorf was number two in the world, behind the Iron Logician Mikhail Botvinnik. He scored his first win against Botvinnik at Groningen 1946 and finished the tournament joint fourth with Laszlo Szabo. In 1950, he was one of the inaugural recipients of the Grandmaster title, and in the same year, he finished fourth again among a list of renowned Soviet stars at the Budapest Candidates. Then, in the controversial 1953 Zurich Candidates, he placed joint sixth with Efim Geller, half a point behind Iron Tigran. 

Back then, Argentina, thanks to the wave of refugees from the 1939 Olympiad, was the strongest chess nation in South America and one of the strongest in the world. At the Chess Olympiads, Najdorf played first board for Argentina, and thanks to his energy and enthusiasm, from 1950 to 1954, Najdorf's team won silver medals three times, always finishing close behind the Soviet steamroller.

Najdorf (left) playing against van Scheltinga (right) in Amsterdam 1950 ©Dutch National Archives

Although his World Championship chances had effectively ended in 1955 when he finished joint 12th at the Gothenburg Interzonal with only the top nine qualifying for the 1956 Amsterdam Candidates, Najdorf remained a strong player well into his sixties. He was the winner of Mar del Plata 1961 and the despite losing rounds one and two of the first Capablanca Memorial in 1962, he won 14 of the remaining 19 games and drew the rest to finish ahead of Spassky, Polugaevsky and Smyslov. 

The Last Lap

The later years of Najdorf's career were no less exciting than his prime. During Bobby Fischer's meteoric rise to the top, Najdorf frequently commented on Fischer's perfect playing style. In 1963 and 1966, he himself played in the first and second Piatigorsky Cup tournaments, neither of which could exhibit his dominance any longer. However, Fischer does not play perfectly, as demonstrated when Najdorf defeated the snowballing youngster to cost him a crucial point.

Just before his 60th birthday, he participated in the 1970 USSR vs Rest of the World match, achieving a 2-2 score against former World Champion Mikhail Tal. Najdorf's dynamic personality made him a favourite among chess fans, as he displayed a talent for witty sayings. For example, commenting on his opponent at the USSR vs Rest of the World match, he remarked,

When Spassky offers you a piece, you might as well resign then and there. But when Tal offers you a piece, you would do well to keep playing, because then he might offer you another, and then another, and then... who knows?

Najdorf remained active in the chess scene until the end of his life. He won the South African Open in 1976 and at age 69, he tied for second at the strong Buenos Aires 1979 behind Bent Larsen. At Buenos Aires 1988, he placed fourth with a score of 8.5/15 and the following year at the 1989 Argentine Championship, he tied for fourth one last time with 10/17.

His last national championship was in 1991 at age 81, where he could only score 5/17 in a pool of rising talents. By that time, he had already become physically frail. In 1996, Najdorf suffered a serious heart attack in Seville, which required a pacemaker insertion. He tragically passed away on the 4th of July, 1997 at the University Hospital in Malaga, Spain due to complications during an operation. 

Miguel Najdorf with Lev Polugaevsky (circa 1994)

Legacy

In the span of his life, Najdorf defeated many World Champions, namely Euwe, Botvinnik, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky and Fischer. Many of his great attacks were conducted in the King's Indian Defence or his favourite line of the Sicilian, both of which received enormous contributions from the old man. "Don Miguel," as colleagues often called him, tirelessly promoted chess in Argentina through multiple blindfold simuls. He was also a well-respected chess journalist, running a popular column in the Buenos Aires Clarin newspaper.

Najdorf never became a professional chess player in his life, crediting his tournament success to his love for the game rather than financial gains or recognition. Sociability and amicability made him a charming man and a favourite of the people, to the point where every notable politician considered it his duty to meet Argentina's chess star. He is buried in Argentina, where a museum has been erected in honour of the national champion, who, despite his rugged life, never gave up his smile.

Something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.

– Barack Obama

As promised in my last blog, the first person to guess which two games were in my thumbnail gets a shoutout here, so shoutout to @DogtheRock for not touching grass. And of course as always, thanks for reading.