Ossip Bernstein

◇A doctor of law who would not turn professional

Bernstein was born in 1882 in Zhytomyr, in the Russian Empire, into a wealthy Jewish family. He took a doctorate in law at Heidelberg and built a career as a financial lawyer while playing in international tournaments. He shared first prize with Carl Schlechter at Stockholm in 1906 and with Akiba Rubinstein at Ostend in 1907.

At Saint Petersburg in 1914 he beat the reigning World Champion Emanuel Lasker in the eighth round. Garry Kasparov's My Great Predecessors, Part I gives his preliminary finish as shared sixth with Rubinstein on 5/10, one point short of the places in the final stage.

Edward Lasker remembered a friendship that extended beyond the board. In Chess Secrets I Learned from the Masters he describes evenings with Bernstein at Arthur Nikisch's symphonic concerts in Berlin. Students paid about ten cents for admission to a space behind the orchestra seats, where they lay on the floor to listen. Bernstein made time for music alongside his legal work and chess.

◇The sharp style of a new century

Tartakower associated Bernstein with the sturm und drang generation of sharp players that emerged around 1910. Edward Lasker's recollections also show his response to mistakes. After Edward blundered away a winning position in a Berlin Chess Society tournament, Bernstein offered friendly condolences: the same "equalizing injustice of chess" had sometimes let him win a lost position. A master, he suggested, should learn to take such defeats stoically.

He told one story on himself that captures the man entirely. "In one tournament," he recalled, "the veteran master Burn, who was a good friend of mine, offered me a draw on the 12th move. I refused, played for a win and ended up in a completely lost position. For the fun of it, I then offered Burn a draw myself. With his eyes flashing slyly at me through his glasses, he replied frowningly: 'Had you accepted my offer then, I would accept yours now,' upon which I resigned." He kept level scores with Lasker across a lifetime and traded blows with Rubinstein, Nimzowitsch and Capablanca — the best of the best.

In the same memoir, Edward tells of a joke at Zurich in 1934. After losing a game to the Swiss champion Gygli through a blunder in a winning position, Bernstein showed it to Emanuel Lasker and asked, "Am I not a chess idiot?" When Lasker agreed, Bernstein asked for the verdict in writing. They drew up a certificate in legal language, signed by Emanuel, which Bernstein kept with what Edward called self-ironic pride.

◇A game for his life

Then came the catastrophe that turned his story into legend. In 1918, during the Red Terror, Bernstein was arrested in Odessa by the Cheka — the Bolshevik secret police — for having served as a legal adviser to bankers, and was marched out to be shot. As the account has come down, through Edward Lasker and Arnold Denker, a commanding officer scanning the prisoners' papers recognised the name from the Saint Petersburg tournament tables, and could not quite believe a famous master was about to be executed in front of him.

The officer, a chess enthusiast, made a wager of it: one game, here and now. Win, and Bernstein would go free; draw or lose, and the sentence would be carried out. Bernstein won — in short order, the story says — and walked out of the yard a free man, escaping soon after by British ship to the West. Of every game he ever played, it was the only one in which the loser would not have lived to resign.

◇Three fortunes, three catastrophes

He rebuilt his life in Paris and, in time, a fortune — the financier's gift surviving the lawyer's flight. History took it from him again. He lost his first fortune to the Russian Revolution, his second to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and his third when Nazi Germany overran France in 1940; as a Jew he fled once more, this time south to Spain, and settled for a while in Barcelona. Three times the world he had built was swept away, and three times he began again.

Through it all he kept his seat at the high table whenever life allowed. In 1933 he played a training match in Paris against the World Champion Alexander Alekhine and held him to a draw, trading wins. He had begun his career against Chigorin and Schlechter and Rubinstein; he was still, decades on, a man the very best had to take seriously. When FIDE created the Grandmaster title in 1950, Bernstein was among the first players in history to receive it — a bridge in a single life between the nineteenth-century game and the modern one.

◇Montevideo, at seventy-two

The last act was the most improbable of all. In 1954, aged seventy-two and more than four decades past his prime, Bernstein travelled to Montevideo and finished in a tie for second and third place — and in his individual game beat Miguel Najdorf, one of the strongest players in the world, taking a brilliancy prize for the win. Najdorf, the story goes, had protested at being made to face so old an opponent; he would regret it.

That same year he played first board for France at the Amsterdam Olympiad. Kasparov's My Great Predecessors, Part II records another meeting with the new generation in the France–USSR match in Paris in 1954: Bernstein equalised against Bronstein's King's Gambit before losing deep in the endgame. He died in the French Pyrenees in 1962.