Max Euwe - Later Career

Later Career

Euwe finished equal fourth with Alekhine and Reshevsky in the AVRO tournament of 1938 in The Netherlands, which featured the world's top eight players and was an attempt to decide who should challenge Alekhine for the world championship. Euwe also had a major organizational role in the event.

He played a match with Paul Keres in The Netherlands in 1939–40, losing 6½–7½.

After Alekhine's death in 1946, Euwe was considered by some to have a moral right to the position of world champion, based at least partially on his clear second place finish in the great tournament at Groningen in 1946, behind Mikhail Botvinnik. But Euwe consented to participate in a five-player tournament to select the new champion, the World Chess Championship 1948. However at 47, Euwe was significantly older than the other players, and well past his best. He finished last.

His final major tournament was the Candidates' Tournament in Zurich, 1953, in which he finished next to last.

He played for The Netherlands in a total of seven Chess Olympiads, from 1927 to 1962, a 35-year-span, always on first board. He scored 10½/15 at London 1927, 9½/13 at Stockholm 1937 for a bronze medal, 8/12 at Dubrovnik 1950, 7½/13 at Amsterdam 1954, 8½/11 at Munich 1958 for a silver medal at age 57, 6½/16 at Leipzig 1960, and finally 4/7 at Varna 1962. His aggregate was 54½/87 for 62.6 percent.

In 1957 Euwe played a short match against 14-year-old future world champion Bobby Fischer, winning one game and drawing the other. His lifetime score against Fischer was one win, one loss, and one draw.

Euwe won a total of 102 first prizes in tournaments during his career. While it is true that many of those were local and were not very strong, the total is very impressive, considering that Euwe was never a true professional player.

He became a professor at Tilburg University in 1964.