Reuben Fine

Reuben Fine, 1961
Association	United States
Born	October 11, 1914 New York City
Died	March 26, 1993 New York City
title	Grand Master (1950)
Best Elo rating	2762 (July 1941) ( historical rating )

Reuben Fine (born October 11, 1914 , † March 26, 1993 in New York City ) was an American chess player and psychoanalyst .

Life

Fine grew up in New York, where he also spent most of his life. He was an eyewitness to the 1927 New York international chess tournament. From 1929 he was a regular guest at the Marshall Chess Club and the Manhattan Chess Club , in which he was soon one of the strongest rapid and blitz chess players. In 1932 and 1933 he won the Western Championships , the forerunner of the USA Open Championships, ahead of Samuel Reshevsky , and in 1934 he shared first place with him. In chess tournament in Pasadena remisierte in 1932 against the reigning world champion Alexander Alekhine . In 1933 he first took part in the Chess Olympiad , which he won on the third board with the USA team.

At his second Olympiad in 1935 , which he won again with the USA, he achieved a positive result on the first board and thus gained the confidence to compete against the best chess players in the world. As a result, he won the strong international tournaments in Hastings (1935/36) and Zandvoort (1936). In the same year he shared third place at the world class tournament in Nottingham with Max Euwe and Reshevsky. The chess magazines Sahovsky Glasnik and Chess ranked him among the five best players in the world in 1936. He played with great success at the tournaments in Amsterdam (1936), Hastings (1936/1937), Stockholm, Moscow, Leningrad, Margate, Ostend and Semmering-Baden (all 1937), while he did less well in Kemeri in 1937. At the 1937 Chess Olympiad , he not only won with the team, but also achieved the best result on the second board. He was Euwe's second in his revenge fight in 1937 against Alekhine and spent several months in the Netherlands. He then returned to New York with his Dutch wife to pursue his profession as a psychologist. It was not until the autumn of 1938 that he played chess again, at the AVRO tournament , in which the world's best took part and Fine shared first place with Paul Keres . According to Garry Kasparov , he outperformed his colleagues at the time, particularly in terms of strategic depth. After that, Fine only played in the USA.

In the open USA championships he was still very successful, while he had to leave first place in the closed championship in 1938 and 1940 each Reshevsky. In July 1941 he achieved his best historical rating with 2762 . At times he was also number one in the subsequently calculated world rankings. In 1941 he also wrote the chess book Basic Chess Endings , which became the standard work on endgame theory . Mikhail Botvinnik called it the first monograph on chess endings with a scientific character because of its depth, its conciseness and the clarity of its presentation. During the Second World War he worked as an analyst for the US Navy . In 1946 he played in Moscow in an international match between the USA and the USSR.

Fine was scheduled to participate in the 1948 World Chess Championship , but did not play there. Several reasons were given for his waiver. He was working on his doctoral thesis on The personality of the asthmatic child at the University of Southern California and was dissatisfied with the fact that the tournament did not take place until 1948 and not, as originally planned, in 1947. He was also disappointed that the American Chess Federation did not support him. Larry Evans later wrote that Fine resigned because he feared collusion by the Soviet players.

He did not return to active play and worked as a psychoanalyst. Nevertheless, in 1950 he was awarded the title of Grand Master by FIDE . Fine has played 25 tournament games against the world chess champions Emanuel Lasker , Jose Raoul Capablanca , Alexander Alekhine , Max Euwe and Michail Botwinnik , from which he scored 14 points. Garry Kasparow emphasizes that Fine is the chess player who has achieved the best result against world champions. In 1963 Fine played a free game against Bobby Fischer , which Fischer won in just 17 moves and included it in his book Meine 60 Memorable Games.

Fine has published numerous books on both chess and psychoanalysis. In the study, The Psychology of the chess player he tried to build on the theories of Sigmund Freud , the chess psychology to create a new foundation and the psychology of the individual world champion to interpret how the psychoanalytic backgrounds of the game itself.

In 1993 Reuben Fine died of complications from a heart attack .

Works (selection)

• Dr. Lasker's chess career (1935, with Fred Reinfeld)
• Basic chess endings (1941)
• The ideas behind the chess openings (1943)
• Chess marches on (1946)
• Lessons from my games (1958)
• Freud, a critical re-evaluation of his theories (1962)
• The psychology of the chess player (1967, German The psychology of the chess player)
• The healing of the mind (1971)
• The development of Freud's thought (1973)
• Bobby Fischer's conquest of the world's chess championship (1973)
• Psychoanalytic psychology (1975)
• The world's great chess games (1976, German The greatest chess games in the world)
• A history of psychoanalysis (1979)
• The psychoanalytic vision (1981)
• The logic of psychology (1983)
• The meaning of love in human experience (1985)
• Narcissism, the self, and society (1986)
• The forgotten man (1987)

literature

• Aidan Woodger: Reuben Fine: A Comprehensive Record of an American Chess Career, 1929-1951 , McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, Jefferson 2004, ISBN 0-7864-1621-1 .
• Garry Kasparov: On My Great Predecessors, Part IV , Gloucester publishers 2003, p. 30 ff.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Reuben Fines results at Chess Olympiads on olimpbase.org (English)
2. ↑ Willy Iclicki: FIDE Golden book 1924-2002 . Euroadria, Slovenia, 2002, p. 74.

Web links

• Literature by and about Reuben Fine in the catalog of the German National Library
• Replayable chess games by Reuben Fine on chessgames.com (English)