Albéric O'Kelly de Galway

◇Brussels

O'Kelly was born on 17 May 1911 in Anderlecht, near Brussels. His family descended from John O'Kelly, an Irish-born officer who was granted a title of nobility in 1720 in what were then the Austrian Low Countries, and he was often styled Count O'Kelly de Galway. As a youth he took lessons from Akiba Rubinstein, who was then living in Belgium.

He won his first Belgian championship in 1937, sharing the title with Paul Devos, and the same year he played for Belgium at the Stockholm Olympiad. Between 1937 and 1959 he won the national title thirteen times; in 1957 he took it a point ahead of Arthur Dunkelblum, and in 1959 he tied with Jozef Boey.

◇The post-war years

O'Kelly's strongest period came after the Second World War. He won the Hoogovens tournament at Beverwijk in 1946. In 1947 he won the West European zonal tournament at Hilversum, a point ahead of Luděk Pachman and Petar Trifunović, tied for first with Vasja Pirc at Teplice-Šanov and shared second place at Venice. In 1948 he won at São Paulo ahead of Erich Eliskases and Héctor Rossetto.

FIDE awarded him the International Master title on its first title list in 1950. That year he scored 11 points from 15 games on Belgium's top board at the Dubrovnik Olympiad, and in 1951 he won the international tournament at Dortmund. Chessmetrics ranks him No. 27 in the world at his peak in 1953–54.

David Bronstein gives a memorable account of his resistance in 200 Open Games (1974), pp. 102–103. Their Hastings game occupied New Year’s Day 1954, beginning at nine in the morning and finishing around midnight, with the tournament’s session breaks. Bronstein tried successive plans against a defence he described as remarkably accurate. O’Kelly remained close to a draw in the ending for some time before Bronstein finally won.

◇Grandmaster

FIDE made him a grandmaster in 1956, and in 1958 Belgium awarded him the Golden Palm of the Order of the Crown for his chess successes. He finished second at Gijón in 1949 and fourth there in 1956. In 1961 he won the round-robin at Utrecht with 6½/9, ahead of Karl Robatsch, Arthur Bisguier and Aleksandar Matanović.

He played in eight Olympiads for Belgium between 1937 and 1968, 118 games in all. In later years he played team chess in West Germany for Solingen, and he was still playing international tournaments in the 1970s.

He played in the fourth series of the BBC's The Master Game (1979), in which the players' recorded thoughts were heard as the moves were shown. With White against Tony Miles in the first round, he resigned a Queen's Indian after 26 moves. Jeremy James and William Hartston, in The Master Game, Book Two (1981), judged that he “played far too passively throughout”, and note that after 17 moves all but one of his pieces stood on black squares. Thinking aloud during the game, he recalled: “I remember a game that I won with Black against the late Ossip Bernstein about twenty-five years ago” (pp. 19, 23–26).

◇Correspondence chess

In the Dyckhoff Memorial correspondence tournament of 1954–56, O'Kelly finished second to Lothar Schmid with ten wins, four draws and one loss, and his win over Olaf Barda received the first brilliancy prize, judged by the former World Champion Max Euwe. In his book 34 mal Schachlogik he called his game against Julius Nielsen from that event probably the most complicated game he had played.

He then won the final of the third World Correspondence Championship, played from 1959 to 1962, ahead of Piotr Dubinin, and became the third World Correspondence Champion, after Cecil Purdy and Viacheslav Ragozin. ICCF awarded him the International Correspondence Grandmaster title in 1962.

◇Arbiter and author

O'Kelly became an International Arbiter in 1962. He was chief arbiter of the World Championship matches between Tigran Petrosian and Boris Spassky in 1966 and 1969, and in 1974 he was the arbiter of the Karpov–Korchnoi Candidates final in Moscow.

He spoke French, Dutch, German, English, Spanish and Russian fluently, and some Italian, and he wrote books and articles in several of those languages. His books include Tigran Petrosian: World Champion (Pergamon, 1965), thirty annotated Petrosian games with a short biography, translated into English by John Littlewood; The Sicilian Flank Game (1969), on the Najdorf Variation; and Assess Your Chess Fast and Improve Your Chess Fast (1978).

In the Petrosian book he recalled that he first met Petrosian at the Maróczy Memorial in Budapest in 1952, soon after Petrosian had been nicknamed “the black panther”. Petrosian shared seventh place there with 9½ points from 19, and O'Kelly was ninth with 9 (p. 3). Writing after the 1963 match, he called Petrosian's win indisputable and found it “difficult to see anyone taking the title from him in the next 10 years” (p. 11). Petrosian kept the title against Spassky in 1966 and lost it to him in 1969, and O'Kelly was chief arbiter of both matches.

The practical demands of arbitration appear in Garry Kasparov’s My Great Predecessors, Part IV (2004), “A vertical Ascent”, before Game 85. O’Kelly was chief arbiter of the 1970 Palma de Mallorca Interzonal. In Evgeny Vasyukov’s recollection, after Larsen objected to an early Friday start against Fischer, O’Kelly proposed exchanging the seventh and ninth rounds. Soviet players threatened countermeasures, including withdrawal. The rounds remained in place, and Larsen and Fischer eventually began at 11:30.