Laszlo Szabo

◈Budapest, and the doors that were closed

Szabó was born in Budapest in March 1917, into a Jewish family, in the last year of Austria-Hungary. He left the Eötvös József gymnasium in 1935 wanting to study chemical engineering, but Hungary's numerus clausus laws made a university place effectively impossible for a Jewish boy. He went to a commercial academy instead and took a job in the foreign-exchange department of a Budapest bank. He had trained as a swimmer; what he had left over went into chess.

It did not stay a spare-time thing for long. In 1935, at eighteen, he won the Hungarian championship, took an international tournament at Tatatóváros without losing a game, and was picked for Hungary's team at the Warsaw Olympiad. What struck onlookers was the manner of it: a flair for attack that ran directly against the dour, positional style his countrymen were known for. Géza Maróczy — who had trained Max Euwe and Vera Menchik — took an interest, and it was Maróczy who steered him toward Hastings.

At the unofficial Olympiad in Munich in 1936 he played board five for a Hungarian team made up largely of Jewish players, in Hitler's own city, and scored 86.8 per cent — the best result in the entire field. He took individual gold; Hungary took the team title. At Stockholm the following year he moved up to board two and won silver on both counts. Then, over the new year of 1938/39, he won the Hastings Premier outright at twenty-one.

◈Five years

In 1942 Szabó was in London when word reached him that he had nothing to fear at home on account of his origins — the same assurance that had been given to Attila Petschauer, the twice Olympic champion sabreur. He believed it and went back to Budapest. Both men were called up for munkaszolgálat, the forced labour service into which Hungary conscripted its Jewish men rather than arm them. Petschauer was sent east and died there in 1943.

Szabó was sent to Ukraine and taken prisoner in 1943. He got home in 1945, emaciated. Five years of his chess life were gone — and they were precisely the five in which the Soviet masters who would dominate the next two decades did nothing but study and play.

◈The comeback, and one round short

The recovery was startlingly fast. In August 1946, barely a year out of captivity, he played Groningen — the first great post-war tournament, and the first outside the Soviet Union to which Moscow sent a squad of masters — and finished equal fourth with Najdorf on 11½/19, behind only Botvinnik, Euwe and Smyslov. Chessmetrics reckons him the sixth-strongest player in the world by that December. He won Hastings again in 1947/48 and once more in 1949/50.

The nearest miss came at the Saltsjöbaden Interzonal of 1948. Szabó led for most of the tournament and stumbled at the end; a final-round loss to the tail-ender Lundin let David Bronstein pass him, and he finished second by a point on 12½/19. It still qualified him for the first Candidates Tournament, and in 1950, when FIDE created the grandmaster title and awarded it to twenty-seven men, László Szabó was one of them.

◈Three times a Candidate

He qualified for the Candidates three times, in an era when doing so meant walking into a room the Soviet Union owned. At Budapest in 1950 he finished in a three-way tie for eighth with 7/18, in a field where the top six were Bronstein, Boleslavsky, Smyslov, Keres, Najdorf and Kotov. At Zurich in 1953 — the tournament Bronstein's book made immortal — he came twelfth of fifteen with 13/28, and beat Bronstein, Boleslavsky, Kotov, Gligorić and Ståhlberg on the way through.

Amsterdam 1956 was his best. He scored 9½/18 and shared third place with Petrosian, Spassky, Bronstein and Geller, behind Smyslov and Keres. Two of the men he finished level with would become world champion. That was as close as Szabó came to a match for the title, and he was thirty-nine.

◈The magazine, the pupils, and the long reign at home

He won the Hungarian championship nine times, the first in 1935 and the last in 1968 — thirty-three years apart. Through the late forties and fifties he traded the title back and forth with Gedeon Barcza; from the late fifties he had to fend off a teenager named Lajos Portisch, twice beating him in a championship play-off before Portisch finally took over as Hungary's number one around 1963/64. By then Szabó had held that position for the better part of twenty years.

He was more than a competitor. With Jenő Bán and Barcza he ran Magyar Sakkélet, the Hungarian chess magazine, and for two decades the three of them set its character. He was made a master trainer in 1952 and coached Budapesti Vörös Meteor for twenty years. He wrote tournament books and newspaper columns, and in 1981 published the memoir that gave his life its title: 50 év – 100 000 lépés, five hundred and thirty-two pages of it.

And the decline kept failing to arrive. He won Zagreb in 1964 and shared Budapest 1965 with Polugaevsky and Taimanov. He won Sarajevo in 1972, at fifty-five. In 1973 he shared first at Hilversum with Efim Geller, and over that new year tied for first at Hastings with Gennady Kuzmin, Jan Timman and Mikhail Tal — thirty-five years after he had first won the same tournament. He was still entering events in the 1980s, and played his last at the Groningen jubilee in 1996, at seventy-nine.

◈The man

Away from the board Szabó was a full-blooded presence: he skied, played tennis, swam, went to the opera, spoke several languages. He was also difficult. Sarcastic, blunt past the point of rudeness and easily wounded, he alienated colleagues, and as the victories thinned he grew openly envious of the men still winning them.

He married late, to a woman twenty-five years his junior, and the marriage was a happy one. When his children settled in Israel he taught himself Hebrew, and in old age he learned to use a computer. His last years were hard: a leg was amputated and he spent them in a wheelchair, complaining that of all the players among whom he had spent a lifetime, only Boris Spassky came to visit.