Remembering 2013

I meant to publish this post in early January; unfortunately it was not ready then. I got tied up with a lot of other things and unfortunately this post fell by the wayside.

Byrne-Spassky
Byrne-Spassky

In 2008 the chess world lost Fischer; In 2010 the chess world lost Vassily Smyslov, in 2013 we lost Robert Byrne. The chess world also lost: GM Milan Matulovic, GM Lothar Schmid and GM Igor Kurnosov (as well as others). In this piece I’m going to attempt to show a few games and discuss each player’s style a bit. I have no plans on re-writing their obituaries as many have done this already and have done a better job than I ever could have.

GM Robert Byrne (April 20, 1928 – April 12, 2013)

GM Robert Byrne
GM Robert Byrne

GM Robert Byrne in particular is a player whose chess I admired. His chess was quite high quality and his ideas were quite modern. I enjoyed his commentary in his game against Viktor Korchnoi for the British television show The Master Game:

There have been many well-written obituaries on Robert Byrne including this one written by Bruce Weber for the NY Times. Byrne had a solid positional style, here is a well known win of his against one of the most imaginative players to ever shuffle the pieces (notes by Byrne):

Here is another gem from Byrne with notes from Kavalek in his wonderful piece for the Huffington Post:

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