Remembering Averbakh

Yuri Averbakh had a wry explanation for why he was made chairman of the USSR Chess Federation in 1972. There was a feeling that Boris Spassky, the Soviet world champion, would lose his title to Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik that year. Nobody else wanted to deal with the fallout, so Averbakh got the job. Whatever the truth of that, Averbakh had been deputy chairman for ten years already, and throughout his life showed a tireless appetite for almost every role that chess has to offer. He left his mark on the game as a player, politician, writer, analyst, editor, researcher, historian and arbiter.

Yuri Lvovich Averbakh died in Moscow on 7 May, just a few months after celebrating his 100th birthday. He was born in Kaluga, a small city 100 miles from Moscow. As a youth he was tall and athletic, and drawn to several sports including volleyball and boxing. Even in his late eighties, he was a regular swimmer until his doctors told him to ease off. He evidently believed that chess could also contribute in maintaining health into old age. But he advocated that older players should spend their time solving chess problems, rather than endure the stress of playing in tournaments.

Averbakh was a prolific composer of problems, which tied in with his work as a theoretician of the endgame. His series of endgame volumes, which were translated into English as Comprehensive Chess Endgames in the 1980s, was a mammoth undertaking, particularly before the advent of computer analysis. For many years, they were the definitive endgame textbooks, and many of Averbakh’s compositions were simplified positions, designed to illustrate key endgame ideas with optimal clarity.

He liked to categorise chess players by their defining traits.