First GM Centurian- Yuri Averbakh
Yury Averbakh is the world's oldest living Grandmaster. He turned 100 on 8th Feb 2022.
In his prime, he was one of the strongest players in the USSR. He was awarded the Grandmaster title in 1952. In 1953 he took part in the legendary Candidates Tournament in Zurich and next year became USSR champion. He wore so many caps which nobody else did: International Judge of chess composition (otherwise known as chess problems) in 1956, International Arbiter in 1969. As Benjamin Disraeli might have put it, he reached the top of the Soviet greasy pole by becoming President of the USSR Chess Federation from 1972-1977.
Born on 8 February 1922 in Kaluga, a city in the southwest of Moscow, Yury Averbakh has witnessed and has helped to shape a century of chess. He was born into a Jewish family – his father Lev Lazarevic, who worked as a forester at the time of his son's birth, had immigrated from Germany – the original family name was “Auerbach”. His mother's Russian family came from the Kaluga area.
When Averbakh was three years old, the family moved to Moscow and lived at Bolshoi Afanasyesky Pereulok, which was only a few minutes' walk from Gogolevsky Boulevard, where the Central Chess Club took up residence in 1956.
In 1935, the 2nd International Chess Tournament took place in Moscow. The tournament was a major event in the Russian capital and attracted a lot of attention. It was played in the Museum of Fine Arts. Averbakh could not visit the tournament, but he did attend a simul by Emanuel Lasker and Rudolf Spielmann at the House of Young Communists. A fellow student of Averbakh defeated Lasker in the simul, and when he saw this, Averbakh felt the urge to get better at chess.
After the Lasker/Spielmann simul, Averbakh regularly took part in chess events and visited the chess pavilion in the sports park. He also enjoyed playing volleyball and basketball.
One day Andor Lilienthal gave a 155-board simul in the sports park. Averbakh took part and won his game when Lilienthal blundered a piece in a winning position. The whole simul lasted 12 hours.
Averbakh joined the Moscow Chess Club, which was located in the basement of the Ministry of Justice on Ilyinka. Here, Averbakh visited a lecture by the famous endgame composer Nikolay Grigoriev and became an endgame enthusiast. He also regularly attended the chess classes at the Pioneer Palace, where he soon took part in solving competitions. The training at the Pioneer Palace also included handicap simuls with Grandmasters such as Alexander Kotov or Alexander Tolush. During one of these simuls, Averbakh first met Isaak Linder, who later became a well-known chess historian.
Averbakh made steady progress and in 1938 won the U16 Soviet Championship. After finishing school he started to study engineering, but in 1952 he gave up his studies to devote himself entirely to chess.
In 1944 Averbakh became a “Master of the USSR”, and in 1952 FIDE made him a Grandmaster. In 1949, 1950 and 1962 Averbakh won the Moscow Championship, and with a shared 5th place in the Saltsjöbaden Interzonal Tournament 1952, he qualified for the Candidates Tournament 1953 in Zurich.
In 1954 Averbakh won the USSR Championship, and two years later he shared first place with Mark Taimanov and Boris Spassky. In 1955 Averbakh also worked as a second for the young Spassky at the World Junior Championship. Spassky's regular coach Alexander Tolush had broken his leg and a replacement was needed at short notice.
In the 1950s Averbakh was a sparring partner of Mikhail Botvinnik, who played several training matches against Averbakh to prepare for his World Championship matches.
Averbakh's international tournament successes include victories and shared first places at the tournaments in Dresden 1956, Djakarta 1956, Adelaide 1960, Vienna 1961, Moscow 1962, Bucharest 1971, Polanica-Zdró, and Manila 1979.
As a member of the Soviet national team, Averbakh won, among others, the 1957 European Team Championships in Baden (Austria) and 1965 in Hamburg. But Averbakh never got a chance to play in the Olympiad because there were too many top players in the USSR who were even better than him.
Averbakh's best rating after the introduction of the Elo-system in 1966 was 2550 in 1971, but he probably reached his peak in the mid/late 1950s. In his calculation of historical ratings, the statistician Jeff Sonas sees Averbakh as number 8th in the world during this period.
Averbakh published numerous textbooks, especially on the endgame, and composed more than 200 endgame studies and for a long time he was considered to be the world's leading endgame expert. He also contributed to opening theory, and a popular variation of the King's Indian Defence is named after him.
In 1962 Averbakh became the editor of Schachmaty w SSSR.
From 1969 Averbakh also acted as an arbiter and, among other things, officiated at the PCA World Championship Kasparov v Short, London 1993.
From 1973 to 1978 Averbakh was President of the Soviet Chess Federation, having previously been a member of the Presidium. The sensational escape and defection of Viktor Kortschnoi, who did not return from a tournament in 1976, took place during this period. In a strong reaction, the Soviet Sports Committee had prepared a critical statement, which Averbakh and almost all the top Soviet grandmasters signed. However, there were some exceptions: Botvinnik and Gulko refused, saying that they would not sign collective statements. Karpov published his own statement and Bronstein famously did not answer his phone.
After his active career, Averbakh worked as author, editor, theoretician, second to several world champions such as Botvinnik, Smyslov, Spassky,etc.
In his autobiographical work Selected Games, published by Cadogan in a translation by Ken Neat, Averbakh eloquently wrote of his induction into chess:
“The first chess book that accidentally came into my hands was My System by Aron Nimzowitsch. It was hard to think of a worse choice! After all, in chess you must first learn to attack, and only then to defend, you must gain a mastery of tactics, and only then strategy. My System is a good book, only not for beginners. It is a textbook on positional play, and first you must learn to make combinations. As will be seen, with me it all happened the other way round, and it is not surprising that later, to a significant extent, I had to relearn.
Late in 1935 I visited the Moscow Chess Club for the first time, and there I was fortunate enough to listen to a lecture by the great endgame expert Nikolai Grigoriev. It made an indelible impression on me. When Grigoriev explained his pawn studies, moving the pieces on the demonstration board with his thin, artistic fingers, I sensed, rather than understood, the great depth and beauty of chess, observing with my own eyes how human thought spiritualizes these little wooden pieces, and they, like real actors, begin performing miraculous spectacles, capable of touching the most sensitive parts of the human soul. It was this perception of chess as an art that finally linked me with it. I wanted to understand chess and study it.”
AIWCF readers are encouraged to follow the 1948 Averbakh-Bondarevsky game where Averbakh used an incredible idea of fortress building from a chess composition for which he had been the judge, which was in turn inspired by his tragic hero Grigoriev who had died prematurely in 1938. Similarly, the Averbakh-Spassky 1956 game features the move 16..Nc6!! by Spassky, regarded among the greatest moves ever played. Averbakh was perhaps stunned by Spassky's incredible knight sacrifice and could not play the rest of the game properly.
These and some other games of Averbakh appear in the next chapter Miscellaneous Games.
Though his eyesight and hearing having worsened over the years due to his age, he continues to devote time to chess-related activities.
Salute to a real chess Titan in all aspects of the game.