Lubomir Kavalek

◈A boy from Prague

Lubomír Kaválek was born in Prague on 9 August 1943, in a city that was then the capital of the German-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and that would be handed from one empire to another before he was old enough to vote. He studied communication and journalism at Charles University — a training that would matter as much to his life as anything he learned at the board. In 1962, at nineteen, he won the Czechoslovak Championship with 12½/17, the youngest player to have done so to that date.

That same summer, at the World Student Team Championship in Mariánské Lázně, he sat down with the black pieces against the Soviet master Eduard Gufeld and reached for a weapon almost nobody had touched in decades: the Cordel Gambit of the Ruy Lopez. He gave up a piece for three pawns, kept giving, and won a brilliancy prize for it. Andrew Soltis would later rank the game seventh in The 100 Best Chess Games of the 20th Century. Three years later FIDE awarded him the International Master and Grandmaster titles in the same year, 1965. He took third at the 1966 European zonal in The Hague with 11½/16, behind only Gligorić and Bilek, and qualified for the 1967 Interzonal at Sousse — where he became one of only three players in the field to hold Bobby Fischer to a draw.

◈Tanks, vodka, and the road west

In 1968 he won the Czechoslovak Championship a second time, scoring 15/19 in what is remembered as the strongest edition the country ever held. That autumn he was to play first board for Czechoslovakia at the Lugano Olympiad. Instead, on 21 August, Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague and ended the Prague Spring. Kavalek was out of the country, playing the Akiba Rubinstein Memorial in the Polish spa town of Polanica-Zdrój, where he finished second. He had always hated communism. He decided not to go back.

The story of what he did next has followed him ever since: he bought several crates of vodka with his tournament winnings, used them to bribe the border guards, and drove into West Germany. Kavalek retold it himself in 2010, with a journalist's wink at his own legend. “I began my escape from the communist Czechoslovakia 42 years ago, on Sunday, September 1, 1968,” he wrote — and then, of the vodka and the guards, added only that this was the version “according to Wikipedia.” What is not in dispute is the ten days between the tanks and the crossing, which he spent giving simultaneous exhibitions across Poland, the last of them in Wrocław — Anderssen's Breslau. It was from there, he said, that he began his journey to the West.

“It was the biggest loss ever suffered by Czechoslovakian chess,” Andrew Soltis wrote of the defection. The state's answer was to erase him. When Vlastimil Jansa and Vlastimil Hort published a chess book that mentioned his name, the censors ordered the publisher to withdraw it and strike Kavalek out of all 18,000 printed copies.

◈Two flags at Caracas

He entered the Netherlands on a student visa and made his way to the United States in 1970. On the journey he stopped in Venezuela and won the Caracas tournament outright with +10 −1 =6 — playing, as the record dryly notes, the first half under the Czechoslovak flag and the second half under the American one. Among the players he beat there was a nineteen-year-old Soviet named Anatoly Karpov, five years from the world title. Kavalek settled outside Washington, studied Slavic literature at George Washington University, and spent 1971–72 working for the Voice of America.

The American titles came quickly. He shared first place at the 1972 U.S. Championship with Samuel Reshevsky and Robert Byrne, shared the 1973 title with John Grefe, and in 1978 won it outright with a 10–4 record, a full point clear of James Tarjan. He played seven Olympiads for the United States between 1972 and 1986 — every one but 1980, three of them on top board — and came home with one gold and five bronze medals; in 1976 he was part of the first American team to win Olympiad gold since the 1930s. In May 1974 his rating peaked at 2625 and he stood tenth in the world, and on five separate FIDE lists between 1978 and 1982 he was the highest-rated player in the United States.

Europe never let him go either. From 1969 to 1991 he was the leading board for Solingen, winning ten German national team championships; on top board in the European Club Championship between 1977 and 1979 he scored 5½/6, including two wins over Vassily Smyslov. He took the Dutch Open at Dieren in 1969 with a perfect 10–0. He beat Hans Ree 7–3 in a 1969 match and Ulf Andersson 6½–3½ in 1978, and he lost matches to Bent Larsen and Boris Spassky without ever declining one. His richest year was 1973 — Lanzarote 8½/10, Netanya 11/15, Bauang 7½/9 — the sustained peak of a player who was, for a decade, among the best in the world.

◈The bowling coach in Reykjavík

He went to Iceland in the summer of 1972 as a reporter for the Voice of America, to cover the match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. He left it as the man who had analysed the world championship home. At the adjournment of the thirteenth game, tempers frayed in Fischer's suite and the challenger sent his official second, the American grandmaster Bill Lombardy, away. “Bobby and Bill were a great pair,” Kavalek recalled, “but during that night they turned into two strong personalities with two different opinions. The tension was resolved by Lombardy's sneeze.” Fischer did not want to catch a cold; he wanted Kavalek. From that night to the end of the match the two worked alone, and away from the board they walked, swam and bowled together.

Because Lombardy remained the official second on paper, the closing ceremony listed Kavalek under a title of its own invention: Bobby Fischer's coach — bowling. He had bowled, by his own count, three times in his life. The designation had one practical virtue: it seated him and his wife at Fischer's table, beside Spassky.

◈Impresario, trainer, columnist

He turned out to be as good at building tournaments as at playing in them. In 1979 he was the chief organiser of the Man and his World Chess Challenge in Montreal, one of the strongest events of the era — and he played in it. His first half was a disaster he himself called “catastrophic,” 1½ out of 9. His second half was 6½ out of 9, better than anyone else in the field, and he described it afterwards as his career-best result in a single tournament. He went on to serve as executive director of the Grandmasters Association and organised the first World Cup series in 1988–89, and in 1990 he came back to Prague to run a tournament under President Václav Havel. Of the country he had left in 1968 he said: “I thought I was in some sort of reversed zombie movie because everyone was smiling all the time.”

As a trainer he was in demand at the very top. He coached Mark Diesen, Robert Byrne, Yasser Seirawan, Eugene Torre and Robert Hübner, and from 1990 he prepared Nigel Short through the Manila Interzonal and the Candidates matches against Speelman, Gelfand, Karpov and Timman that carried Short to the 1993 title match with Garry Kasparov. The two separated shortly after that match began, and both later published sharp articles about the other. Anatoly Karpov's verdict, recalled by Jan Timman, was blunt: “It was very stupid of Short to send Kavalek home. Kavalek was the only person in their team that Kasparov truly hated.”

And all the while he wrote. Chess Life & Review from 1970 to 1979; editor-in-chief of RHM Press from 1973 to 1986; the British Chess Magazine from 1994 to 2010; and, above all, the chess column of the Washington Post from 1986 until his last piece on 4 January 2010 — 760 columns in all — before moving to The Huffington Post that May. He was named to the Gallery of Distinguished Chess Journalists in 2006 and won Chess Journalists of America awards for the best newspaper column. It was Kavalek who fixed on Magnus Carlsen the phrase that stuck to him: the Mozart of Chess.