THE PROFESSOR

Max Euwe

1901 — 1981

5th World Chess Champion · 1935–1937

Player Index 823 CURATED GAMES Notable Games

At a glance

Born: 20 May 1901 · Watergraafsmeer, Amsterdam
Died: 26 November 1981 (aged 80) · Amsterdam
Nationality: Dutch
Federation: Netherlands
Profession: Mathematician · teacher (PhD 1926)
World Champion: 1935 – 1937 (5th)
FIDE President: 1970 – 1978
Books: 72

By the numbers

15½–14½

the 1935 margin over Alekhine

70+

books written · most of any champion

Dutch national titles · a record

1970–78

President of FIDE

Max Euwe never let chess become his whole life, and that is what makes his story unusual. He was a doctor of mathematics, a schoolteacher, a husband and father who played chess on weekends and evenings, and for two years he was world champion. In the autumn of 1935 this courteous Dutch amateur did what no professional had managed in eight years: he took the title from Alexander Alekhine. He won it and lost it graciously, and spent the rest of a long life giving back to chess: seventy books, a generation of pupils, and in the end a FIDE presidency remembered as one of the most principled the game has had.

The mathematician from Watergraafsmeer

Machgielis Euwe — Max to everyone — was born in the Watergraafsmeer district of Amsterdam on 20 May 1901. He learned the moves as a small boy and played his first tournament at the age of ten, reportedly winning every game; but chess was never allowed to crowd out the rest of his mind. He read mathematics at the University of Amsterdam under the shadow of the great intuitionist L. E. J. Brouwer, and in 1926 took his doctorate under Roland Weitzenböck. He taught mathematics in Rotterdam and then at a girls' lyceum in Amsterdam, and he carried that teacher's clarity to the board for the rest of his life.

He remained, by choice, an amateur — a player who earned his bread elsewhere and came to the sixty-four squares unbought and unhurried. In 1928 at The Hague he won the World Amateur Championship with a commanding 12 out of 15, and across three decades he would take the Dutch national title a record twelve times. The professional world began to understand that the polite professor from Amsterdam was something more than a gifted dilettante.

The road to the title

Through the late 1920s and early 1930s Euwe tested his logical, well-prepared style against the strongest opponents alive. He had a mathematician's appetite for variations and would walk into the wildest complications when his calculation told him they were sound. Garry Kasparov's My Great Predecessors, Part II records his victory at Hastings 1930–31: 7 out of 9, half a point ahead of José Raúl Capablanca. Their ten-game match in July 1931 was a different matter: Capablanca won 6–4, with two wins and eight draws.

At the end of 1933 Euwe was planning to leave chess for a few years and concentrate on mathematics. In the same chapter he recalls a chance meeting with Hans Kmoch in a café. Kmoch convinced him that thorough preparation could give him a chance against Alexander Alekhine, and Euwe decided to challenge for the title. His preparation combined physical training, opening study and practical play: he swam, boxed, played tennis and took cold showers while building his opening repertoire.

“Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation.”

— Max Euwe, Strategy and Tactics in Chess, ch. I, p. 2 (retained English edition)

“Whoever sees no other aim in the game than that of giving checkmate to one's opponent, will never become a good chess-player.”

— Max Euwe, Strategy and Tactics in Chess, ch. I, p. 2 (retained English edition)

“Yes, Hein, that is so, but you shouldn’t forget that I understand chess better than the three of you put together ...”

— Max Euwe to Jan Hein Donner, recalled by Genna Sosonko, in Garry Kasparov, My Great Predecessors, Part II (2003), ch. 1, “President”

“Botvinnik’s comments always gave food for thought and they sometimes forced me to change my decisions. Differences of opinion never interfered with our friendship.”

— Max Euwe, reflecting in 1981, quoted in Garry Kasparov, My Great Predecessors, Part II (2003), ch. 2, “The Euwe Problem”

“Euwe was undoubtedly the best President of FIDE in all the history of this organisation!”

— Yuri Averbakh, quoted in Garry Kasparov, My Great Predecessors, Part II (2003), ch. 1, “President”

“He was the last honourable president of FIDE.”

— Viktor Korchnoi

“Euwe won the 1935 match on merit.”

— Vladimir Kramnik

“Thorough preparation, exceptional concentration, strength of will – this is what we learned from Euwe.”

— Mikhail Tal, quoted in Garry Kasparov, My Great Predecessors, Part II (2003), end of ch. 1

The Pearl and the crown

The 1935 World Championship match ran from 3 October to 15 December, a marathon of thirty games carried across thirteen Dutch cities — it was the first title match in which the players used seconds to help analyse adjourned positions. Alekhine started like the champion he was, winning games one, three, four, seven and nine to open a daunting lead. Then the tide turned. Euwe steadied, struck back, and game by game hauled himself level and ahead.

