The Chess Story of Pyotr Kapitsa
No one will regret the time devoted to Chess, for it will help in any profession.
Tigran Petrosyan
Hello, dear readers!
Today I want to tell you about a remarkable man—Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa. His name is known primarily in science: he was a great physicist, a Nobel Prize winner, and a researcher of low temperatures and superfluidity. But behind the stern image of a scientist lurked a man with wide interests and passions. One of these passions was chess.
Read about Kapitsa, his scientific achievements, and how chess became a part of his life in my new blog.
Table of contents
• The great scientist of the 20th century
• Friendship with great chess players
• Personality in Science and Chess
The great scientist of the 20th century
Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa was born on July 8, 1894, in Kronstadt, Russia, to a military engineer. He studied at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, where his mentor was the future Nobel laureate Abram Fedorovich Ioffe. Even then, Kapitsa stood out for his extraordinary experimental talent: he was able to devise original instruments and unconventional research methods.
After the Revolution and the Civil War, he found himself in England. There, in Cambridge, from 1921 onward, he worked in the laboratory of Ernest Rutherford, the legendary physicist and researcher of the atomic nucleus. Kapitsa quickly became one of Rutherford's closest collaborators and earned a reputation as a "Russian genius." 
Kapitsa was introduced to chess in his youth in St. Petersburg, but he became seriously interested in it in England. Tired after long hours in the laboratory, he loved to relax at the chessboard. For him, chess was not so much a sport as an intellectual exercise, akin to solving physics problems.
By 1923, he had already joined the Trinity Chess Club at Cambridge. It was one of the oldest student clubs in England, attracting strong players—future scientists, politicians, and educators. In October of that year, Kapitsa played for the university team for the first time in a match against the Ipswich team. His game attracted considerable interest: he demonstrated a deep understanding of the opening and a bold attacking strategy.
In 1925, he was elected Honorary Vice-President of the Club. For a foreigner, this was an exceptional sign of trust—a sign that he had earned the respect of the Cambridge chess community.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Kapitsa traveled extensively throughout Europe, finding a chess café in every city. His favorite was the Régence in Paris, a place where Dumas, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Napoleon once played.
He once played there against a local chess master who mistook him for an Englishman. Kapitsa, unperturbed, beat his opponent, who panicked and rushed to ask for advice… in Russian, unaware that he was also Russian. When the truth was revealed, the player was so stunned that he fled through the back door. This story became a legend among Cambridge students.
Friendship with great chess players
After returning to the USSR in 1934, Kapitsa continued to play actively. His home and dacha became meeting places for chess players.
Mikhail Botvinnik, the future world champion, once agreed to play a game in an unusual format: "in tandem" with the physicist Rubinin against Kapitsa. The condition was that the players would move alternately, without consulting each other. As a result, Botvinnik's brilliant sacrifice was ruined by his partner's move, and Kapitsa won. He later recounted this story with pleasure, teasing the champion.
He always tried to attack the king at the first opportunity, preferred open openings, especially gambit continuations, and it seemed to me a good idea to give him the first volume of the Encyclopedia of Chess Openings, dedicated to open openings, for his birthday.
Vasily Smyslov, the 1957 world champion, met Kapitsa on numerous occasions. According to his recollections, the scientist played "selflessly," loved risky openings and sharp play, and disliked lengthy positional adjustments. Smyslov believed that Kapitsa was a strong master.
When he found time to play chess, I had an interesting opponent," Smyslov recounted. "I fondly recall my meetings with Pyotr Leonidovich and our chess battles that took place on Nikolina Gora, at the academician's dacha. Pyotr Leonidovich was distinguished by his lively intellect, and he played chess with absolute abandon. The matches lasted until late in the evening. During the games, Pyotr Leonidovich was very focused. Once, during one of our meetings, Pyotr Leonidovich's son, Professor Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa, dropped by, and I began asking him about the popular science television program 'The Obvious - the Incredible.' Pyotr Leonidovich asked me not to "get distracted"—it was clear that the game was captivating him completely. Apparently, this trait was characteristic of Kapitsa in general and manifested itself in other areas of his activity.
Isaak Khalatnikov, an academician and theoretical physicist, was his constant rival in the last decades of his life. Their games often lasted until the night and were accompanied by lively debates about the beauty of moves.
In his later years, he probably played at a first-class level. But his endgame technique and understanding of the position suggest that at one time he could have played at the level of a master."
Kapitsa treated chess as a science. He solved problems and studies, and attempted to compose chess compositions. He especially enjoyed beautiful sacrifices, unexpected moves, and elegant mating nets.
He said:
Chess is not for winning, but for playing!
However, he hated losing: he viewed every defeat as a personal challenge.
Even when, in 1946, after a conflict with Lavrentiy Beria, Kapitsa was temporarily dismissed from the Institute for Physical Problems, he continued to play chess. At his dacha, he created what he called a "house of physical problems," where he would gather colleagues and friends. There, they not only discussed scientific issues but also played chess games that lasted for hours.
Kapitsa was also interested in chess technology. In the 1970s, he tried playing against the first electronic chess machines. However, he quickly realized the limitations of the computer: it readily accepted sacrifices but was unable to think positionally.
A machine is boring, it can't surprise you
He needed real opponents.
Personality in Science and Chess
For Kapitsa, chess reflected his scientific approach:
a passion for simple yet profound ideas
a love of paradoxes and unexpected solutions
the ability to take risks while maintaining a level head
He approached physics in the same way – boldly rejecting established views, seeking new paths, and often winning thanks to his intuition and ingenuity.
Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa went down in history as a great physicist, but among his friends, he was also known as a passionate chess player. He could spend hours at the board, playing with academics, students, or world champions, and always remained himself – independent, passionate, and cheerful.
Chess was not only a game for him, but also a way to maintain mental clarity, train his imagination, and find beauty in simplicity.
And if in science he discovered superfluidity, then in chess, his greatest discovery was the joy of the game itself.
Thank you to everyone who reads this blog! 
I want to say that writing it was both very interesting and challenging, as there is very little information about Kapitsa as a chess player. I literally had to sift through printed publications to find material for this story. Unfortunately, I was unable to reconstruct or find any games played by this outstanding physicist.
But don't think you've been reading this blog in vain. On the contrary, you can now see for yourself that chess can be useful in many professions.
See you in new blogs! 
