Chess Survivor

In Chess Survivor – The Last of the Greats a chess legend shares his life story and annotates his best games.

When FIDE introduced the grandmaster title in 1950, Andor Lilienthal was one of the 27 names on that original list. And when he died at age 99, he was the last survivor of that historic group. This inspired our title. Douglas Griffin translated Lilienthal’s book from Russian and added 17 games to the 60 that Lilienthal annotated.

Lilienthal met or played all the World Champions of the 20th century. In fact, that understates it – Lilienthal won a game against Lasker, whose reign began in the 19th century. And some 21st-century champions, such as Vladimir Kramnik, certainly met Lilienthal. One might say that Lilienthal was connected to three centuries of chess.

Lilienthal’s quality of play matched his longevity. Most famous is his win against Capablanca in 1935. Equally famous is the story that when Bobby Fischer saw Lilienthal in the audience during his 1992 return match against Spassky, Fischer immediately said: “Pawn e5 takes f6!” – a reference to that Capablanca game.