Rafael Vaganian was a grandmaster at nineteen and was still winning strong tournaments in his fifties. The Yerevan player won the Biel Interzonal of 1985, shared first place in the Candidates Tournament that followed, and twice reached the Candidates matches. In 1989 he became champion of the Soviet Union on his 38th birthday. His play was intuitive and dynamic, and Alexey Suetin, who played him several times, found him fearless: a perpetual optimist with an explosive temperament. He won more than thirty tournaments, beat World Champions from Karpov to Ponomariov, and in 2019 won the World Seniors' Championship.
Yerevan
Vaganian was born in Yerevan on 15 October 1951. In 1971 he finished fourth at the World Junior Championship, won by Werner Hug, and took first place at Vrnjačka Banja ahead of Leonid Stein and Ljubomir Ljubojević. That result made him a grandmaster at nineteen.
In 1974 he played top board for the Soviet Union at the World Student Team Championship at Teesside, scored 10 out of 11 and won the board prize. He won at Kragujevac in 1974, São Paulo in 1977, Kirovakan in 1978, Las Palmas in 1979, Manila in 1981 and Hastings 1982/83, and he shared first place with Mikhail Tal at Moscow in 1982 and at Tallinn in 1983.
Karpov recalled a small act of solidarity at Skopje in 1976, recorded in Kasparov's My Great Predecessors, Part V. Reshevsky's Friday game with Vaganian was scheduled for ten in the morning so it could finish before sunset. Vaganian disliked rising early; Karpov helped him obtain an eleven o'clock start, with support from the other players. In Karpov's telling, Vaganian played brilliantly and hurried back to the hotel to thank him.
In Yerevan in 1978 he accepted an unusual challenge from Bronstein: four games played simultaneously, with forty moves in two hours on each board. They each won one game and drew two. Bronstein recalled in The Sorcerer's Apprentice that the match reached the national television news the following day, and that Vaganian found it interesting but tiring. Bronstein had originally proposed eight boards; they settled on four.
Biel and Montpellier
In 1985 Vaganian won the Biel Interzonal, and in the Candidates Tournament at Montpellier later that year he shared first place with Artur Yusupov and Andrei Sokolov. He also shared first place with Walter Browne and Bent Larsen at Næstved in 1985, and won at Leningrad in 1987.
The Candidates matches were less kind. He lost to Sokolov in 1986, 2–6, and in 1988 he lost to Lajos Portisch, 2½–3½. He played for the Soviet Union at the Olympiads of 1984 and 1986, and in 1984 he met Zoltán Ribli on fifth board in the USSR versus the Rest of the World match.
“He has a fine feeling of the dynamics of a chess battle and knows how to intensify the play at the right moment. He does not always calculate variants thoroughly, relying on his natural chess flair.”
“The feeling of fear or uncertainty is unknown to him. He is a perpetual optimist, full of ambitious intentions at every stage in every game, with an explosive temperament.”
“Vaganian is a chess player of enormous practical potential. But he is more of an artist than a fighter.”
Champion of the Soviet Union
Vaganian shared third place in the Soviet Championship at Leningrad in 1974, finished second at Yerevan, his home city, in 1975, and shared third again at Moscow in 1983. At Odessa in 1989, on his 38th birthday, he won the title.
He won at Toronto in 1990, Ter Apel in 1992 and Reggio Emilia in 1992/93 and 1994/95, and in 2004 he shared first place at the Aeroflot Open in Moscow. At the Calvià Olympiad that year he won the individual gold medal on third board, and in January 2005, in his fifties, his rating reached 2670, putting him back in the world's top fifty.
Legacy
In 2019, in Bucharest, Vaganian won the World Seniors' Championship in the over-65 section. He has since cut back on tournament play and coaches junior players in Armenia. He is married to the Women's International Master Irina Vaganian.
Books
No authored or contributed books are documented in the available sources.