RIP Pal Benko - dead at 91

[Kerry Liles]

Susan Polgar just tweeted that news of Pal Benko's death today at 91...

[Wayne Komer]

RIP Pal Benko

August 26, 2019

An excerpt from Gennady Sosonko’s article on Benko entitled Happy Man!

http://chess-news.ru/node/25634

Pal Benko really is a living chess legend. In his best years, Benko was a very strong grandmaster who twice entered the Candidates' tournaments. He developed many lines in a wide variety of openings, and the gambit that he regularly used back in the fifties was named after him (the Benko gambit, known in Russia as the Volga gambit).

In addition, Benko is an outstanding chess composer. Not a grandmaster, from time to time making up a task or study using ideas found in his own games, but one of the most outstanding chess composers of our time.

He still works in various areas of this, according to Nabokov’s word, chess poetry, “brilliant and at the same time dark matter of chess problems, magic puzzles, each of which is the fruit of a thousand and one nights without sleep”.

Benko was thirteen when he completed the first task, but Pal really began to work on the composition already in adulthood. He did and does this only and exclusively out of a love of art: the numerous prizes that Benko won in competitions are financially ridiculously small. In this, if you think about it, there is great happiness - it does not depend on anyone and is not obligated to anyone, to do business that you love.

* * *

Hungarian, born in 1928 in French Amiens, where his father worked as an engineer, he moved with his parents to Hungary as a small child and experienced all the hardships of war as a teenager. In 1945 he got to a refugee camp, suffering from hunger and cold. Freed up. Although death had receded, that time in post-war Europe was alarming. Chess saved him. Pal became a master, one of the strongest in the country.

In 1952, while in the Soviet zone of Berlin, Benko made a desperate attempt to flee to the West.

The attempt failed. After a short detention in Berlin and Prague, he was transferred to his homeland, and in a Budapest prison he underwent a three-week conversion interrogation: he was accused of being an American spy. All this time he got almost no sleep in solitary confinement, and during interrogations, high-power lamps were directed into his eyes, continuously blinding him. Long before the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s most famous book, Benko learned in practice what the Gulag is, even if not Soviet, but Hungarian.

When he was forced to admit that he was an agent of the CIA, Pal didn’t even understand what was meant: the Hungarian-pronounced “CIA” sounds very similar to the word “cat” in concert, and Benko even exclaimed - I don’t keep a cat at home!

“It really pissed them off,” he recalled many years later, “and they started beating me, but I still didn't sign anything. After searching my apartment, they found postcards with strange numbers and letters: then I played a lot of correspondence. As I did not assure that it was the moves of a chess game, they were sure that they had discovered some secret code and began to beat me even more. But they did not knock out the confession that I was a participant in a conspiracy against the Soviet government of Hungary. In the end, my imprisonment ended, and without even pronouncing a sentence, I was sent to a concentration camp. Although it was 1952, I happened to see people in the camp who had been there for six years and continued to sit, not knowing when their term would end. Many died of hunger, and I, too, was incredibly exhausted. But I was young and strong and survived in the end. Among the people convicted literally for nothing, I spent a year and a half in the camp until a miracle happened: Stalin died! An amnesty was declared, and I was free! Although I was already a master, second in strength after Szabo, I was not allowed to play chess for six months, and then I lived under the constant supervision of the secret police. My only dream was to leave Hungary as soon as possible; help flee to the free world

A year later, my passport was returned to me and I was able to travel abroad, so far, however, only to countries controlled by Moscow. In 1957, I was allowed to represent Hungary in Reykjavik at the student world championship. I played on the first board, Portisch on the second, and I played all the games. Then he went to the American embassy and asked for political asylum. A press conference, a visa pending and - in a week - New York ... "

Benko did not speak English at all, and at first it was not easy for him. Sentenced to play in open games, a chess player of a pure positional style with a penchant for endgame, Pal was forced to drastically reconsider his approach to chess: in a Swiss, where, having scored 6.5 out of 9, you could be left without a prize at all, such a game was not good.

So there was the Benko gambit, where from the first moves the opponent is warned - I’m coming to you! But even after becoming the king of Swisses, Pal barely made ends meet: the prizes in the opens were small, Skype lessons then, for obvious reasons, did not exist, and simultaneous games were not often offered. But after all the difficulties and a beggarly existence in Hungary, he did not lose enthusiasm. The very next year, Benko fell into the interzonal (Portoroz 1958), where he defeated the young Fischer. Both of them entered the tournament of applicants, played in the same Yugoslavia a year later. He managed to repeat the same result in the next cycle, when he played in the candidate tournament in Curacao (1962).

[Ian Findlay]

RIP Pal Benko

August 26, 2019


In 1952, while in the Soviet zone of Berlin, Benko made a desperate attempt to flee to the West.

The attempt failed. After a short detention in Berlin and Prague, he was transferred to his homeland, and in a Budapest prison he underwent a three-week conversion interrogation: he was accused of being an American spy. All this time he got almost no sleep in solitary confinement, and during interrogations, high-power lamps were directed into his eyes, continuously blinding him. Long before the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s most famous book, Benko learned in practice what the Gulag is, even if not Soviet, but Hungarian.
.

One story I heard, was that IM Geza Fuster and Benko were trying to escape at the same time. Fuster saw a guard and pointed to Benko and said 'Look, he is trying to escape'. The guard went to chase Benko and Fuster escaped. Geza used to play for the Hungarian junior soccer team and I am sure was able to run fast. Fuster moved to Canada and the rest is history. I tried to confirm this story when I played Benko in a tournament in NY around 1987, but he was not keen to talk about it.

[Hans Jung]

A surprise in that GM Benko was the second oldest GM in the world next to GM Averbakh. I thought that GM Averbakh would be first to 100 (yrs of age) and that then GM Benko would replace him as oldest GM in the world. I bought into the story that GM Benko was invincible. (shared anecdotes by many famous players).
GM Pal Benko was a certified chess legend who i happened to meet at the Budapest Chess Club on my Hungarian travels in the 80"s. There were so many stories about him that I had a number of questions but he didnt want to talk about the past only discuss his current problem composition.
I would love to hear more stories about Pal Benko.

[Erik Malmsten]

Benko won the Canadian Open in Scarborough in 1964.

[Hans Jung]

I do have his excellent biography (by Silman) and I highly recommend it.

[Frank Dixon]

I was privileged to share a friendly coffee with GM Pal Benko at the 1988 World Open, Philadelphia, and found him amazingly friendly and approachable, for a player of such exceptional achievements. It was magical for me, an experience I still treasure. He would have been age 60, but was still very sharp, and played quite well in the Open section of the tournament. He was one of the world's greatest experts on chess endgames. He gave up his place in the 1970 Interzonal, which he had won through qualification, to allow GM Bobby Fischer (who hadn't played in the qualifying event) to play in his place, in the Interzonal, Palma 1970; I guess there was a fee involved for this. Fischer then went on the greatest streak in chess history, culminating by winning the World Championship in 1972.

[Vlad Drkulec]

RIP Mr. Benko. I met him and got a signed copy of one of his endgame monographs, likely at the Canadian Open in Windsor in the 1990s. His book on the Benko Gambit was probably one of my first opening books and probably as well read as any chess book that I have owned. I used to love his columns in Chess Life and Review.

The lesson of his torture is, "Never confess." no matter how much they beat you. This is true in socialist banana republics and even places like Italy. Once you confess they don't have to fill out as much paperwork to make you disappear forever. If you endure the torture without confession you will likely survive.