The oldest living Grandmaster Yuri Averbakh turns 100
Yuri Lvovich Averbakh was already a legendary figure. Now he is also centenary. The oldest living Grandmaster turns 100 today, after beating the odds last year and overcoming a serious COVID infection that took him to hospital. Tall and athletic, Averbakh was physically gifted from his youth, and he cultivated his body as much as his mind. Volleyball was the first sports activity he took up seriously, taking advantage of his height. He also loved hockey and skiing – two national passions in Russia. Not so well known is the fact that, for a short period, he was also a regular at the boxing ring. “In our yard, there was a club which was turned into a dormitory for workers. It was a real rabble, where a cult of strength reigned. Therefore, if you wanted to be equal in the yard, you had to be able to give as good as you got. That’s why I took up boxing for a year,” Averbakh said in an interview with Vladimir Barsky and Eteri Kublashvili on the occasion of his 90th birthday. He was already a middle-aged man when he took swimming as a way to stay in shape. “I swam until very recently, having gone to the swimming pool from 1964 to 1996”. He would swim almost daily when he was already in his seventies and continued to do so until the doctors, worried about his pacemaker, told him to stop when he was already in his late eighties. “A healthy lifestyle with plenty of physical exercises is very important.” While all this explains his longevity, it is very likely that keeping mentally active also played a huge role. He is one of those people who basically never retired and kept working as much as his health allowed. As late as 2016, he would still visit the Central Chess Club at Gogolevsky boulevard every Wednesday to meet with young talents and offer them advice. Photo: Boris Dolmatovsky Averbakh was very fond of working with young people, but he also kept in mind the seniors and, with that intention, he found a chess centre in a library. “We were looking to attract older people to the game,” he explained in an interview with Dagobert Kohlmeyer. “They should not play in tough tournaments but rather spend their time-solving chess problems. Working with studies helps prevent Alzheimer. If you are over seventy, the stress of a tournament can be dangerous to your health. (…) But a calm and reflective attitude to chess is very useful, especially when you are very old.” Averbakh started to play chess at the age of seven, but it was just one more hobby for him during his first years, and he didn’t really take it seriously, with volleyball being his main interest. Then, in February 1935, he had the chance to meet the famous chess composer Nikolai Grigoriev, at a time when Moscow was hosting its second international chess tournament, with Capablanca, Lasker, Botvinnik, and many others. “Grigoriev gave a lecture in the club, showing some of his famous pawn studies. They made an enormous impression on me, and that was the first time I sensed that chess wasn’t simply a game but was something more, that it was an art. And I also had the urge to master that field. That’s how I got involved in chess.” Finally hooked on chess at the age of 13, his first great success came three years later when he won the Soviet Union’s championship for schoolchildren. However, his incipient career would come to a halt, along with most chess organized activity, due to the World War II. He was evacuated with all his school from Moscow to Izhevsk, barely avoided being recruited himself when he reached the required age, and he would only return to Moscow in 1943. Yuri Averbakh at the tournament in Ivanovo (1944) It was then that his career took off, gaining in strength until he won the Moscow Championship of 1949, ahead of a strong field that included Andor Lilienthal and Vladimir Simagin, among many others. This was his first major success and the beginning of a decade in which he became one of the top players in the world, probably one of the top-10 at his peak. He won the Moscow Championship again the next year, and in 1952 he earned the Grandmaster title – a title he has borne for almost 70 years! Averbakh finished 5th at the Stockholm Interzonal Tournament in 1952, qualifying for the legendary Zurich 1953 Candidates Tournament, where he finished in 10th place. The next year, in 1954, he became champion of the USSR, and in 1956 he was very close to repeating this feat, sharing 1st-3rd places with Taimanov and Spassky, and ending up in second place after a tie-break stage. In his collection of selected games, published by Cadogan, Averbakh says that he learned chess “the wrong way round”, becoming a strategist before he learned properly about tactics and combinations. A very solid player, pure attack players would often feel uncomfortable when playing against him: Rashid Nezhmetdinov, for instance, was only able to get one draw in the nine games they played. Photo: ERIC KOCH @ANEFO Averbakh reduced his competitive activities when he reached his forties, leaving behind numerous victories in international events all over the world, like Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro, Adelaide, and Vienna. His latest international success was the Rubinstein Memorial held in Polanica-Zdroj in 1975. He shifted then his interest from playing the game to studying the game. And in that, he was as successful, or even more, as he was as a player. “My investigative character forced me to make a serious study of the endgame, that phase of the game where individual pieces battle against each other. Initially, I published several articles and then thought about a book devoted to various types of endings.” His endeavour turned into a monumental work, the first systematic study of the endgame in history, published in five volumes. “So
FIDE World Championship Match 2023 – Call for bids
1.1 The International Chess Federation (FIDE) will hold the World Championship Match in spring 2023. The Regulations shall be approved by March 15, 2022. FIDE is opening a bidding procedure to host the event. 1.2 The basic provisions are the following: a) Number of standard games to be played – 14b) Total duration – up to 21 daysc) Recommended prize fund – 2,000,000 (two million) eurosd) The Organiser shall cover all organisation expenses according to the Regulations and FIDE standardse) The Organiser shall respect the rights of the FIDE sponsors and partners, including for the video broadcast. 1.3 The Applicant shall fill in the Bid Form. A signed copy shall be submitted as an e-mail message to the FIDE Secretariat to office@fide.com from February 7, 2022, to June 7, 2022, by 23:59 Lausanne time. FIDE has the right to extend this deadline if considered necessary. All the documents shall be submitted in English. The bid should be accompanied by a non-refundable fee of three thousand (3,000) euros. Additional documents may be requested by the FIDE General Strategy Commission (GSC) for further evaluation.
