Lajos Portisch

◇A late start in a small town

Portisch was born in 1937 in Zalaegerszeg, a small town in western Hungary, and he came to chess later than the prodigies he would spend his life beating. 'I was only twelve years old when I started to play the game,' he recalled, 'and it was a very slow development as I was born in a small town in Hungary. There were no books, no computers of course, nor even chess clocks.' What he lacked in early resources he made up for in patience — and in an iron work ethic that would become his signature.

Kasparov recounts in My Great Predecessors, Part III that at fourteen Portisch impressed Paul Keres in a simultaneous display. Keres predicted that they would eventually have to meet in an individual game. The account describes a promising performance without giving the result of their encounter.

As a child he played the violin and hoped to become a musician, an ambition his parents shared. He gave up the violin to pursue chess. He briefly went to university to study economics after high school but found he had no talent for it, dropped out after a single month, and — at eighteen — committed himself fully to the life of a professional chess player.

◇The Hungarian Botvinnik

By 1961 Portisch was a grandmaster, and through the 1960s and 1970s he established himself among the world's leading players. His positional style earned him the nickname 'Hungarian Botvinnik', but he disputed the comparison in his 2012 interview with Albert Silver. He had studied Botvinnik along with the other great players and did not see a close similarity between their styles. 'Positional,' he said when asked to describe his own play. 'I was always very positional.'

He won or shared the Hungarian Championship nine times across more than two decades, and posted a minus score at a major event only on the rarest of occasions — a record of durability that very few players in history can match. Where flashier rivals burned bright and faded, Portisch simply kept turning up, year after year, among the world's elite.

At the 1975 Vidmar Memorial in Portorož and Ljubljana, Anatoly Karpov's first tournament as world champion, Portisch lost to Karpov in the first round and had 1½ points from his first five games. He recovered to share sixth place with Bruno Parma on 8½/15, beating the runner-up Svetozar Gligorić, who lost no other game, and winning his last two games. In Portoroz/Ljubljana Grandmaster Chess Tournament 1975 Vlastimil Hort wrote of his win over Janez Barle that Portisch “played the final part brilliantly and it was a pity that he started to play his best chess so late.”

In his chapter of How to Open a Chess Game (1974) Portisch described how his openings were built. In his youth the minority attack in the Queen's Gambit was “my favorite weapon”, until experience taught him not to underestimate Black's counterplay. As a candidate master he worked out a Nimzo-Indian system with an early ...Bxc3, based on Nimzowitsch's win over Johner at Dresden in 1926, and he noted that Fischer had used it against Spassky in the 1972 World Championship match. He gave up one of his King's Indian lines after losing with it at Stockholm in 1962, although the loss came from a combination he overlooked later in the game: “Certain opening variations are buried not for objective but for psychological reasons.”

His writing extended beyond opening preparation. In Six Hundred Endings, coauthored with Balázs Sárközy and published in English in 1981, the authors emphasized studying endgames as well as openings. Their preface (p. vii) describes a collection intended for practical play and encourages readers to trace how an ending developed from the earlier stages of a game.

◇Eight times a Candidate

From 1962 onward Portisch qualified for an unbroken string of Interzonals and reached the Candidates — the tournaments and matches deciding who would challenge for the world crown — on eight separate occasions: 1965, 1968, 1974, 1977, 1980, 1983, 1985 and 1988. His deepest runs came in the 1977 and 1980 cycles, where he reached the Candidates semi-finals.

He defeated, at one time or another, virtually every great player of his era — Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Karpov — yet the final step always eluded him. He never reached a World Championship match. It is the one gap in an otherwise monumental career, and it places him among the strongest players never to contest the title.

In Six Hundred Endings (ending 188, p. 61), Portisch recalled his adjourned game against Leonid Stein at the 1967 Sousse Interzonal. The analysts expected an easy win, but his “sense of danger” sent him back to the position alone. He worked until four in the morning and found the precise bishop move needed to stop Stein's pawns. He won after the resumption.

The 1980 quarterfinal against Spassky illustrated how fine the margins could be. Kasparov records in My Great Predecessors, Part III that ten games left them tied 5–5, followed by four more draws. Portisch advanced at 7–7 because his earlier win had come with Black, the tiebreak specified for that cycle.

◇Hungary's standard-bearer

If there is a single arena that belonged to Portisch, it was the Chess Olympiad. He represented Hungary at twenty of them between 1956 and 2000 — a record of longevity spanning six decades — and played a record number of games for his country, gathering eleven medals along the way.

His greatest team success came at Buenos Aires 1978, where he led Hungary to the gold medal with 10/14 on top board. It was the only Olympiad between 1952 and 1990 in which another team finished ahead of a participating Soviet team, and it made Portisch a national hero.

◇The baritone

For all the discipline of his chess, Portisch's inner life was bound up with music. The boy who once dreamed of the violin grew into an accomplished baritone with a deep love of opera — a passion he shared with world champion Vasily Smyslov, another grandmaster who might have sung professionally. He played, he said, not for prizes but for something purer: 'I have always played for the satisfaction from the game itself and competition.'

His younger brother Ferenc Portisch became an International Master, making them one of chess's notable sibling pairs. A devout Catholic and a private man, Portisch carried into his ninth decade the same quiet seriousness that had defined him at the board — the bearing of an artist who happened to have chosen chess.