Zoltán Ribli

◇Mohács and the junior titles

Ribli was born in Mohács on 6 September 1951. He won the European Junior Championship twice, sharing first place in 1968/69 and winning it outright in 1970/71. FIDE made him an International Master in 1970 and a grandmaster in 1973.

At home he shared the Hungarian championship in 1973, 1974 and 1977. Abroad he shared first place at Kecskemét in 1972 with Alexey Suetin and at Budapest in 1975 with Lev Polugaevsky. At the Vidmar Memorial at Portorož and Ljubljana in June 1975, Anatoly Karpov's first tournament as world champion, he shared third place with Semyon Furman and Vlastimil Hort on 9½ of 15 without losing a game; in the tournament book, Portoroz/Ljubljana Grandmaster Chess Tournament 1975, Hort describes how Ribli beat Furman in round ten with a pawn sacrifice that led to a four-knight ending. He was second at Amsterdam in 1978, behind Jan Timman.

◇The Olympiad team

Ribli played for Hungary at almost every Olympiad from 1970 to 1994. He was on board two when Hungary won the team gold medal in 1978, and he also won team silver medals in 1970, 1972 and 1980.

◇Two Candidates cycles

In 1979 he narrowly missed a place in the Candidates, losing out to his compatriot András Adorján after a play-off. In the next cycle he won the Las Palmas Interzonal of 1982 with 9 points, ahead of Vasily Smyslov. In the 1983 Candidates quarter-final he beat Eugenio Torre +3 −1 =6. The semi-final against Smyslov was played in London, and Smyslov won it +3 −1 =7 and went on to lose the final to Garry Kasparov.

Kasparov's Garry Kasparov on My Great Predecessors, Part II describes Ribli's natural strength as positional understanding, especially in quiet, roughly equal positions. Against the sixty-two-year-old Smyslov in 1983, however, Ribli chose sharper play and repeatedly created complications. After each player had won once in the first four games, Smyslov's win in game five became the turning point (introduction to Game 119).

In 1984 he played for the Rest of the World against the USSR in London and beat his Soviet opponent, Rafael Vaganian, by a narrow margin. As one of the top finishers of the previous cycle he was seeded into the 1985 Candidates Tournament at Montpellier, where he scored 6½ of 15 and did not reach the knockout stage.

◇The tournament circuit

Ribli's tournament wins in the 1980s included Mexico 1980, Baden-Baden 1981 (shared with Tony Miles), the Vidmar Memorial at Portorož and Ljubljana in 1985 (shared with Miles and Lajos Portisch), Dortmund 1986, Reggio Emilia 1987 and Wijk aan Zee 1989, shared with Viswanathan Anand, Gyula Sax and Predrag Nikolić. He was second or shared second at Bled and Portorož 1979, Wijk aan Zee 1983, Bugojno 1984 and Tilburg 1984. His highest rating was 2625, in January 1989.

He played less often from the 1990s, but his rating was still 2589 in July 2006, and in 2002 he won a grandmaster tournament at Kastav in Croatia. With Gábor Kállai he wrote Winning with the Queen's Indian (1987) and Winning with the English (1993). He became an International Arbiter in 1995 and has coached Austrian national teams.