HISTORICAL CHESS
Chesstories

Excerpt from Chessbase:
The knight's tours of George Koltanowski

by Frederic Friedel

 

"...It happened many years ago, at a US chess club, where a blindfold master was giving a demonstration of his extraordinary abilities. At one stage he asked for a helper from the audience, and I was pushed and poked by my friends to take the stage. There the master gave me block of sticky notes and asked me to write down names, words and numbers dictated at random by the audience. Each was stuck on a big demo chessboard, starting from the square a8 and working sequentially to h1.

The audience call out a variety of words: names of cities, family members, phone numbers, abstract expressions. It went something like: Dayton, Margaret-Lee Farrow, pride before a fall, 212-783-4529, my dad's dog Skippy. While this was going on the master sat on his chair, listening to the audience, chatting with them. He was completely relaxed and not making any visible effort to memorise the notes.

After all the squares had been covered the master was blindfolded. He then asked someone in the audience to name a square on the chessboard. Starting from that square he started repeating words and numbers, while I removed the corresponding sticky notes from the demo board. The order of the words resulted in a perfect knight's tour. I believe he got one or two words slightly wrong, on the lines of Margaret-Mae Farrow instead of Margaret-Lee. All the numbers were perfect.

Now that is a truly remarkable feat. We were all deeply impressed, not the least because the master was approaching ninety years in age! He was George Koltanowski, one of the greatest mental acrobats the world has ever seen.

George Koltanowski, 1903-2000, copyright (C) San Francisco Chronicle 2000

George Koltanowski was born in Antwerp on Sept. 17, 1903. He developed his prodigious memory skills by studying memory games while he was very ill as a child and confined to bed for a couple of years. When he was 14 he started playing chess, and at the age of 21 when he played and drew Siegbert Tarrasch at the 1924 Meran tournament. In the early thirties he was the top Belgian player, beating Akiba Rubinstein in Antwerp 1931 and drawing Alekhine at Hastings 1936/37. He was awarded the title of IM in 1950 and in 1988 he was given an honorary GM title by FIDE.

Koltanowsky held a number of records in another area of chess. For centuries, the greatest masters in the world tested their mettle by playing blindfolded. It was long believed that three blindfolded games at once marked the limit of human capacity. Then, in 1933, Alexander Alekhine successfully played 32 simultaneous blindfolded games. Later, other grandmasters left Alekhine's record in the dust. Koltanowski set the current record, playing 56 blindfolded games San Francisco in 1960. He played the games sequentially at 10 seconds a move in 9 hours, scoring +50 =6. He also gave huge simultaneous displays with sight of the board, playing 271 games in 1949 and 110 in 1955. (Some of this is described in an article entitled "The Einstein Factor", a very readable article which explains in general terms why everyone should play chess).

When the Nazis overran Belgium during World War II, several of his family members perished in the Holocaust. Koltanowski was on a chess tour of Central America and was allowed to immigrate to the United States, mainly because a chess-playing consul in Cuba had been amazed by one of his demonstrations. He started writing a column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He had completed over 19,000 instalments when he died of complications resulting from congestive heart failure in February 2000, at the age of 96.

A full obituary is still available in the archives of the San Francisco Chronicle: Grandmaster Of Chess, George Koltanowski."