Chess Players who retired too young

Ladies and gentlemen, chess is a vast game. A lot of players have come and gone, and a lot of players have reached new heights. But there are some rare cases and exceptions, where players who were really bright and shone in their early years, but faded as quickly as they arrived on the chess scene. We are going to be looking at some of these examples, and seeing what happened to them and why they left the game of chess.

James Tarjan

James Tarjan’s father, George Tarjan (1912-1991), raised in Hungary was a child psychiatrist. James Tarjan’s older brother Robert became a computer scientist and mathematician.

James Tarjan was 17 when he was selected to the American team for the 1969 World Students’ Olympiad, at Dresden. He was a member of the winning American side at Haifa 1970, and was selected again at Graz 1972.

He finished second at an invitational junior tournament at Norwich 1972, with 12/15, behind Hungarian Gyula Sax.

He earned his International Master title in 1974, followed by the Grandmaster title in 1976. He played for the American team at five straight chess Olympiads. He began at Nice 1974, then played at Haifa 1976, Buenos Aires 1978, Valletta 1980, and Lucerne 1982.

His best results in international tournaments include first at Subotica 1975, first at Vancouver 1976, and first equal at Vršac 1983, along with Predrag Nikolić and Georgy Agzamov. Other good finishes included tied for third at Chicago 1973 with 7/11; tied for fifth at Venice 1974 with 7.5/13; and an excellent tied second at Bogotá 1979, with 10.5/14, behind only Alexander Beliavsky.

Tarjan played in several U.S. Championships during the 1970s and 1980s. He was fourth at El Paso 1973 with 7.5/12. At Oberlin 1975, he ended up tied for sixth with a score of 6.5/13. At Pasadena 1978, which was the Zonal qualifier, he tied for second with 10.5/14, and advanced to the 1979 Riga Interzonal, part of the World Championship cycle. He scored 8.5/17 and did not advance; the tournament was won by former World Champion Mikhail Tal. Tarjan’s last competitive tournament for three decades was the 1984 U.S. Championship at Berkeley, where he finished tied for third, scoring 10.5/17.

In 1984, Tarjan gave up professional chess to become a librarian.

Fast forward 30 years to 2014, he retired from being a librarian, and un-retired from being a chess player. He ended up beating Vladimir Kramnik in one of his first tournaments back as a chess player, which may have led to a few cheating allegations here and there.

Parimarjan Negi

He achieved the grandmaster title at the age of 13 years, 4 months, and 20 days, which made him the second youngest grandmaster in history at the time. As of now, he is the seventh youngest player to achieve this feat.

Negi is an Indian and Asian champion. He played on the top board for the bronze medal-winning Indian team in the 2014 Chess Olympiad in Tromsø, Norway.

Despite being so promising, he left the chess world in 2017 to left chess to study mathematics at Stanford. Talk about The Stanford Gambit.

Paul Morphy

Morphy learned chess at the age of 10. At 19 he was admitted to the Louisiana bar on condition that he not practice law until coming of age. After winning the first American chess championship tournament at New York City in 1857, he traveled to Europe, where he defeated Adolf Anderssen of Germany, the unofficial world champion, and every other master who would face him—the leading English player, Howard Staunton, avoided a match with him. In Paris Morphy played blindfolded against eight strong players, winning six games and drawing two.

He returned to the United States in 1859 and issued a challenge, offering to face any player in the world at odds of pawn and move (where Morphy would play Black, thus giving up the first move, and would play minus one pawn). When there was no response, Morphy abandoned his public chess career. After an unsuccessful attempt to practice law, he gradually withdrew into a life of seclusion, marked by eccentric behaviour and delusions of persecution. He retired at 22.

Joshua Waitzkin

Waitzkin first noticed the game of chess being played while walking with his mother in New York City’s Washington Square Park at the age of six. At age seven, Waitzkin began studying the game with his first formal teacher Bruce Pandolfini. During his years as a student at Dalton he led the school to win seven national team championships between the third and ninth grades, in addition to his eight individual titles. In 1999, Waitzkin enrolled at Columbia University, where he studied philosophy.

At ten years old, Waitzkin played a notable game featuring a sacrifice of his queen and rook in exchange for a checkmate six moves later.  At 11, Waitzkin and fellow prodigy K. K. Karanja were the only two children to draw with World Champion Garry Kasparov in an exhibition event where Kasparov played simultaneously against 59 youngsters. At age 13, he earned the title of National Master, and at age 16 became an International Master.

Waitzkin has not played in a US Chess Federation tournament since 1999, and his last FIDE tournament was before 2000. Waitzkin has also stated in an interview his reasoning for leaving chess

When people ask me why I stopped playing chess … I tend to say that I lost the love. And I guess if I were to be a little bit more true, I would say that I became separated from my love; I became alienated from chess somewhat … The need that I felt to win, to win, to win all the time, as opposed to the freedom to explore the art more and more deeply, and I think that started to move me away from the game and also chess for me was so intimate. It was something that I loved so deeply that when I started to become alienated from it, I couldn’t do it in an impure way.

Bobby Fischer

Fischer learned the moves of chess at age six. He attracted international attention in 1956 with a stunning victory over Donald Byrne at a tournament in New York City. In what was dubbed the “Game of the Century,” Fischer sacrificed his queen on the 17th move to Byrne to set up a devastating counterattack that led to checkmate. At age 16 he dropped out of high school to devote himself fully to the game. In 1958 he won the first of eight American championships. He became the only player ever to earn a perfect score at an American championship, winning all 11 games in the 1964 tournament.

In world championship candidate matches during 1970–71, Fischer won 20 consecutive games before losing once and drawing three times to former world champion Tigran Petrosyan of the Soviet Union in a final match won by Fischer. In 1972 Fischer became the first native-born American to hold the title of world champion when he defeated Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union in a match held in Reykjavík, Iceland. The tournament was highly publicized. The Soviet Union dominated chess; all the world champions since the end of World War II had been Soviets. The Fischer-Spassky match thus became a metaphorical battle in the Cold War. In defeating Spassky 12 1/2–8 1/2, Fischer won the $156,000 victor’s share of the $250,000 purse.

When playing White, Fischer virtually always opened with 1. e4 (see chess notation). His victories commonly resulted from surprise attacks or counterattacks rather than from the accumulation of small advantages, yet his play remained positionally sound.

 
In 1975 Fischer refused to meet his Soviet challenger, Anatoly Karpov. The Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE; the international chess federation) deprived him of his championship and declared Karpov champion by default. Fischer then withdrew from serious play for almost 20 years, returning only to defeat Spassky in a privately organized rematch in 1992 held in Sveti Stefan, Montenegro, Yugoslavia. His period away from chess was marked with encentric and strange isolated behavior.

Thanks for tuning today, and hope to see you next time with another blog!