Yuri Averbakh, chess’ first centenarian grandmaster, dies at 100

Yuri Averbakh, a Russian chess grandmaster who was among the world’s best players for a decade, trained world champions and was the last surviving participant in one of the greatest competitions in hory, died Saturday in Moscow. He was 100 — the first grandmaster to reach that age.
His death was announced on the site of the International Chess Federation, the game’s governing body. No cause was given.
The horic contest in which Averbakh took part was the Candidates Tournament in Zurich in 1953, the final step in the cycle to select a challenger for the world championship. The field held many great players of the 20th century, including future world champions Vasily Smyslov and Tigran Petrosian and former world champion Max Euwe.
The tournament was notable not only for the participants but also for the quality of the games played; many chess experts consider four or five of them among the most memorable in chess hory, including one that Averbakh lost to Alexander Kotov in round 14 after Kotov uncorked a spectacular queen sacrifice.

I was fascinated the personality of Botvinnik. He had his own original views on many things but I found out that my objections to anything he said usually fell on deaf ears. Basically it was a monologue and I was supposed to len and admire him. Yuri Averbakh in 2011 #Chess pic.twitter.com/TjXg3N2KFT
— JustChessMiniatures (@JustChessMini) May 10, 2022
The 1953 Candidates competition was the only time that Averbakh made it to the final stage of the world championship cycle. He missed playing in the 1959 Candidates Tournament finishing in a tie for seventh in the previous stage of the world championship — the 1958 Interzonal Tournament in Portoroz, Yugoslavia. Only the top six players in the Interzonal qualified for the Candidates.
In 1954, Averbakh won the Soviet Championship. At the time, it was one of the world’s most elite tournaments because many of the world’s top players were from the Soviet Union.
Averbakh tied for first in the 1956 championship with Boris Spassky, another future world champion, and Mark Taimanov, who had also played in the 1953 Candidates Tournament. Taimanov won a playoff to claim the title, with Averbakh finishing second.
Stylically, Averbakh was not a dynamic player; he often succeeded wearing down his opponents. He was particularly accomplished in the endgames, where few pieces are left on the board, and he wrote several books on the subject that is still highly regarded among players of many levels.
Yuri Lvovich Averbakh was born on Feb. 8, 1922, in Kaluga, a small town about 100 miles southwest of Moscow. His father worked for the forestry service, and his mother was a teacher. When Averbakh was 3, the family moved to Moscow, where they shared an apartment with two other families.
He learned to play chess at the age of 7 but was not particularly interested in the game at first; growing to 6 feet, 2 inches tall, he preferred volleyball, hockey, skiing and boxing.
Everything changed one day when he was 13: He heard a lecture on chess Nikolay Grigoriev, a master who won the Moscow Championship four times in the 1920s. The lecture, in which Grigoriev showed some chess problems he had composed, had a huge effect on Averbakh’s thinking about the game.
In his autobiography, “Centre-Stage and Behind the Scenes: The Personal Memoir of a Soviet Chess Legend” (2011), Averbakh wrote: “The impression of chess as an art connected me forever with the game. I wanted to get into chess, to understand its laws, its secrets.”
And yet Averbakh almost did not become a professional chess player. He studied to be an engineer and repaired tanks and tractors during World War II. the late 1940s, he was working in a missile research institute and writing a doctoral thesis in engineering. He had also continued to progress at chess, becoming a master in 1944, but he found that the multiple demands of his studies, work and chess were too great.
Then his supervisor at the institute gave him an unusual opportunity. He told Averbakh that he could take two years off to devote himself to chess and that if he did not succeed in becoming a professional, he could return to work at the institute.
Averbakh qualified for the 1952 Interzonal tournament in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, southeast of Stockholm, and finished fifth, giving him a place in the 1953 Candidates in Zurich. He was also awarded the grandmaster title the International Chess Federation (then going the name the World Chess Federation).
“The question of my return to work at the institute died a death,” he wrote in his memoir.
In 1955, Mikhail Botvinnik, who was then world champion, recruited Averbakh to play training games with him. Over the next two years, the two played 25 games against each other — about the same length as a world championship match — with Botvinnik winning only one or two more games than Averbakh, according to Averbakh.
Their working relationship ended after Averbakh agreed to play training games with Mikail Tal before the 1959 Candidates Tournament in Yugoslavia. Botvinnik regarded that decision as a betrayal, Averbakh wrote. Tal went on to win the Candidates Tournament and defeat Botvinnik the following year.
At the end of 1982, Smyslov, who was then 61, qualified for the Candidate’s matches and asked Averbakh, whom he had known since childhood, to be his trainer. Averbakh accepted, and Smyslov won his quarterfinal and semifinal matches before losing the final to Garry Kasparov, a future world champion.
As his playing career faded in the early 1960s, Averbakh took on a behind-the-scenes role in the Soviet chess establishment. It was a difficult task, with every appointment and the bureaucratic decision often subject to political intrigue and second-guessing. Still, though he claimed to be naive about politics, he managed to thrive for many years in that second career.
In 1962, he became editor of the two most prestigious Soviet chess magazines, Shakhmatny Bulletin and Shakhmaty v SSSR. He edited them for 37 years, a record for longevity.
Averbakh was appointed president of the Soviet Chess Federation in 1972, a privileged position in Soviet society. With success in chess seen as crucial to proving the validity of communism, chess players were regarded much like elite athletes and were even sent to train with the Olympic national teams. Averbakh described the scene at the Central Komsomol school in Veshnyako in 1963:
“It was an unforgettable sight. Basketball players were as thin as pencils, bow-legged squat weightlifters, boxers with huge hands like gorillas and cauliflower ears and squashed noses. Of course, there were exceptions, but in general, one got the impression that they were pathological, freak types, which is what had brought them into the big-time sport, and allowed them to achieve better results than normal people.”
He is survived his daughter (sources differ in identifying her as Jane or Evgenia). Information on other survivors was not available.

Though Averbakh was talented, he said he knew he lacked the necessary qualities to become a world champion. In his autobiography, he wrote that great players fall into six categories: killers, fighters, sportsmen, people who like to play games, arts and explorers. All of the world champions came from the first four groups, he said. He put himself in the sixth category — that of an explorer.
“The main thing was that I never obtained great pleasure from winning,” he wrote. “Clearly, I did not have a champion’s character. On the other hand, I did not like to lose, and the bitterness of defeat was in no way compensated for the pleasure of winning.”