Alexander Morozevich

◇A Moscow original

Alexander Sergeyevich Morozevich was born in Moscow on July 18, 1977 and came up through the Soviet and then Russian chess schools, though he never played the way they taught. From early on he was drawn to unusual, sharp positions that resisted neat explanation. He became a grandmaster in 1994, at seventeen, and made his name internationally with 9½/10 at the strong Lloyds Bank open in London in August 1994.

He stood out for temperament as much as talent. Other prodigies absorbed the current theory; Morozevich seemed almost to resent it, and went looking for forgotten side lines that engines and grandmasters alike had written off. He spent his career showing that many of them were playable after all.

◇The climb to No. 2

Through the 2000s Morozevich was one of the most feared competitors alive. He won the elite Biel tournament in 2003, 2004 and 2006, triumphed repeatedly at Melody Amber — the rapid-and-blindfold festival in Monaco — taking it outright in 2002 and sharing first across several later editions, and he captured the Russian Championship in 1998 and again in 2007.

In July 2008 he reached his peak: a rating of 2788 and the world No. 2 ranking, behind only Anand and ahead of nearly every great name of the time. He did it while playing the most uncompromising chess at the top, turning down the safe draws other players relied on and choosing positions where someone, often spectacularly, had to lose.

◇The openings nobody dared

Morozevich's repertoire was a standing provocation. He wheeled out the Chigorin Defence and the Albin Countergambit — replies to the Queen's Gambit that respectable theory had filed under "dubious" — alongside the Evans Gambit, the King's Gambit and other relics of the romantic age, and he scored with them against the world's best.

In My Great Predecessors, Part II (2003), Kasparov credited Morozevich's example with making the pawn push 11...g5 fashionable in a sharp Slav line. In My Great Predecessors, Part V, he noted Morozevich's English Defence draws against him at Frankfurt in 2000, in rapid play, and against Karpov at Cannes in 2002.

As the commentator Dennis Monokroussos pointed out, it wasn't only his openings that were unusual: he was creative in every phase of the game. He could, Monokroussos wrote, beat anyone playing practically anything. Behind the bravado were deep, personal preparation and the calculating power to handle the chaos he looked for, so walking into complications was a bet he usually won.

◇The reluctant genius

For all that the chess world hailed his imagination, Morozevich wore the label uneasily. Asked about his celebrated creativity, he answered with characteristic irony — that he must, on the contrary, be boring, since professionals found his play boring. It was the deflection of a man who simply played the moves he believed in and let others supply the adjectives.

By the end of the decade the strain of elite competition was telling. "2009 was already a tough year," he later admitted; he felt he had begun to play badly, and rather than grind on for ranking points he chose to compete less and less at the classical top, on his own schedule and his own terms.

◇Beyond the sixty-four squares

Morozevich never fully retired, surfacing for rapid and blitz events and the occasional classical tournament, but his centre of gravity shifted. His restless, pattern-hungry mind found a new home in the ancient Asian game of Go, in which he reached the rank of 1-dan — a serious amateur standard — by 2018.

Go suited a player who had always liked the unexplored. Chess fans remember him as the elite grandmaster who treated the opening book as something to argue with, and who showed there was still room to invent at the very top of the modern game.