Lev Polugaevsky

◇A talent that ripened slowly

Polugaevsky was born on 20 November 1934 in Mogilev, in the Byelorussian SSR, and came to chess around the age of ten — late, by the standards of the prodigies who filled the Soviet ranks. He was not one of them. Where Tal flashed and Spassky flowed, Polugaevsky climbed: first under the candidate master Alexy Ivashin, who taught him in 1948, then in the orbit of the international master Lev Aronin, whom he credited above all others for his development, and in study sessions with the great tactician Rashid Nezhmetdinov between 1950 and 1953.

He rose slowly, and he earned every step. He became a Soviet master only as an adult, and a grandmaster in 1962. For years he was a working engineer as much as a chess player, keeping his job until 1973 and fitting world-class chess around it. It suited the player he became, one who trusted hard work more than talent.

◇Champion of the Soviet Union

Winning the Soviet Championship in those decades was, by general agreement, harder than winning many a world title: the field was simply the strongest anywhere. Polugaevsky did it twice. In 1967 he shared the championship with Mikhail Tal; in 1968 he took the title alone after beating Alexander Zaitsev in a play-off match, played at Vladimir in 1969. In 1969 he tied for first again and lost the deciding playoff to Tigran Petrosian: three straight years at the top of the toughest national championship in chess.

Abroad he was just as dangerous, winning the strong Mar del Plata tournament in 1962 and again in 1971, and earning a place on the Soviet team for the 1970 “Match of the Century” against a Rest of the World side — selection that by itself marked him among the handful of best players alive. By July 1972 the rating lists placed him at 2645, third in the world. He played in seven Chess Olympiads between 1966 and 1984, the Soviet team taking gold in every one of them but 1978, when Hungary edged them into second.

His analysis also served other leading players. In the summer of 1971 he joined Isaac Boleslavsky, Leonid Shamkovich and Evgeny Vasiukov in a study of Fischer's games, including the matches against Taimanov and Larsen; their 26-page report went to Petrosian and Spassky. A decade later, Igor Zaitsev recalled Polugaevsky taking an active part in Karpov's analytical preparation for the 1981 world-title match and travelling to Merano with the team. These accounts, recorded in Kasparov's My Great Predecessors Part IV and Part V, show how widely his work was shared.

◇The labyrinth

Polugaevsky's true monument is an opening. He fell in love with the Sicilian Defence and, within it, the sharpest of all its branches, the Najdorf. There he authored the line the whole chess world now calls the Polugaevsky Variation: after 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Bg5 e6 7.f4, the audacious 7...b5, throwing a pawn forward into the most dangerous attacking position White can build. It was not a move so much as a wager on analysis — that Black's resources, if dug deep enough, would hold. Generations have tested it and it endures.

He poured that obsession into The Sicilian Labyrinth, a two-volume work of some five hundred pages he spent two and a half years building — his magnum opus, and a guided tour of a maze he had walked more thoroughly than any man living. For Polugaevsky, home analysis was not preparation for the art; it was the art. “Analysis,” he wrote, “is a glittering opportunity for training.”

The most famous proof came at the 1969 Soviet Championship in Moscow, against Mikhail Tal — the Magician from Riga himself. Working alongside Boris Spassky, who was then preparing his world-title match, Polugaevsky had searched the resulting position to its depths. In My Great Predecessors Part III, Kasparov quotes his recollection of their joint analysis in Dubna, where Polugaevsky was also preparing for his Soviet-title playoff with Alexander Zaitsev. It was Efim Geller who recalled seeing the position reached after move 25 on Polugaevsky's hotel-room board that morning. The preparation produced a brilliant win, though Kasparov's later analysis also found considerable defensive resources for Black.

◇Close to a title match

His first Candidates match ended in defeat against the young Anatoly Karpov in 1974. Afterwards, he admitted: “I devoted too much time to purely chess work, and did not concentrate sufficiently on the need for correct psychological preparation.” Kasparov records the reflection in My Great Predecessors Part V. Karpov's recollection on the same page is warmer: their detailed, open discussions of the games brought them closer, and the match gave him Polugaevsky's friendship.

For all his strength, the world title stayed just beyond him, and the same name kept barring the door. In the Candidates cycle of 1977 he defeated the brilliant young Brazilian Henrique Mecking in the quarter-final, only to fall to Viktor Korchnoi in the semi-final. He tried again in the next cycle, finishing second at the 1979 Riga Interzonal with 11½/17, behind Tal. In 1980 he beat Tal in the quarter-final — a measure of how high he still stood — before Korchnoi stopped him once more in the semi-final.

Preparing for Tal meant studying the opponent as well as the opening. In Kasparov's My Great Predecessors Part II, Polugaevsky describes a more pragmatic Tal, capable of long positional manoeuvring and resourceful defence, but expects his enduring appetite for attack to draw him into trying to refute Polugaevsky's own variation. He won their match 5½–2½.

The 1980 semi-final was level at 6–6 after twelve games, and the first extra game was drawn. Kasparov's My Great Predecessors Part V records Korchnoi's press attaché Emmanuel Sztein recalling an extraordinary twist before the decisive fourteenth game: Bent Larsen's column in Clarín had discussed the very English Opening line Korchnoi's team was preparing, following a game in the parallel Hübner–Portisch match. According to Sztein, Polugaevsky had not seen the newspaper. Korchnoi risked the line and won; Kasparov presents the episode as a failure of information reaching the player in time.

Twice within sight of a title match, twice turned back by the same indomitable opponent. There is a particular cruelty in it: the most thorough preparer in chess history could prepare for everything except the man who stood between him and the challenge. He never became World Champion, and he wears that absence the way Rubinstein and Keres wear theirs — as proof not of any lack, but of how merciless the era was.

◇The writer and the man

What he could not win he chose instead to give away, in books written to a standard almost no one else kept. Grandmaster Preparation, Grandmaster Performance and Grandmaster Achievement let readers inside the mind of a man for whom chess was a vocation rather than a contest. He was scathing about lazy work: “Ninety per cent of all chess books you can open at page one and then immediately close again for ever,” he said. “You should take at least two years for a book, or not do it at all.” He held himself to exactly that.

With Iakov Damsky he also wrote The Art of Defence in Chess, a manual of defensive technique. Its examples include his best-known defeat, against Rashid Nezhmetdinov at Sochi in 1958. The authors mark 20 Bc2 as his decisive error, say that after 20 Bb1 his plan of defence and counterattack would have been justified, and add: “But now Black gains the chance to carry out a combination of exceptional beauty.”

In his last years he settled in Paris. In October 1994 the chess world honoured his sixtieth birthday with a tournament in Buenos Aires in which every game had to open with a Sicilian — a gift to the man who loved the opening more than anyone; the book of it was titled Sicilian Love. He came as guest of honour, but illness kept him from playing. Within the year he was gone.