Lajos Steiner

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Lajos Steiner (born June 14, 1903 in Oradea , † April 22, 1975 in Castlecrag , New South Wales , Australia ) was a Hungarian - Australian chess player . Lajos was the strongest and most successful player in the three-person "Steiner family" who entered the Hungarian chess scene in the early 1920s and soon afterwards also helped shape international tournaments. In addition to Lajos' brother Endre Steiner , her cousin Herman Steiner completed the trio.

Life

Lajos Steiner was born in 1903 in Great Oradein, Hungary (now Oradea, Romania ) as one of four children. His father, Bernát Steiner, was a strong club player who was able to beat the young Richard Réti and the eventual winner Leó Forgács in the 1907 Hungarian national tournament in Székesfehérvár .

Career in Europe and the USA

Steiner studied mechanical engineering at the Technikum Mittweida from 1924 to 1926 and completed his studies as an engineer. In 1923, Steiner first drew attention to himself when it came to chess, when he and Ernst Grünfeld finished 4th and 5th at the Carl Schlechter memorial tournament . Took place. Four years later, in 1927, he won a tournament in Schandau and achieved one of his greatest successes in Kecskemét : He was second with only half a point behind the future world chess champion Alexander Alekhine , shared with Aaron Nimzowitsch . A year later, in 1928 in Berlin, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Berlin Chess Society, he won against the eventual tournament winner Nimzowitsch and defeated grandmasters such as Réti, Savielly Tartakower and Efim Bogoljubow (for the game against Bogoljubow see also: Zwischenzug ). At the FIDE Amateur World Championship that year he was twelfth of 16 participants.

In the late 1920s, Steiner spent two years as an engineer in the United States; after his return he won his first Hungarian championship in 1931 (the second in 1936) and achieved further good results in the tournaments of Mährisch Ostrau in 1933 (shared second), Maribor in 1934 and in Vienna in 1935 (shared first place) and in Vienna in 1938 (first place). Steiner played in all three Chess Olympiads for Hungary in 1931 , 1933 and 1935 . In his first use on the second board (his brother Endre played on the top board) he achieved the third-best individual result. In 1936 he won the unofficial Chess Olympiad in Munich with Hungary and achieved the second-best individual result on the second board.

Second stage of life in Australia

In 1936 Steiner traveled to Australia and took part in the national championship, where he was able to win all games, but as a non-Australian he was not entitled to the title. Australia was to become his homeland only a few years later, as he had to leave his Hungarian homeland before the outbreak of World War II due to his Jewish ancestry . In March 1939 he settled in Sydney and a few months later married Augusta Edna Kingston, herself a good chess player who won the championships of New South Wales six times. Steiner found a job as a draftsman and was naturalized in 1944. In his new home, Steiner won the championship of New South Wales nine times in ten participations (1940/41, 1943, 1944, 1945/46, 1953, 1955 and 1958) and four times in the national championships of Australia (1945, 1946/47) in six participations , 1952/53 and 1958/59). He also qualified for the Interzonal Tournament in Stockholm in 1948 and won the title of International Master in 1950 . He was never awarded the grandmaster title because his life was too far outside the central, international chess scene to be considered by the world chess federation FIDE .

Lajos Steiner only returned to Europe once after the war and played three chess tournaments during this time. He processed his experiences and games in this regard in his only chess-related printed work Kings of the Chess Board (1948). Steiner also wrote numerous articles for the chess magazine Chess World, edited by Cecil Purdy .

According to calculations of his historical Elo number , Steiner achieved his highest rating in 1938 with a number of 2654, after which he was 12th in the world.

Web links

literature

  • Lajos Steiner: Kings of the Chess Board 1948. A Selection of 26 Games from Saltsjöbaden, Budapest, Carlsbad and London . ME Goldstein and H. Falconer, Roseville New South Wales 1948.
  • Árpád Walter Földeák: Lajos Steiner. The Chess Player, Nottingham 1997.
  • John S. Purdy: Steiner, Lajos (1903-1975) . In: Douglas Pike (Ed.): Australian Dictionary of Biography . Volume 16. Melbourne University Press, Carlton (Victoria) 2002, ISBN 0-522-84997-0 (English).
  • Jan-Peter Domschke, Sabine Dorn, Hansgeorg Hofmann, Rosemarie Poch, Marion Stascheit: Mittweida's engineers all over the world . Hochschule Mittweida (ed.): Mittweida 2014, p. 114f.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Schach-Echo , 6, 1987.
  2. ↑ Lajos Steiner's results at the Chess Olympiads on olimpbase.org (English)
  3. ↑ Lajos Steiner's results at unofficial chess Olympiads on olimpbase.org (English)
  4. ^ After John S. Purdy, in: Australian Dictionary of Biography
  5. ↑ Steiner's historical Elo rating from Jeff Sonas
personal data
SURNAME Steiner, Lajos
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-Australian chess player
DATE OF BIRTH June 14, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Oradein
DATE OF DEATH April 22, 1975
Place of death Castlecrag , New South Wales , Australia