Kurt Richter

◇The sharp judge of Berlin

Kurt Paul Otto Joseph Richter was born in Berlin on 24 November 1900, and the city's chess life was his home for the whole of his career. He first took the Berlin City Championship in 1922 and would win it again and again over the next two decades, a fixture of the German master class through the Weimar years and beyond.

His friends gave him a nickname that captured both the man and the play: Scharfrichter, the executioner. It was a pun no German could miss — scharf means sharp, Richter means judge, and together they made the word for the headsman. Sharp judge, sharp player, executioner of Berlin: the name followed him for life and it fit.

◇A master of the German board

Richter's results traced the arc of German chess between the wars. He won at Bad Aachen in 1935 — the 3rd German Championship — and took the Berlin title again in 1936 and 1938, always among the strongest players in the country even if the very top prizes usually went to others.

He represented Germany at three Chess Olympiads. At Hamburg 1930 and Prague 1931 he played fourth board, earning an individual bronze medal at Prague; by Munich 1936 he had risen to first board for the German team. His single great international appearance came at Podebrady 1936, a rare venture beyond German borders for a master whose life and battles were centred on Berlin.

◇Blood on the sixty-four squares

What set Richter apart was not the standings but the manner of his wins. He played for the attack as an article of faith, chasing the fight even when a quieter path promised a safer point, and the result was a stream of brilliant, violent miniatures. Alexander Alekhine paid him the rarest compliment, saying he could recognise one of Richter's games out of hundreds.

The commentator Paul Michel reached for the executioner's tools to describe him: what the Berlin headsman could not achieve with the dagger and the axe, Michel wrote, he would finish with the rope. The English master Harry Golombek judged that "almost every Richter game is characterized by a superb fighting quality and a great depth of Anderssen-like combination" — placing him in a line that ran back to the great German romantic of the nineteenth century.

These weren't weak opponents. He beat Ernst Grünfeld, one of the leading opening theorists of the time; he beat Efim Bogoljubow, twice a challenger for the world title; and at the Munich European Championship of 1942 he beat Paul Keres, then one of the best players in the world, with Black.

◇The openings that bear his name

Two of Richter's ideas outlasted all his tournament results. In the Sicilian Defense, his aggressive 6.Bg5 against the Classical Variation, 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 Nc6 6.Bg5, was taken up and developed by the Soviet master Vsevolod Rauzer, and the two names have been linked ever since: the Richter–Rauzer Attack, still one of the most heavily analyzed lines in chess.

The second is the Richter–Veresov Attack, the pugnacious queen's-pawn line 1.d4 d5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Bg5, which Richter pioneered and the Belarusian master Gavriil Veresov later championed. Both systems share their author's fingerprint: rapid development, an early bishop, and the promise of a fight.

◇The pen after the sword

The Second World War devastated German chess, and in its aftermath Richter set competitive play aside. He turned instead to journalism and writing, work he had long combined with playing: he served as an editor of Deutsche Schachblätter and Deutsche Schachzeitung, the country's leading chess periodicals.

His books — collections of combinations and spectacular short games, written with wit and an unmistakable love of the attack — became enormously popular in the 1950s and 1960s and were translated into many languages, carrying his style to readers who would never see him play. He spent his final years in East Berlin, on the far side of the Iron Curtain from the western masters he had once faced, and died there on 29 December 1969, at the age of sixty-nine.