Lubomir Kavalek (1943-2021)

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Lubomir Kavalek (1943-2021)

    Lubomir Kavalek (1943-2021)

    January 19, 2021

    From Peter Doggers at chess.com:

    Lubomir Kavalek

    The Czech-American grandmaster, former number-10 in the world, coach, organizer, trainer, commentator, author, columnist, and member of the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame Lubomir (Lubosh) Kavalek died at the age of 77 after a brief but severe illness. The news was confirmed by his wife Irina.

    Kavalek was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), on August 9, 1943, exactly five months after GM Bobby Fischer. He won his first national championship in 1962 at the age of 19. In the same year, he played one of his most famous games, as Black against Eduard Gufeld, at the World Student Team Championships

    Kavalek earned the titles of international master and grandmaster in the same year, 1965. It has been said that he was the most talented among a "golden generation" of Czechoslovakian players that also included GMs Vlastimil Hort, Vlastimil Jansa, and Jan Smejkal.

    The year 1968, when Kavalek won his second national championship and his first major tournament (Amsterdam, ahead of GM David Bronstein), was a turning point in his life and a historic year for his country. After eight months of mass protests in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in August 1968.

    Kavalek, an anti-communist himself, was playing the Akiba Rubinstein Memorial in Poland (where he finished in second place) when it happened. He decided to defect to the West. After two years in Germany, Kavalek moved to the U.S. where his father lived—he had left Czechoslovakia as early as 1948.

    When he returned to Czechoslovakia in early 1990 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kavalek would say: "I thought I was in some sort of reversed zombie movie because everyone was smiling all the time." He would return happily to his native country on many occasions, one of the last times being in early 2020 for the Prague Chess Festival.

    In his native country, he had studied communication and journalism—which would serve him well later. Having settled in Washington, D.C. with his wife Irena, he studied Slavic literature at George Washington University, and briefly worked at Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. Later he would move to Reston, Virginia.

    https://www.chess.com/news/view/lubo...alek-1943-2021


    (to be continued)

  • #2
    Lubomir Kavalek (1943-2021)

    January 19, 2021

    Chessbase’s tribute by Frederic Friedel is at:

    https://en.chessbase.com/post/lubomir-kavalek-1943-2021

    An excerpt from an article by Lubomir:

    Nailed To The Chessboard For 50 Years

    By GM Lubomir Kavalek

    “A grandmaster title is like a driver’s license,” the Serbian grandmaster Dr. Petar Trifunovic once told me. “You don’t yet know how to drive well, you learn on the go.” The World Chess Federation (FIDE) started honoring chess players with the title of Grandmaster (GM) in 1950. There are nearly 1550 chess grandmasters in the world today. A half century ago there were just 94 GM titleholders.

    My graduation from national master and International Master took just seven months before I made my last grandmaster norm in December 1965 in Leipzig. The newspaper Vecerní Praha (The Evening Prague) announced it the next day with a little drawing.

    “You are now nailed to the chess board, young man,” the nestor of Czechoslovakian chess, Karel Opocensky, told me on the train to Prague. I laughed it off. What did he know? He had seen many generations of chess players and compared me to young Salo Flohr. At the same time he told me I would never become a world champion: “You have no discipline or patience. You only want to attack. Chess is hard work. You have to take care of small details.”

    The GM title opened some opportunities for me. I started to write chess and cultural columns in one daily and became editor of the final sports editions in two newspapers in Prague. I was also a subject of some interviews. Sometimes the photographers tried to be too original.

    I went to Bucharest in March 1966 for my first tournament as a grandmaster. It was won by Viktor Korchnoi and I finished third. My game against Milan Matulovic was voted third best in the Chess Informant behind two games between Petrosian and Spassky.

    Flohr was the only Czechoslovakian player in history with a world championship contract in his pocket, signed with Alekhine in the Alcron hotel in Prague in May 1938. The World War II intervened, Flohr emigrated to the Soviet Union and never played the match.

