R.I.P. Grandmaster Istvan Csom.
A couple of days ago my friend @tk22h was kind enough to inform me of the death of Grandmaster Istvan Csom.
I do not have time to write any kind of proper obituary, but hopefully by drawing attention to him here, and providing the following link to an article I wrote some time ago:-
I will interest a few of you in looking into his games for yourself. Indeed, if you want to improve your play in quiet positions, I can think of very few players more worth the time spent.
From the FIDE site.
Add my condolences to those.
For those who judge players purely on ratings, I would add this to my previous article ( sadly no time to redo and repost it ) Csom won both a team and an individual gold medal at Olympiads. For a non-Soviet player to be able to say such a thing back in the days when the USSR utterly dominated the events, that is an extraordinary achievement.
My friend mentioned one of his Olympiad games, which I recalled at once when he said about it.
Not only was it a huge game from the sporting standpoint, but also a really beautiful one. A positional masterpiece of the first order. I noted it at the time, as Yusupov was a player who's games I was paying particular attention to back then.
Hopefully my notes to it will serve as my humble tribute to a fine player - a Grandmaster when it meant something.
R.I.P. Grandmaster Csom, and thank you for your legacy of high class chess, from which I personally took many lessons.
