Yuri Averbakh, a Russian chess grandmaster who was among the world’s best players for a decade, trained world champions and was the last surviving participant in one of the greatest competitions in history, died on Saturday in Moscow. He was 100 — the first grandmaster ever to reach that age.
His death was announced on the site of the International Chess Federation, the game’s governing body. No cause was given.
The historic contest in which Mr. Averbakh took part was the Candidates Tournament in Zurich in 1953, the final step in the cycle to select a challenger for the world championship. The field held many great players of the 20th century, including the future world champions Vasily Smyslov and Tigran Petrosian and the former world champion Max Euwe.
The tournament was notable not only for the participants but also for the quality of the games played; many chess experts consider four or five of them among the most memorable in chess history, including one that Mr. Averbakh lost to Alexander Kotov in Round 14 after Mr. Kotov uncorked a spectacular queen sacrifice.
The 1953 Candidates competition was the only time that Mr. Averbakh made it to the final stage of the world championship cycle. He missed playing in the 1959 Candidates Tournament by finishing in a tie for seventh in the previous stage of the world championship — the 1958 Interzonal Tournament in Portoroz, Yugoslavia. Only the top six players in the Interzonal qualified for the candidates.
In 1954, Mr. Averbakh won the Soviet Championship. At the time, it was one of the world’s most elite tournaments because many of the world’s top players were from the Soviet Union.
Mr. Averbakh tied for first in the 1956 championship with Boris Spassky, another future world champion, and Mark Taimanov, who had also played in the 1953 Candidates Tournament. Mr. Taimanov won a playoff to claim the title, with Mr. Averbakh finishing second.
Stylistically, Mr. Averbakh was not a dynamic player; he often succeeded by wearing down his opponents. He was particularly accomplished in the endgames, where few pieces are left on the board, and he wrote several books on the subject that are still highly regarded among players of many levels.
Yuri Lvovich Averbakh was born on Feb. 8, 1922, in Kaluga, a small town about 100 miles southwest of Moscow. His father worked for the forestry service, and his mother was a teacher. When Yuri was 3, the family moved to Moscow, where they shared an apartment with two other families.
He learned to play chess at the age of 7 but was not particularly interested in the game at first; growing to 6 feet 2 inches, he preferred volleyball, hockey, skiing and boxing.
Everything changed one day when he was 13: He heard a lecture on chess by Nikolay Grigoriev, a master who won the Moscow Championship four times in the 1920s. The lecture, in which Mr. Grigoriev showed some chess problems he had composed, had a huge impact on Yuri’s thinking about the game.
In his autobiography, “Centre-Stage and Behind the Scenes: The Personal Memoir of a Soviet Chess Legend” (2011), Mr. Averbakh wrote: “The impression of chess as an art connected me forever with the game. I wanted to get into chess, to understand its laws, its secrets.”
And yet Mr. Averbakh almost did not become a professional chess player. He studied to be an engineer and repaired tanks and tractors during World War II. By the late 1940s, he was working in a missile research institute and writing a Ph.D. thesis in engineering. He had also continued to progress at chess, becoming a master in 1944, but he found that the multiple demands of his studies, work and chess were too great.
Then his supervisor at the institute gave him an unusual opportunity. He told Mr. Averbakh that he could take two years off to devote himself to chess, and that if he did not succeed in becoming a professional, he could return to work at the institute.
Mr. Averbakh qualified for the 1952 Interzonal tournament in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden, southeast of Stockholm, and finished fifth, giving a him a place in the 1953 Candidates in Zurich. He was also awarded the grandmaster title by the International Chess Federation (then going by the name the World Chess Federation).
“The question of my return to work at the institute died a death,” he wrote in his memoir.
In 1955, Mikhail Botvinnik, who was then world champion, recruited Mr. Averbakh to play training games with him. Over the next two years, the two played 25 games against each other — about the same length as a world championship match — with Mr. Botvinnik winning only one or two more games than Mr. Averbakh, according to Mr. Averbakh.
Their working relationship ended after Mr. Averbakh agreed to play training games with Mikail Tal before the 1959 Candidates Tournament in Yugoslavia. Mr. Botvinnik regarded that decision as a betrayal, Mr. Averbakh wrote. Mr. Tal went on to win the Candidates Tournament and defeat Mr. Botvinnik the following year.
At the end of 1982, Mr. Smyslov, who was then 61, qualified for the Candidates matches and asked Mr. Averbakh, whom he had known since childhood, to be his trainer. Mr. Averbakh accepted, and Mr. Smyslov won his quarterfinal and semifinal matches before losing the final to Garry Kasparov, the future world champion.
As his playing career faded in the early 1960s, Mr. Averbakh took on a behind-the-scenes role in the Soviet chess establishment. It was a difficult task, with every appointment and bureaucratic decision often subject to political intrigue and second-guessing. Still, though he claimed to be naïve about politics, he managed to thrive for many years in that second career.
In 1962, he became editor of the two most prestigious Soviet chess magazines, Shakhmatny Bulletin and Shakhmaty v SSSR. He edited them for 37 years, a record for longevity.
Mr. Averbakh was appointed president of the Soviet Chess Federation in 1972, a privileged position in Soviet society. With success in chess seen as crucial to proving the validity of communism, chess players were regarded much like elite athletes and were even sent to train with the Olympic national teams. Mr. Averbakh described the scene at the Central Komsomol school in Veshnyako in 1963:
“It was an unforgettable sight. Basketball players as thin as pencils, bow-legged squat weightlifters, boxers with huge hands like gorillas and cauliflower ears and squashed noses. Of course, there were exceptions, but in general one got the impression that they were pathological, freak types, which is what had brought them into big-time sport, and allowed them to achieve better results than normal people.”
He is survived by his daughter (sources differ in identifying her as Jane or Evgenia). Information on other survivors was not available.
Though Mr. Averbakh was talented, he said he knew he lacked the necessary qualities to become a world champion. In his autobiography, he wrote that great players fall into six categories: killers, fighters, sportsmen, people who like to play games, artists and explorers. All of the world champions came from the first four groups, he said. He put himself in the sixth category — that of an explorer.
“The main thing was that I never obtained great pleasure from winning,’’ he wrote. “Clearly, I did not have a champion’s character. On the other hand, I did not like to lose, and the bitterness of defeat was in no way compensated for by the pleasure of winning.”
