Ossip Bernstein
Ossip Bernstein ( originally Russian Осип Самойлович Бернштейн, scientific transliteration Osip Samojlovič Bernštejn or Осип Самуилович Бернштейн / Osip Samuilovič Bernštejn; born September 20, 1882 in Zhytomyr, † November 30, 1962 ) was a Russian- Ukrainian chess player with Jewish roots.
Tournament Players
Ossip Bernstein came from a wealthy merchant family in 1901 and went to Germany to study law. He won several tournaments of the Berlin Chess Club and participated in 1902 at the main tournament of the German Chess Federation in Hanover, where he reached the 2nd place. He was also a very good simultaneous players. In 1903 he played in Berlin against 80 opponents and won 70 games in six draws and only four games lost. In 1906 he received his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg. Bernstein settled thereon in Moscow, where he became a member of the Moscow Chess Club.
He scored his first major international success at the tournament in Kiev in 1903, in which he finished second behind Mikhail Ivanovich Chigorin, but this was overcome in a direct duel.
Then he participated until the outbreak of World War I in many major tournaments and landed mostly on front seats, so in Coburg, 1904, Barmen 1905, Ostend 1906 and 1907, St. Petersburg, 1909, San Sebastián 1911. This year, Amber also won a contest against Szymon Winawer with 3.5 to 2.5. At the All-Russian National Tournament 1912 in Vilnius he finished second behind Akiba Rubinstein, who was at that time considered a serious World Cup contender. A relative failure Bernstein was the tournament in St. Petersburg in 1914, where he was eliminated in the first round, but was able to win only participant a match against world chess champion Emanuel Lasker.
After the October Revolution, in which he lost his fortune, he emigrated with his wife and two children to France and lived from 1920 as a respected lawyer in Paris. He took only sporadically in tournaments, but lost little of skill level and could 1933 hold a training match against world champion Alexander Alekhine in a draw (2-2 ). 1940 Bernstein had to flee from the Nazis to Spain, but returned after the end of World War II returned to France. 1950 FIDE awarded him the title of Grand Master. Still in 1954 he represented France at the Chess Olympiad in Amsterdam on the first board and won in the same year in Montevideo with an excellent beauty contest game against Miguel Najdorf. 1956 saw Bernstein Russia for the last time, when he came to the Chess Olympiad in Moscow as captain of the French team, but due to illness did not play.
Ossip Bernstein died on 30 November 1962 in a sanatorium in the French Pyrenees.
Savielly Tartakower, who published in 1930 a biography of Bernstein, described him as a " tactician par excellence ".
His best Historical Elo rating was 2688, so he was in 1906 one of the ten best players in the world.
Bernstein met in 1911 in San Sebastián on the future world champion José Raúl Capablanca, who played against him one of the best games of his career: Capablanca - Bernstein, San Sebastián 1911
Known games
- Capablanca - Bernstein, San Sebastián 1911
Chess composition
Bernstein composed some chess problems and studies. The following game on Patt illustrates this
Solution: 1 g7 Kg8 2 f7 Kxf7 3 Bh5 Kg8 4 Bf7 Kxf7 5 g6 Kg8 White is a stalemate.
The following task has been widely reprinted as a supposed game position.
Solution: 1.c4 c5, and: 1 .. b6xc5 2.Sd6 - c4 ka5 - b5 3.a2 -a4 matt 1 .. SD8- ~ 2.Sd6 - b7 b5 3.a2 -a4 ka5 - matt 1 .. b6 - b5 2.a2 -a3 with Zugzwang