    Boris Spassky was the strongest player in the world in 1966. He won Candidates matches against Paul Keres, Efim Geller and Mikhail Tal in 1965 and finished first in the 1966 Piatigorsky Cup ahead of Bobby Fischer, Tigran Petrosian and Bent Larsen. In the world championship match Spassky narrowly lost to Petrosian 11.5-12.5.

    I covered the match together with Flohr. His phone calls from Moscow were full of sartorial details. He even reported on grandmasters’ ties, socks and shoes. The articles, typed on a typewriter, appeared in the paper the next day. No live coverage, only occasional photos or drawings were used in the reports.

    I finished third at the Zonal in the Hague behind Svetozar Gligoric and Istvan Bilek. I qualified for the 1967 Interzonal in Sousse, where Bobby Fischer played ten games, including seven wins, before he withdrew. I was one of the three players making a draw against him. The knight sacrifice in that game has been influencing opening theory in the Poisoned Pawn variation of the Najdorf Sicilian for the next 30 years.

    The Olympiad was played in Havana, Cuba, and I saw Fischer live for the first time. He resurrected the Exchange Variation of the Spanish with wins against Lajos Portisch, Eleazar Jimenez and Gligoric.

    I had the best score on the Czechoslovak team in Havana and on this high note my first year as a grandmaster ended. It didn’t cross my mind that ten years later I would collect a gold medal on the U.S. team that won the 1976 Olympiad in Haifa. It didn’t cross my mind that I would be nailed to the chessboard for the next 50 years.

    (to be continued)
    Last edited by Wayne Komer; Tuesday, 19th January, 2021, 04:46 PM.

    Comment


    • #3
      Lubomir Kavalek (1943-2021)

      January 19, 2021

      Chess Books by Kavalek

      1 Wijk aan Zee Grandmaster chess tournament 1975

      2 Gasunie schaaktoernooi 1977

      3 R.H.M. Survey of current chess openings 1978/79

      4 World Cup chess: the grandmasters Grand Prix 1990

      5 Tilburg 1977

      Chess in the Time of War

      By Lubomir Kavalek

      From huffpost.com

      https://www.huffpost.com/entry/chess...-war_b_5702082

      “Wake up,” my wife shouted. “We are at war!”

      A few moments earlier, she met Vladimir Simagin pacing back and forth in the lobby of the Polish hotel in Polanica Zdroj, repeating:”Stupid people, stupid people, stupid people....” The Moscow grandmaster explained to her that Soviet tanks crossed into Czechoslovakia overnight. It was August 21, 1968. “The night would not be short,” predicted the Czech poet Karel Kryl in one of his songs.

      On Vaclav Touzimsky’s iconic picture, a Soviet tank crashes into a building in the town of Liberec. The tank has one white stripe, not the usual red star. The Soviets used more than 6,000 tanks during the August 1968 invasion. They came to quash what became known as the Prague Spring, a seven-months attempt to “humanize” communism.

      Chess was played and often flourished under totalitarian regimes, military juntas and in the middle of wars. How did the chessplayers deal with that? Did they raise their voices against the leaders of their own country or did they keep silent?

      In the Polish spa Polanica Zdroj in August 1968 we continued to play chess. The former world champion Vassily Smyslov, with whom I fought for first place, kept to himself and was quiet. Simagin was exhausted and distressed. The Soviet players spent better times together. Simagin was Smyslov’s coach during his world championship matches in the 1950s.

      As fate would have it, I played Simagin in the penultimate round and I knew that the man across the board disagreed with the Soviet occupation. He was a chess philosopher believing that violence has no place in our lives and it is best to leave it on the chessboard. We played nervously, exchanged a lot of pieces until we were left only with my rook against his knight. We sensed that in an absurd, symbolic way the single rook was fighting against thousands of Soviet tanks. Eventually, we agreed to a draw, but the invasion broke his heart. Simagin died of a heart attack during the tournament in Kislovodsk on September 25, 1968 at the age of 49.

