Andre Lilienthal

◇Born in Moscow, raised in Budapest

Lilienthal was born in Moscow in 1911 and moved with his family to Hungary as a small child. Garry Kasparov’s My Great Predecessors, Part IV (2004), in “The last of the Mohicans” before Game 26, says he learned chess at fifteen. He trained as a tailor but struggled to find work, and spent his days playing chess at the Budapest Labour Exchange. Around 1930 he decided to become a professional player.

By his late teens he had turned professional in the only way a poor young master could — on the road. Through the late 1920s and early 1930s he wandered the cafés and tournament halls of Western Europe, living game to game, sharpening himself against the strong and the famous. It was an itinerant, precarious education, but it carried him into the company of the very best players in the world, and it taught him that he belonged there.

Kasparov recounts a proposal made to Lilienthal and Savielly Tartakower in Paris: a circus lion-tamer offered to pay them to play an exhibition game inside a lion’s cage. They declined. Lilienthal also played casual games with Alekhine, winning three and losing one; when the champion offered to continue, he preferred “to retain this result as a keep-sake.” Alekhine later took an interest in the young player, who visited his home.

◇The famous queen sacrifice

At the Hastings Christmas Congress of 1934–35 he produced the game that would follow him for the rest of his life. With the white pieces against Capablanca — the former World Champion, the man who in his prime had gone years without losing — Lilienthal reached a sharp middlegame and, on the twentieth move, gave up his queen with 20.exf6, opening the e-file against a king still stranded in the centre. A few moves later Capablanca's position collapsed.

Lilienthal explained that the queen sacrifice exploited Black’s undeveloped pieces and the exposed king by opening the e-file. In Game 26 of My Great Predecessors, Part IV, Kasparov quotes his recollection of the finish: “Without waiting for my reply, Capablanca smiled and held out his hand, congratulating me on my win. I couldn’t hide the fact that I was happy ...” Audiences continued to ask Lilienthal to demonstrate the game on exhibition tours.

◇Among the champions

The Capablanca brilliancy was no accident of a single night. Lilienthal played three Olympiads for Hungary — 1933, 1935 and 1937 — and took individual gold on the first two, with unbeaten and near-unbeaten scores. In 1935, after the great Moscow tournament, he settled in the Soviet Union, becoming a Soviet citizen in 1939 and entering the deepest pool of talent the game has ever held.

There he had the best result of his career. At the 1940 USSR Championship, one of the strongest national championships ever held, Lilienthal tied for first with Igor Bondarevsky, ahead of Smyslov, Keres, Boleslavsky and the future World Champion Botvinnik. Over his long career he played ten men who held the world title and beat seven of them, among them Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Euwe, Botvinnik and Smyslov, and he also beat the women's champion Vera Menchik. No one else has beaten champions across such a span.

◇The teacher

When FIDE named its first official grandmasters in 1950, Lilienthal was among them. But by then he had already begun a second life in chess, quieter and just as consequential — as a trainer and second to the men who would rule the game. He worked with the young Tigran Petrosian through the 1950s, helping shape the most unbeatable defender chess would produce, and he served as a second to his close friend Vasily Smyslov in Smyslov's World Championship matches against Botvinnik.

He retired from serious tournament play in 1965, his last competitive outing coming at Zamárdi in 1980. In 1976 he returned to Hungary, the country of his childhood, having spent four decades inside Soviet chess and given much of his strength to others' crowns. The friendships endured: his bond with Smyslov, begun in 1938, lasted the rest of their lives.

Kasparov describes a practical habit Smyslov learned from Lilienthal: when analysing an adjourned position, establish how to draw before pursuing a win. He also records Smyslov’s praise of his trainer’s intuition and positional judgment, and of his wins over Capablanca and Botvinnik (“The last of the Mohicans,” before Game 26).

David Bronstein supplies a friend’s view in 200 Open Games (1974), p. 24. He described Lilienthal’s gentleness and sympathy as a handicap in tournaments, then joked that their own friendship earned him no mercy at the board. His illustration was the game Lilienthal won against him in the Moscow Championship of 1953.

◇Ninety-nine years

Lilienthal simply would not stop. He lived to be ninety-nine — the longest-lived grandmaster in history, and at the end the last surviving member of that original 1950 class, the final living link to a vanished world of champions. To meet him was to touch the whole arc of modern chess at once.

Bobby Fischer understood as much. When the two met again in 1992, on the eve of Fischer's return match with Spassky, the reclusive American greeted the old Hungarian not with hello but with a chess move — "Pawn e5 takes f6" — naming, by heart, the sacrifice against Capablanca from fifty-seven years before. Fischer's regard ran deeper still: he is said to have approved only three men to carry his coffin, and Lilienthal was one of them. Andor Lilienthal died in Budapest in 2010, three days after his ninety-ninth birthday, having outlasted every rival of his youth and carried their game gently into a new century.