Ljubomir Ljubojević

◇The comet

Ljubojević was born in Titovo Užice on 2 November 1950. His second place at the European Junior Championship in Groningen in 1969/70 earned him an invitation to a grandmaster tournament in Sarajevo, and he shared first place there with Bruno Parma. FIDE made him an International Master in 1970 and a grandmaster the following year.

He shared first place with Oscar Panno at Palma de Mallorca in 1971, scoring 11/15, and at the Skopje Olympiad of 1972 he made the best score on third board. In 1974 he won at Las Palmas and the Canadian Open, in 1975 at Manila, and in 1976 at Wijk aan Zee. At the Vidmar Memorial at Portorož and Ljubljana in June 1975, Anatoly Karpov's first tournament as world champion, he shared eighth place with 8 of 15. Vlastimil Hort, who wrote the tournament book, Portoroz/Ljubljana Grandmaster Chess Tournament 1975, called his win over Silvino Garcia “probably his best game in the tournament”; against Svetozar Gligorić he chose Albin's Counter Gambit, “a choice that indicated that Black was not thinking about a draw at all”, and lost.

At the Petropolis Interzonal in 1973 he began with 6½/8 before losing to Reshevsky in round nine. Two rounds later came his famous defeat by Bronstein. Kasparov tells both stories in My Great Predecessors, Parts II and IV. Ljubojević told him at the 2002 Bled Olympiad that Bronstein had offered a draw after 18.d6, with only five minutes left on his clock; Ljubojević had used just ten minutes of his own time and declined. The resulting struggle earned Bronstein a brilliancy prize.

◇Champion of Yugoslavia

He shared the Yugoslav Championship in 1977 and won it outright in 1982. In 1979 he beat Svetozar Gligorić, for a generation the leading player in Yugoslavia, in a match in Belgrade, 5½–4½. He played in twelve Olympiads for Yugoslavia between 1972 and 2002, nine of them on top board, scoring 63.5 per cent, and won a team silver medal at Nice in 1974.

In January and July 1983 his rating of 2645 put him third in the world, behind Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov. In 1984 he played fourth board for the Rest of the World against the Soviet Union and beat the former World Champion Vasily Smyslov.

◇Linares, Brussels, Barcelona

In 1985 he shared first place at Linares with Robert Hübner, ahead of Jan Timman, Rafael Vaganian, Lajos Portisch, Viktor Korchnoi and Lev Polugaevsky. He won at Reggio Emilia in 1985/86, at Belgrade in 1987, shared first with Kasparov at Brussels in 1987, and shared first with Kasparov at Barcelona in 1989, taking first on tie-break. In 1993 he won the Melody Amber tournament.

His style was highly tactical and full of risk, and chess fans loved it, though the leading players learned to adjust to him. With Ulf Andersson he was also one of the pioneers of the Hedgehog, one of the most patient set-ups in the openings. He played his last rated game in Amsterdam in 2010, the year he won the Dutch team championship with Hilversum.

Kasparov's My Great Predecessors, Part III gives a concrete example of his opening experiments. The Benoni plan of ...Nh5, allowing Bxh5 and accepting doubled pawns, which Fischer played in the third game of the 1972 match with Spassky, had appeared a month earlier in Timman–Ljubojević at Amsterdam. Kasparov traced the precedent to that earlier game.