Svetozar Gligorić

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Svetozar Gligorić (Светозар Глигорић) (born February 2, 1923) is a chess grandmaster. During the 1950s and 1960s he was one of the strongest players in the world, and also among the world's most popular owing to his globe-trotting tournament schedule and a particularly engaging personality that is reflected in the title of his autobiography, I Play Against Pieces (i.e., with no hostility to the opponent, or playing differently for "psychological" reasons against different players; playing the board not the man).

Life

Svetozar Gligorić was born in Belgrade to a poor family. According to his recollections, his first exposure to chess was as a small child watching patrons of a neighborhood bar play. He did not himself begin to play until the age of eleven, when he was taught by a boarder taken in by his mother (his father had died by this time). Lacking a chess set he made one for himself by carving pieces from corks from wine bottles — a story paralleling the formative years of his great contemporary, the Estonian grandmaster Paul Keres.

Gligorić was a good student during his youth, with both academic and athletic successes that famously led to him being invited to represent his school at a birthday celebration for Prince Peter, later to become King Peter II of Yugoslavia. He later recounted (to International Master David Levy, who chronicled his chess career in The Chess of Gligoric) his distress at attending this gala event wearing the beat-up clothes required by his family's impoverished condition. His first tournament success came in 1938 when he won the championship of the Belgrade Chess Club; however World War II interrupted his chess progress for a time. During the war Gligorić was a member of a partisan unit. A chance encounter with a chess-playing partisan officer led to his removal from combat, likely saving his life.

Following the war Gligorić worked for several years as a journalist and organizer of chess tournaments. He continued to progress as a chessplayer and was awarded the chess International Master (IM) title in 1950 and the Grandmaster (GM) title in 1951, eventually making the transition to full-time chess professional. He continued active tournament play well into his sixties.

Chess career

Gligorić was one of the most successful tournament players of the middle of the century, with a number of tournament titles to his credit, but was less successful in competing for the World Chess Championship. He was Yugoslav champion in 1947 (joint), 1948 (joint), 1949, 1950, 1956, 1957, 1958 (joint), 1959, 1960, 1962, 1965 and 1971 and represented his country with great success in Chess Olympiads for decades, often as first board on the national team. His list of first-place finishes in international chess competitions is one of the longest and includes such events as Mar del Plata 1950, Stockholm 1954, Belgrade 1964, Manila 1968, etc. He was a regular competitor in the series of great tournaments held at Hastings at the end of the year, with wins (or ties for first) in 1951–2, 1956–7, 1959–60, 1960–61, and 1962–3.

His record in world-championship qualifying events was mixed. He was a regular competitor in Zonal and Interzonal competitions with several successes, e.g. Zonal wins in 1951, 1960 (joint), 1963, 1966, and 1969 (joint) and finishes at the Interzonals of 1952, 1958 and 1967 high enough to qualify him for the final "Candidates" events the following year. However, he was not successful in any of the Candidates events, with mediocre results in the 1953 and 1959 Candidates Tournaments and a match loss to Mikhail Tal in the 1968 Candidates match series.

Lifetime scores against world champions

Gligorić was very dangerous to the world chess champions, too, but he had minus scores against most. E.g. Mikhail Botvinnik +2-2=5, Vasily Smyslov +5-7=21, Tigran Petrosian +7-10=10, Mikhail Tal +2-11=19, Boris Spassky +0-5=15, Bobby Fischer +4-6=6, Anatoly Karpov +0-4=6 and Gary Kasparov -3.

Gligorić's chess legacy

Despite his superb tournament record, it is perhaps as an openings theorist and commentator that Gligorić will be remembered the longest. He made enormous contributions to the theory of the King's Indian Defense, Ruy Lopez and Nimzo-Indian Defense, among others, and particularly with the King's Indian, translated his theoretical contributions into several spectacular victories on both sides of the board (including the sample game below). Theoretically significant variations in the King's Indian and Ruy Lopez are named for him. His battles with Bobby Fischer in the King's Indian and Sicilian Defense (particularly the Najdorf Variation, a long-time Fischer specialty) were the stuff of legend and often worked out in his favor.

As a commentator, Gligorić was able to take advantage of his fluency in a number of languages and his training as a journalist, to produce lucid, interesting game annotations. He was a regular columnist for Chess Review and Chess Life magazines for many years, his "Game of the Month" column often amounting to a complete tutorial in the opening used in the feature game as well as a set of comprehensive game annotations. He wrote a number of chess books in several languages and has contributed regularly to the Chess Informant quarterly (more recently, thrice-yearly) compilation of the world's most important chess games. Add to these accomplishments a successful career as organizer and arbiter of chess tournaments, and the picture that emerges is of one of the greatest chess figures of all time.

Sample Game

One of Gligorić's most famous games was this win against the former World Champion Tigran Petrosian at the great "Tournament of Peace" held in Zagreb in 1970. It displays Gligorić's virtuosity on the Black side of the King's Indian and his willingness to play for a sacrifical attack even against one of chess history's greatest defenders. Zagreb 1970 was another Gligorić tournament success, as he tied for second (with Petrosian and others) behind Fischer in the prime of the latter's ascendancy.

Petrosian–Gligorić, Zagreb 1970:[1] 1. c4 g6 2. Nf3 Bg7 3. d4 Nf6 4. Nc3 o-o 5. e4 d6 6. Be2 e5 7. o-o Nc6 8. d5 Ne7 9. b4 Nh5 10. Nd2 Nf4 11. a4 f5 12. Bf3 g5 13. exf5 Nxf5 14. g3 Nd4 15. gxf4 Nxf3+ 16. Qxf3 g4 17. Qh1 exf4 18. Bb2 Bf5 19. Rfe1 f3 20. Nde4 Qh4 21. h3 Be5 22. Re3 gxh3 23. Qxf3 Bg4 24. Qh1 h2+ 25. Kg2 Qh5 26. Nd2 Bd4 27. Qe1 Rae8 28. Nce4 Bxb2 29. Rg3 Be5 30. R1a3 Kh8 31. Kh1 Rg8 32. Qf1 Bxe3 33. Rxe3 Rxe4 0-1.

Indeed, Gligorić was the first person to inflict a defeat on Petrosian after he won the world title from Mikhail Botvinnik in 1963.[2]

References

• Svetozar Gligorić, I Play Against Pieces, Batsford, 288 pages, 2002.
• David N. L. Levy, The Chess of Gligoric, World Publishing, 192 pages, 1972.

External links

• FIDE rating card for Svetozar Gligoric