László Szabó (chess player)

László Szabó [ la ː slo ː sɒbo ː ] ( born March 19, 1917 in Budapest, † August 8, 1998 ) was a Hungarian chess player.

Life

He learned to play chess in 1931 and made ​​rapid progress. In 1935, he won a national champion tournament in Tatatóváros, was called to the national team and played in his first Chess Olympiad Warsaw. In Chess 1936 Olympics in Munich, which was declared by the organizers as the Chess Olympiad, although it was not an official event of the FIDE, he played outstanding ( 14, = 5; 86.84 %) and had so large share of the title of the Hungarian team.

After he had meanwhile completed training as a bank clerk, he won the Hungarian championship in 1937, 1938/39, the traditional tournament in Hastings, with Max Euwe and 1939, a tournament in his hometown with 11 points from 11 games. Shortly after the Second World War broke out, and Szabó was used for forced labor because of his Jewish origin. In January 1943, he fell into Russian captivity.

After the war he became a professional chess player and was one of the strongest non-Russian chess masters of the world. Due to his international success he obtained in 1950 by FIDE the title of Grand Master.

Szabó was nine times Hungarian champion, eleven times he participated in chess Olympiads and reached three times the candidates tournament, namely in 1950, 1953 and 1956. He played until 1979 in 88 international tournaments, of which he won 21. In 1974 he was first in the second Dortmund Chess days.

His best historical Elo rating was 2726th This he achieved in December 1946. At that time he was the sixth- best player in the world.

In 1981 he wrote the book 50 év - 100000 lépés, which appeared in German translation in 1990 under the title My best games (ISBN 3-8171-1126-6 ).