      At the Lugano Olympiad in October 1968 Jan Smejkal asked his Czech teammates to play against the Soviets wearing a black ribbon in their lapels and most of them did. Boris Spassky was outspoken. “The Czechs also fight for us,” he said in front of the Soviet team and their KGB informant. After another Czech grandmaster, Ludek Pachman, boycotted the participation of Smyslov in Athens in December, the Soviets boycotted Pachman for years. “No Soviet flag on my table,” I told the organizers of the 1969 tournament in Wijk aan Zee and Mikhail Botvinnik and Paul Keres played without the red flag. Keres understood: the legendary Estonian grandmaster played tournaments in countries annexed by Germany during World War Two. It almost cost him his live after Stalin grabbed his homeland after the war was over.

      I left Czechoslovakia on September 1, 1968 and was able to go back only after 21 years. It took 23 years before the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia ended in 1991. And the Czechs showed what they thought of Soviet tanks. The one that came to Prague in 1945 was painted pink and was left floating on the Vltava river during the Week of Freedom in 2011.

      In December 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and ceased to exist. It was split into many countries and that didn’t go over well with Vladimir Putin. As soon as he came to power, he plotted how to get back the Soviet territories. And this led to the current situation. Russia is at war again. The armor and the little green men Vladimir Putin sent to Ukraine this year to annex Crimea and to carve up the mainland were also without Russian insignias.

      Russian tanks tend to invade at night as if ashamed to be seen. Their favorite time for invasions seems to be August (Czechoslovakia 1968, Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014) or during the Olympic Games (Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014) when the world is distracted. They come under the pretense of “brotherly” or “humanitarian” help. They even use chess strategies in their action: the principle of two weaknesses - creating threats in two separate places - is applied in the Ukraine as we speak.

      Putin helped Kirsan Ilyumzhinov to win the FIDE presidential campaign. They announced together that the next world championship match between Magnus Carlsen and Vishy Anand will take place in November in Sochi. Carlsen, now playing the Sinquefield Cup, has till Sunday to accept, although the conditions of the match are far from clear. FIDE already shaved one million dollars off the previous match budget.

      Ilyumzhinov is staging other major events in the former Soviet territories. The Chess Olympiad in 2016 will be in Baku, Azerbaijan and in 2018 in Batumi, Georgia. Grand Prix tournaments - important qualification events for the world championship - are scheduled for Moscow, Baku and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. There is also another one in Tehran, Iran, but it is hard to imagine the American Hikaru Nakamura playing there. Or for that matter the Armenian Levon Aronjan playing in Baku. And some of the events will be played while Putin is aiming his guns at Ukraine.

      Vladimir Simagin was an excellent chess theoretician and thinker, inventing many deep ideas in the openings and middlegame.

      Once he was asked whether chess style can reflect a player’s character. Simagin gave the example of Adolf Anderssen, the world’s best player in the mid-19th century, known for his “Immortal” and “Evergreen” games. Anderssen was born in Breslau, Prussia, and lived and worked there quietly most of his life. And then Simagin pointed out Mikhail Tal and his wild life. Two different persons, each capable of creating beautiful, stormy and surprising attacks.

      When Simagin was told that the most beautiful creations in chess are long combinations with unexpected first moves, not anticipated by the opponent and the spectators, he replied:” It is not in the first move, but in the ability to create a position where the first move of a combination is possible.”

      Comment


      • #4
        Lubomir Kavalek (1943-2021)

        January 22, 2021

        From:

        https://new.uschess.org/news/hall-famer-gm-lubomir-kavalek-dies-77

        Said long-time friend and fellow author GM Andy Soltis: “I was stunned to hear about his death. We exchanged emails last month, and he seemed to be the Lubos I had known for 50 years. He said he was writing a book, in Czech, but otherwise hunkering down during the pandemic like the rest of us.

