Zoltán Sárosy

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Zoltán L. Sárosy (born August 23, 1906 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary , † June 19, 2017 in Toronto ) was a Hungarian-Canadian chess player and supercentenarian .

Life

Sárosy was the son of an army doctor with whom he and his mother lived in an Adriatic military base. After the assassination attempt in Sarajevo , the family fled to Budapest from the impending war . When he saw a boy playing in a public park, he became interested in the game he had seen and, according to his own account, learned to play chess at the age of 10. After completing his degree in international trade at a university in Vienna , he returned to Budapest in 1928. He received the Hungarian championship title in 1943 , which was not the same as winning the Hungarian championship. At the end of the Second World War , in which Sárosy, who spoke fluent German and Hungarian, was working as a translator and was probably therefore escaped from being drafted to the Eastern Front, he fled to the west because he feared he would be imprisoned by the Russians. He left his wife and daughter behind. After a stay in Salzburg , Sárosy found shelter in a German refugee camp . After traveling through Europe in 1948, he then settled in Alsace, which is also German-speaking, in eastern France. When he read that Canada was looking for immigrants, Sárosy obtained the necessary documents in Paris and reached Halifax on December 27, 1950, from where he traveled by train to Toronto .

After working as a tiler, Sárosy started his own business as a seller of imported cosmetics. After a few years he bought a convenience shop which he ran until the late 1970s. In Canada, Sárosy tried to catch up with his wife; However, the refused, so it came to a divorce. He later married an Estonian immigrant. His daughter from his first marriage visited Sárosy, but, contrary to what was initially intended, she did not want to stay in Canada. Sárosy's second wife died in 1998.

In 1963 he won the Toronto Championship. In Canada, Sárosy also began to play correspondence chess . In 1967, 1972 and 1981 he won the Canadian correspondence chess championships and in 1988 he was awarded the title of International Master in Correspondence Chess. In 2006 he was inducted into the Canadian Chess Hall of Fame. At the age of 102, Sárosy reached 2nd place in a correspondence chess tournament of the German E-Mail Chess Club (DESC) in 2008–2009. At the end of 2010 he left the DESC due to age. On his 105th birthday in 2011, Sárosy was considered one of the oldest active athletes in the world. At the age of 108, Sárosy had a rating of 2282 at the International Correspondence Chess Federation .

Sárosy introduced the sequence of moves 1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. Nf3 Nc6 4. g3 g6 5. d4 in the opening theory in a suit in the four knights variant at the Sicilian opening .

useful information

At the time of his 110th birthday on August 23, 2016, Sárosy was the oldest known living Canadian man as a Supercentenarian . Most recently, he was ranked ninth among the oldest living men in the world .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Zoltan Sarosy, Chessmaster, passes away at 110
  2. ↑ a b c Fred Langan: Hungarian chess master living in Toronto tells tales from his 110 years . The Globe and Mail, August 12, 2016. Retrieved June 22, 2017
  3. ↑ Tournament table , accessed on July 25, 2011
  4. ↑ DESC newsletter of January 3, 2011 , accessed on July 25, 2011
  5. ↑ Alex Dunne: The September Check is in the Mail . Published on the United States Chess Federation website. September 1, 2011, accessed February 27, 2015
  6. ↑ Alex Dunne: The October Check is in the Mail . United States Chess Federation, October 15, 2014. Retrieved June 18, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Sárosy, Zoltán
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sárosy, Zoltán L .; Sarosy, Zoltan L. (ICCF)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-Canadian chess player
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH 19th June 2017
Place of death Toronto