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| Steiner and Lilienthal |
Prior to participating in the Hastings tournament, Lilienthal, then a talented young Hungarian master, played a six games with Lajos Steiner in Budapest. Steiner won +3 -1 =2. For details on the Hastings tournament see Chessgames.com. It was at Hastings that Lilienthal defeated Capablanca in a sensational game.
According to Chessmetrics at the time Steiner is assigned a rating of 2602 placing him number 27 in the world. He was ranked in a group that included Kurt Richter, Fritz Saemisch and Frank Marshall. On Chessmetrics' list Steiner peaked at 2654 in 1934 and in 1937 was ranked as number 11 in the world.
In 1934 Lilienthal was ranked much higher – number 6 in the world with an assigned rating of 2710. The top five were Aekhine, Euwe, Flohr, Bogoljubow and Kashdan. Lilienthal was grouped with Botvinnik, Reshevsky, Denker and Sultan Kahn! Yes, Arnold Denker was assigned a rating that put him in the top 10 players in the world in 1934 and 1935 and he was to remain in Chessmetrics top 100 until 1949. Personally, I never realized that Denker was that good!
As for Sultan Kahn, he was ranked among the top 10 players in the world for his entire short career which was between 1930 and 1935.
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| Denker |
Lajos Steiner (June 14, 1903 - April 22, 1975) was one of four children of Bernat Steiner, a mathematics teacher, and his wife Cecilia. His older brother was Endre Steiner. Both he and his Endre started playing in master chess events in Budapest while they were schoolboys. Lajos was granted the title of master at the age of 19.
He graduated from the Technikum Mittweida, Germany in 1926 with a mechanical engineering degree. In the late 1920s Steiner spent two years working as an engineer in the United States and after his return to Europe he turned professional, but made a precarious living from tournaments.
He won the Hungarian Championship in 1931 and 1936. In the mid-1930s he played for Hungary in four Chess Olympiads. In 1936 Steiner toured Australia and although he played in the 1936-37 Australian championship and won every game, he was ineligible for the title. He returned to Western Australia in 1939 and settled in Sydney. His father and brother were to die in Nazi concentration camps.
He won the Australian Chess Championship four times: 1945, 1946/47, 1952/53, and 1958/59. He also won nine of his ten attempts at the New South Wales title (1940–41, 1943, 1944, 1945–46, 1953, 1955, 1958).
In 1939 Steiner married Augusta Edna Kingston, a New South Wales women's champion. He acquired Australian citizenship in 1944. Finding it impossible to earn a living playing chess, he took employment a design draftsman.
After moving to Australia he only returned to Europe once, in 1948, where he played in three tournaments, at Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), Czechoslovakia, Budapest, Hungary and Saltsjobaden, Sweden.
Because of his disappearance from the main chess centers of the world after WW2 he was never recognized as a GM although he surely deserved the title. He stopped competing in major tournaments in the early 1960s, but continued to play for his local club and willingly helped young players. He died at Castlecrag, a suburb of Sydney, on April 22, 1975 and was cremated.
I get a locked viewer at White's move 12, likely because of the variation given at that point. Good to have the pgn window, though.
ReplyDeleteCorrect! When entering games into Caissa's Web game viewer you have to remove all embedded variations and I missed one at move 12.
ReplyDelete