FIDE Grand Prix: Aronian and So make their claim
The players will enjoy a free day tomorrow IM Michael Rahal – Berlin, February 7th 2022 – The participants in the Berlin Grand Prix have a maximum of exactly fifteen minutes to play their first move on the board after the arbiter starts the round. However, elite players are generally already seated or at least in the building five or ten minutes earlier. So, at the start of today’s round four, when GM Pentala Harikrishna played 1.e4 and his opponent GM Alexei Shirov was clearly absent, you could sense the nervousness around the room. The organizers quickly contacted him at the official hotel and, luckily for Shirov, he was in his room. Visibly nervous at the prospect of “losing on time”, he ran to the playing venue, arriving a few seconds before being forfeited. In his postgame interview, Shirov apologized profoundly: he hadn’t checked the schedule and had mistakenly thought that there was no game today. Going into the free day, and with only two rounds to go in the qualifying group stage, only two players – GM’s Levon Aronian and Wesley So – dominate their groups with three points out of four. But as we witnessed today, anything can happen: also, tiebreaks are looming on the horizon for players with equal scores at the end. Pool A In yesterday’s press conference, GM Hikaru Nakamura said that “everyone will be going for a specific player in the group from now on”, clearly referring to his opponent today, Etienne Bacrot, currently last in the group standings. However, although Bacrot is no longer a professional player – “…my focus nowadays is on coaching Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (MVL), and therefore it’s difficult to play with the top players” – he still prepares the games thoroughly and, for the second time, brought out the French defence. “After all, I am a French player!” he said after the game”. Today he caught Nakamura by surprise with 10…g5!?, a nice opening idea introduced last year by World Championship challengerrr GM Ian Nepomniatchchi. The play took on a forced nature and Nakamura decided that in view of his tournament situation, it was not the day to play on in a win-lose manner. “I was afraid the position could collapse if I continued the final position” was Bacrot’s final conclusion after the game. “However, it’s still very nice to sense the following of the French chess fans that support me”. In the other game of the group, the two Russians faced each other for the second time, both of them in need of a win to catch Nakamura in the standings. With Black, Andrey Esipenko went for the reliable Nimzo-Indian reaching a slighly inferiour middlegame position which was complex enough to make Alexander Grischuk go wrong. “I got completely confused. After 22.Qd3 Andrey played Qc6, and I started calculating some lines, but I will not say which ones. Because if I say, tomorrow I will have not only a PCR test but also a psychiatric test,” joked Grischuk after the game, stirring up a laugh from the spectators in the press room. Esipenko defended with precision, and the draw became inevitable. “Both my strength and my weakness is that I am a perfectionist,” concluded Grischuk after the game. Pool B GM Vladimir – “I am very strong in closed positions” – Fedoseev made his claim for first place in group B today by crushing GM Grigoriy Oparin with Black. “I had a blackout and missed …Qg4″. Maybe there is some incredible tactic that saves the game, but I couldn’t see it” was Oparin’s postgame explanation. Already famous in the postgame press conferences for his incredible calculation skills, Fedoseev recited several interesting lines that he had calculated, but which all led to good positions for him. It was clear he had everything under control: with this important win, he ties for first place in the group. When he was asked by WGM Dina Belankaya if would like to have a chess opening named after him, Fedoseev surprised us all by responding: “I already invented two openings. For example, the line 1.d4 d5 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 a6 was developed by me and I am very proud of this idea”. GM Richard Rapport was out for the win today against GM Radoslaw Wojtaszek in the other game of the group. With White, he played an excellent technical game against Black’s isolated queen-pawn but couldn’t convert, in good measure thanks to his opponent’s tenacious defence. After the game, Rapport was asked what he considered the best skills to have as a chess player. His answer stood out: “The engines are pretty strong, so I suspect that accurate calculation is the best skill to have as a chess player”. Pool C In the game that might have decided the winner of this group, GM Levon Aronian displayed some fine opening preparation to hold a comfortable draw against GM Vidit Gujarathi, maintaining top position going into the rest day. “I have analyzed this to play with White actually, and also from the Black side. It’s kind of a solid line for Black, and my conclusion is that maybe it’s a tiny bit better for White but nothing really special. I think it’s important in this type of position to play precisely: I have to act fast with …a5—a4 as there is a strategical risk,” said Aronian after the game in conversation with Press Officer IM Michael Rahal. In the other game of the pool, GM’s Daniil Dubov and Vincent Keymer fought out a very technical battle in a Caro-Kan: neither of the two wanted to share the last place anymore. Today the Russian prevailed, notching up a win that allows him to tie for second place and keep his winning aspirations intact. “This is chess nowadays. The Caro-Kan used to be a really fighting opening, but now, with the line I played, sometimes you will run into something like this. You have to be very well prepared to play 15 only moves in a