Game twenty-six, played at Zandvoort, became famous as the Pearl of Zandvoort — a bold, creative win that is still cited as one of the finest games of the entire match. When the dust settled, Max Euwe had won 15½–14½ and become the fifth World Chess Champion, and the only Dutchman ever to hold the title. A nation that had never produced a champion suddenly had one, and chess clubs sprang up across the Netherlands in his wake.

Reign, rematch, and a logical art

Euwe held the title the way he did everything, with modesty and good humor. He was admired for the clarity of his play and for an opening knowledge so thorough that he changed theory in several lines. But his contemporaries also noticed that his even temper could cost him: Gennadi Sosonko thought Euwe's modesty was a handicap at the top level, and the champion sometimes lacked the ruthlessness to fight on in a position that had gone wrong.

The rematch came in 1937, and a transformed Alekhine — who had given up alcohol and tobacco to prepare — reclaimed the title decisively, 15½–9½. Euwe accepted the loss without bitterness and simply kept playing and, above all, kept teaching. He went on to write more than seventy chess books — more than any other World Champion — including The Road to Chess Mastery (with Walter Meiden), Judgment and Planning in Chess and Strategy and Tactics in Chess. His instructional work Practische Schaaklessen became a textbook even in the Soviet chess schools that produced his rivals. Two of his courses, a set of lessons for beginners and a course of lectures for rated club players, appeared in Russian in the early 1930s and reached third editions; a Moscow publisher collected both in 2003 as Uchebnik shakhmatnoy igry, calling them bibliographic rarities. The lecture course starts from his view that every player's development repeats the history of the game, so the lectures move in order from Greco and Philidor through Anderssen and Morphy to Steinitz.

His books grew out of teaching and collaboration. In the preface to De beginselen van alle schaakspel (1939), the revised edition of his De fundamenten van het schaakspel (1931), he explains that the book writes up the lectures he gave in the 1930–31 course at the Volksuniversiteit, the adult-education institutes of Amsterdam and The Hague. In it he argues that misjudging a feature of a position teaches a player something he can use again, while a miscalculation teaches little, because the same position may come up once in a thousand, the same feature once in ten. In the foreword to Strategy and Tactics in Chess, he traces that book to lectures he gave in Amsterdam in 1934.

In the signed preface to Judgment and Planning in Chess, he recalls meeting J. du Mont at Plymouth in August 1948: du Mont suggested a book to guide players after their opening knowledge ran out. M. Blaine and J. F. S. Rumble, who had conceived The Logical Approach to Chess while serving with the RAF in Ceylon, showed him their manuscript during the Hastings Congress of 1949–50, and he undertook to revise it. In his preface he admits that at first he hesitated, “for I felt some scruples because my share of the labour would not be in proportion to that of the other authors.” He agreed when he realized that he could “subscribe to every word of the text in its final form.” Euwe and Meiden's preface to The Road to Chess Mastery describes twenty-five master–amateur games chosen to explain the reasons behind moves. The amateurs grow stronger through the collection and win its final three games.

The honourable president

In 1970, at the age of sixty-nine, Euwe took on the presidency of FIDE, the world chess federation, and gave the game one last great service. Where chess politics ran on Cold-War expediency, he insisted on principle. He interpreted the rules flexibly to bring Bobby Fischer into the cycle that produced the epochal 1972 match against Spassky; he defended the right of defectors such as Viktor Korchnoi and Gennadi Sosonko to compete; and in 1977 he ruled that women could not be barred from open events.

A mathematician who had become a professor of the new science of computing, Euwe was also an early believer in computer chess, taking the machines seriously long before they could beat a master. He served until 1978. The assessments collected in Kasparov's My Great Predecessors, Part II differ: Averbakh praises his tact and fairness, and Kasparov records Korchnoi remembering him as one of FIDE's last honest presidents. Karpov supports his efforts to spread chess but criticises the inflation of grandmaster titles. Kasparov, in turn, faults his handling of the 1978 match in Baguio.

Legacy

Max Euwe died of a heart attack in Amsterdam on November 26, 1981, aged eighty. He had been appointed Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau in 1936 and promoted to Commander in 1979. Amsterdam remembers him at the Max Euweplein, a square with a giant outdoor chessboard and his statue, beside the Max Euwe Centrum, which houses one of the world's great chess libraries. He is honored on two counts: as the amateur who reached the top of a professional's game on his own quiet terms, and as the rare administrator who put integrity above power. The schoolteacher from Watergraafsmeer gave chess a champion, a teacher and a conscience.