Petar Trifunović

◇Šibenik and Zagreb

Trifunović was born in Dubrovnik on 31 August 1910 and grew up in Šibenik. He learned chess late, at sixteen, while still at secondary school there. He studied law in Zagreb and took his doctorate in law in 1933. He earned the master title at a tournament in Banja Luka in 1931.

◇Typhoonovic, 1935–1938

In the 1930s he was an attacking player, known as "Typhoonovic." He was third in the first Yugoslav Championship in 1935 and second in 1936, and he shared second place in 1937 and in 1938. At the Warsaw Olympiad of 1935 he scored 12½ of 16 on board four, and at Stockholm in 1937 he scored 11 of 16 on board two, winning a board bronze medal each time.

In 1938 he settled in Belgrade, where he lived for more than forty years, and from 1938 to 1940 he edited the magazine Šahovski pregled.

◇National champion

After the Second World War Trifunović won the Yugoslav Championship in 1945, 1946 and 1947, the last shared with Svetozar Gligorić, and again in 1952 and 1961. He finished among the top three of the national championship sixteen times. Abroad he won at Zlín in 1945, shared second place behind Miguel Najdorf at Prague in 1946 and finished tenth at the Saltsjöbaden Interzonal of 1948. In 1949 he drew a twelve-game match with Najdorf at Opatija, winning one game, losing one and drawing ten.

At the 1950 Olympiad in Dubrovnik, the city of his birth, he scored 10 of 13 on board three and won the individual gold medal as Yugoslavia took the team gold. FIDE awarded him the international master title in 1950 and the grandmaster title in 1953, making him the third Serbian grandmaster after Boris Kostić and Gligorić.

◇The international circuit

He won at Lima in 1950 and shared second place behind Gligorić at Cheltenham in 1951. At Belgrade 1954 he was third behind David Bronstein and Aleksandar Matanović, ahead of Gligorić and Tigran Petrosian. He shared first place at Netanya in 1961, won outright at Prague in 1961 and at Beverwijk in 1962, and in 1965 he finished second to Mikhail Botvinnik at Noordwijk, ahead of Salo Flohr, Bent Larsen and Jan Hein Donner.

His later style was cautious and positional, and he drew many games; at Leipzig in 1965 he drew all fifteen. He could still play sharply when he chose: at Havana in 1963 he beat Mikhail Tal with Black in the Falkbeer Countergambit. He played for Yugoslavia in Olympiads until Varna 1962, adding team bronze medals at Helsinki 1952 and Amsterdam 1954 and team silver medals at Munich 1958 and Varna 1962.

In My Great Predecessors, Part V (2006), Kasparov quotes a letter Trifunović sent to Belgrade during Korchnoi's extraordinary start at Wijk aan Zee in January 1968. The Moscow weekly 64 reported the letter. After Korchnoi began with eight wins and reached 10½/11, the veteran wrote: “Such a superiority frightens even me, an old tournament fox.” He went on to wonder whether everyone except Korchnoi had forgotten how to play chess.

◇Teacher and organizer

Trifunović was a chess teacher and trainer, a team captain and president of the Chess Federation of Serbia. With Sava Vuković he wrote Šahovski bukvar (1959), and he wrote Za šahovsku krunu on the 1972 Spassky–Fischer match. He died in Belgrade on 8 December 1980.