        “I had been trying to get him to write for years. He had the best chess stories of just about anyone I knew – and he knew everyone who mattered. For example, he once brought Bobby Fischer to the municipal menagerie in Lubos’ town of Reston, and watched as Bobby tried to outrun one of the animals. Fischer lost.

        “I suspect few of today’s young players know much about Lubos. To them I’d suggest taking a look at the 1962 game of Gufeld-Kavalek. When I have a bad day, I open up that game and enjoy it one more time. I’ll be looking at it several times today.”

        Student Olympiad
        Marianske Lazne CSR
        Round 7, July 20, 1962
        Gufeld, Eduard – Kavalek, Lubomir
        C64 Ruy Lopez, Cordel Gambit

        1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Bc5 4.c3 f5 5.d4 fxe4 6.Ng5 Bb6 7.d5 e3 8.Ne4 Qh4 9.Qf3 Nf6 10.Nxf6+ gxf6 11.dxc6 exf2+ 12.Kd1 dxc6 13.Be2 Be6 14.Qh5+ Qxh5 15.Bxh5+ Ke7 16.b3 Bd5 17.Ba3+ Ke6 18.Bg4+ f5 19.Bh3 Rhg8 20.Nd2 Bxg2 21.Bxg2 Rxg2 22.Rf1 Rd8 23.Ke2 Rxd2+ 24.Kxd2 e4 25.Bf8 f4 26.b4 Rg5 27.Bc5 Rxc5 28.bxc5 Bxc5 29.Rab1 f3 30.Rb4 Kf5 31.Rd4 Bxd4 32.cxd4 Kf4 0-1

        Final Position

        
        - It is also the only game I know where a player after 35 moves have all pawns and no pieces left.

        - amazing game!!!when I looked at the final position, black wins here without losing a single pawn!..

        Robert Coleman - He wrote my favorite chess column of all time in the Washington Post. That column was a big reason I became so interested in chess and, in my opinion, had the clearest and most concise annotations of all the columns at the time. Thank you, Mr. Kavalek and RIP.

        Edward Gonsalves - In 8 US Championships , he won 2, tied for 1st in another one. Record was 31-5-75. He also was undefeated in 4 US Championships. Never lost back-to-back games (most for anyone with 100+ games). Only James Tarjan had a plus score vs. Kavalek in US Championship play 1-0-4. A 47 games unbeaten streak in the US Championship. 4th Best ever. Roman Dzindzichashvili now the oldest living former US Champion at 76.

        Jude Acers/New Orleans - I downloaded every single Washington Post chess column he ever wrote...it was absolutely mandatory.

        Comment


        • #5
          That game above is one of my all time favorites. The power of the pawns! Isnt it simply gorgeous, brilliant, and a utter joy to play over!?

          Comment


          • #6
            Lubomir Kavalek (1943-2021)

            January 24, 2021

            From a tweet by Ian Rogers:

            RIP Lubosh Kavalek. Not only a great friend and player - his Mind over Matter game v Gufeld is a classic - but wrote one of the very best chess columns, in the WP. Left two unpublished works: a 500+ page book on Montreal 1979 - "as good as Zurich 1953" he said - and his memoirs.

            https://twitter.com/GMIanRogers?ref_...inchess.com%2F


            (We should lobby some publisher to do the Montreal book – WK)

            Comment


            • #7
              I'll second that (about publishing the Montreal 1979 book) That tournament opened my eyes to grandmastery. One of my favorite unforgettable moments there was meeting Edward Lasker and speaking to him in German. What an amazing gentleman of the old school!

              Comment


              • #8
                GM Kavalek had a fantastic chess career, to be sure.
                Not mentioned on threads so far here is his role in coaching GM Nigel Short's rise to the world title match, in the 1990-93 cycle. This is discussed in some detail in the fine book 'Nigel Short: Quest for the Crown', by WIM Cathy Forbes, from 1993.

                Comment

                Working...
                X