Gyula Breyer

Gyula Breyer [ ˈɟulɒ ˈbrɛiɛr ] (born April 30, 1893 in Budapest , † November 9, 1921 in Bratislava ) was a Hungarian chess player .

Life

Gyula Breyer's grave site

Breyer was one of five children of Adolf Breyer and his wife Irma Róth. He grew up in a middle-class family and graduated from high school, where he excelled in particular in mathematics. In 1910 he enrolled at the Technical and Economic University of Budapest . He was released from military service because of his poor health. In 1918 he received his degree as an engineer . In the same year he married Teréz Balikó († 1935), who came from a poor background, with whom he had a daughter born in 1921. In 1920 he moved to Bratislava and ran an engineering office for reinforced concrete construction, which, however, hardly made any profit. A magazine for chess and brain games he founded, Szellemi Sport - Geistes Sport , had to cease publication after only five issues. He lived mainly from his meager income from his chess activities, which included prize money from tournaments and fees from simultaneous performances as well as his work as a chess columnist for the newspaper Bécsi Magyar Újság . He died of heart failure in Bratislava at the age of only 28.

Chess career

He learned to play chess in 1907, his first published game dates from 1909. In addition, since 1910 he has been writing chess problems for newspapers. In 1911 he defeated the world chess champion Emanuel Lasker in a simultaneous game. Shortly afterwards he finished sixth as the youngest participant in his first international tournament in Cologne . In August 1912 he won the Hungarian championship in Temesvár. His greatest success was the victory in the Berlin tournament in 1920 , which he was able to win in front of players like Efim Bogoljubow and Savielly Tartakower . Bogolyubov said of his daring game: How you stood against Breyer, you only know after the game . His last tournament was in Vienna in 1921, when he was clearly marked by his heart disease.

Breyer was an excellent blind simultaneous player and set a world record in Kaschau in January 1921 : He played on 25 boards and won 15 games in seven draws and three losing games.

He was famous for his opening theory treatises, in which he as a precursor to the later materially from Richard Réti embossed Hyper Modern School showed. In 1917 he published an essay on the basic position entitled A Complicated Position in the chess magazine Magyar Sakkvilág . His considerations can be exaggerated with the sentence that is often quoted later. After 1. e2 – e4, White is on the last legs . He considered 1. d2 – d4 to be the strongest starting move and recommended as an answer not the 1.… d7 – d5 most played at the time, which he even described as a mistake, but 1.… Ng8 – f6.

Nowadays the name Breyer is mainly associated with a variant of the Spanish game , which follows the moves 1. e2 – e4 e7 – e5 2. Ng1 – f3 Nb8 – c6 3. Bf1 – b5 a7 – a6 4. Bb5 – a4 Ng8 –F6 5. 0–0 Bf8 – e7 6. Rf1 – e1 b7 – b5 7. Ba4 – b3 d7 – d6 8. c2 – c3 0–0 9. h2 – h3 Nc6 – b8 . This retreat, incomprehensible at first glance, intends to regroup the black knight on d7, which gives the black position more flexibility. Breyer suggested this way of playing around 1911, today it is one of the popular sequels to this opening and world champion Boris Spasski is one of its most important supporters. He also suggested the variant 1. e2 – e4 e7 – e5 2. f2 – f4 e5xf4 3. Qd1 – f3 in the King's Gambit . A variant of the Caro-Kann defense is also named after him. It arises after the moves 1. e2 – e4 c7 – c6 2. d2 – d3 with a white structure that is similar to the King's Indian attack.

Richard Réti wrote about Breyer in an obituary: All of us, all moderns who ended up ahead of the old famous names in the major tournaments of recent years, have learned from Breyer . Tartakower also dealt with Breyer in his book Die hypermoderne Schachpartie (1924) and wrote: There was something prophetic in his look and something feverish in his work .

His best historical rating was 2630, making him one of the ten best players in the world in 1917.

literature

• Jimmy Adams: Gyula Breyer: The Chess Revolutionary . New in Chess, Alkmaar 2017. ISBN 978-90-5691-721-0 .
• Ivan Bottlik: Gyula Breyer: his life, work and creativity for the renewal of chess . Chess company Fruth, Unterhaching 1999. ISBN 3-933105-02-1 .